Andrea Wright’s Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea joins a growing body of scholarship that reexamines the history of the Gulf in the oil era. As with other important studies, Wright’s book highlights the role played by workers who organized to secure their rights within states and migrated across borders during a time of pan-Arab nationalism and decolonization. Her contribution analyzes the interplay of imperialism, corporations, labor, and states. It employs “the Arabian Sea as a geographic framework” to consider “the multiple scales at play” for these historical actors (p. 7). Although encompassing Iran, her scope concentrates primarily on the incipient states of Arabia and the western side of the Gulf: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Trucial States (later the United Arab Emirates), and Yemen. Migrant labor from South Asia, consistent with Britain’s longstanding practice of circulating workers within the empire, also plays a significant part in Wright’s study. Focused on the period before Britain’s formal withdrawal from the Gulf in 1971, this book serves as a prequel to Wright’s earlier work Between Dreams and Ghosts: Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil (Stanford University Press, 2021). With Unruly Labor, Wright challenges what she sees as an overemphasis in the literature on oil’s materiality and inherent tendency to marginalize worker agency. She instead places labor in a dynamic historical field in which state formation and divisions based on citizenship and nationality had the effect of impeding worker solidarity.

To foreground workers, Wright begins each of her seven chapters by describing a labor strike. These industrial actions occurred at sites stretching from Iran and the Gulf states to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company refinery in Aden. They spanned nearly three decades after World War II and punctuated nationalist upheavals, such as the Suez Crisis and the 1967 Arab–Israeli Six Day War. Wright emphasizes the British imperial foundation of the oil regime in Arabia and the Gulf. This foundation encompassed labor flows and company concessions as well as colonial tropes, including the portrayal of workers as fundamentally backward and apolitical. Suppression of strikes meant merely restoring order. At the same time, London often interpreted worker actions as the result of external subversion and as threatening Britain’s vital cold war interests. Oil companies adopted an American-style, human resources approach that imagined workers as citizens who contributed to national development. This ethos supplemented Britain’s civilizing mission and imperial practices of coercing and controlling workers. British officials tracked labor organizers across the Gulf and monitored striking Indian workers, who often came from the same natal village, as they returned home. Whenever imperial officials felt it necessary, they interceded in labor affairs at the expense of companies and hereditary rulers. Wright notes Britain’s resort to what Abdel Razzaq Takriti described in the American Historical Review as “colonial coups” in the Gulf. British officials worked with the other actors ultimately to “shape governable spaces that facilitated oil production” (p. 65).

Wright’s most important contribution is to show the complex ways in which nationality and citizenship affected labor. Gulf rulers, for instance, responded to worker demands by pressuring oil companies to hire more locals. Major oil companies were more likely than their contractors to honor political demands to keep locals on the payroll after projects were completed. As a result of pan-Arab solidarity, however, insistence on hiring locals did not necessarily result in discrimination or animosity between workers from one Gulf state and those from another or from elsewhere in the Arab world. Palestine served as an important issue for uniting workers; however, the Arabian American Oil Company initially considered Palestinians desirable employees because they lacked a state that could advocate for their rights. Following India’s independence, as laws and pan-Arab nationalism favored Arabs, the Indian government sought to protect its citizens working in the Gulf. Indian–Pakistani tensions played out within labor forces and became polarized around religion. Indian citizenship came to be conflated with Hinduism, whereas anti-Indian sentiment tended to result in violence against Sikhs. Oil companies objected to the costs associated with maintaining separate cafeterias that could serve Muslims and Hindus. Workers struck over unacceptable food as well as over wages, working conditions, and the right to organize. As companies segregated jobs by national origin, nationality became racialized.

A series of labor and nationality laws written during the 1950s and 1960s codified trends that undermined worker militancy and solidarity. In Bahrain, a Labour Law Advisory Committee consisted of ruling family members, a British employee of the government, representatives from the Bahrain Petroleum Company, and elected worker delegates. Wright explains how the California Texas Oil Company (Caltex) nevertheless shaped Bahrain’s labor law to constrain the ability of workers to strike. She compares this law to the Taft-Hartley Act in the United States. British officials thwarted Qatar’s membership in the International Labor Organization, unlike Kuwait, which joined and was therefore required to register labor unions. In Kuwait, Qatar, and the Trucial Coast, merchants demanded that rulers “restrict the share of foreigners in the economy,” and new laws “impacted non-khaliji [Gulf] Arabs, Indians, and Pakistanis” (p. 150). Wright sees these laws as the basis of the kafala system by which outside investors are required to work with local agents, and contractors exploit vulnerable migrant laborers. Rather than a vestige of tradition, Wright concludes, such practices are the relatively recent product of power relations in which workers played an active part but increasingly found themselves at a disadvantage.

Wright bases her study on impressive research in government documents, including records from the Indian National Archives, interviews, and oil company records. She also judiciously frames her analysis using literature on the Gulf, the oil industry, and subaltern studies. Accessed through English-language research, worker voices are less vivid in Unruly Labor than in her previous book, for which she conducted extensive fieldwork. Rosie Bsheer and others have used research in Arabic sources to explore the relationship between labor activism and revolutionary politics in the Gulf. Wright’s sources may not fully represent the degree of working-class militancy. Indian white-collar and technical workers were more likely than other laborers to have their grievances recorded by the state. One clerk employed at the Aden refinery, a Mr. T. J. Diaz, became known to Indian officials because he reportedly “suffered a dislocated shoulder from excessive stapling” (p. 104). Nevertheless, Wright’s wide-ranging book is a welcome addition to the literature on labor in the Gulf oil industry for her focus on Indian migrants and detailed exploration of state-formation and capitalist development under British influence. It nicely complements her previous study and will be of interest to students and scholars of Arabia, the Gulf, and labor more broadly.