Migratory Pipelines: Labor and Oil in the Arabian Sea.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the development of oil production in the Arabian Sea through the lens of Indian labor migration. Beginning with the Arabic-speaking Persian Gulf’s first large oil projects in the 1940s and continuing through the present, I consider how circulations of labor and oil have produced the modern Arabian Sea. These networks are composed of actors including government bureaucrats (both colonial administrators and postcolonial administrators), oil company managers, recruiters, and migrants. I explore how labor practices and migrant networks help shape the nature of oil production specific to the Arabian Sea. Using both archival and ethnographic sources, I find labor circulations are integral to oil companies policies and states regulation of migration. While much research on migration primarily engages with national polities and the Middle East and South Asia are often studied as different regions, I, instead, consider the entire process of migration from villages to oilfields and all parties involved in this process from migrants to corporations. What emerge are migrants and their networks dynamic capacities to form and reform relationships between people, the nation-state, and industry.

I use interdisciplinary methods and insights to investigate how corporations, states, and individuals shape international economies, national policies, communities, and individual practices. I explore how citizenship, politics, and kinship in India and the Arabic-speaking Persian Gulf gave the oil industry in the Arabian Sea its unique character. The oil industry in the Gulf is a site not only of commodity extraction, but also a place where culture, politics, and histories converge and encourage us to rethink regions, commodities, and governance. What emerges is that the localized politics and kinship structures of migrants shape oil production and management policies in the Gulf. As workers circulate, they destabilize the neat division of the world into local, national, and global scales.