Undoubtedly, the casualised and subcontracting nature of the labour regime was the primary factor in the low productivity.9 A 1953 report from the docks of Kuwait clearly recognised that a better-managed port could not depend entirely on subcontracted labour. The report added that ‘with the growth of mechanisation it is desirable that the handling of mechanical plant should be confined to directly employed labour’.10 However, subcontracting gave the shipping companies and ports the alibi they needed to not provide their workers with basic wages and benefits. Once citizenship became a norm of governance, with its attached rights – however minimal – nationals began to draw on an expanded repertoire of claim-making for better wages and workplace conditions. Foreign workers (with carefully graded hierarchies of nationality and foreign citizenship) did not have access to this expanded repertoire. As long as foreign workers were cheap, abundant, and deportable, they could be used to build and run the transport infrastructures, instead of expensive heavy equipment and machinery. Walter Rodney had seen the same pattern in the European exploitation of Africa, where, instead of capital-intensive equipment, ‘sheer manpower had to take the place of earth-moving machinery, cranes, and so on’.11