Curzon arrived on a viceregal tour of the Persian Gulf so that he could claim the much-contested body of water and its littorals for Britain.

It is a mistake to imagine these dhows as remnants or residues of ‘traditional’ trade; their business has flourished alongside, in the interstices of, and because of the more global, large-scale, and mechanised trade of container ships and modern bulk carriers.

In his commissioned hagiography of Aramco, Wallace Stegner describes the momentary silence of the oil terminals:

In the 1950s, as anticolonial movements unravelled the empire and nationalist sentiments roiled the tricontinents, the British began to consider a programme of economic development as a bulwark against the possibility of revolution.

[...] Many famous London trading houses had offices in Aden, including Cory Brothers, who by the end of the nineteenth century were the most important coal traders in the London docks. The best-known shipping companies of Aden in the early half of the twentieth century were owned by Antonin Besse and Cowasjee Dinshaw. The French-born Besse was a ruthless businessman who treated his workers poorly and had a monopoly on Shell products in Yemen. His donations went on to found St Antony’s College of Oxford. [...]

A rocky hill stands tall on a promontory jutting out to sea at the southernmost edge of the town; along with two other rocky atolls nearby, it is a recognisable landmark

The effects of land reclamation are not solely ecological. As shorelines shift and maritime cartographies change, so do sea borders, exclusive maritime economic zones, and other topographic features that are transformed into legal and political categories. Land reclamation can bring with it disputes over the drawing of maritime borders and exploitation of subsea resources.73 It can redefine what is meant by international waters. But land reclamation also creates value ex nihilo, giving those major investors access to land-as-commodity conjured out of the sea. Such value creation also gives those who reclaim the land disproportionate profits and the authority to allocate them. In Bahrain, investigative reporters have discovered shell companies established to allow the royal family to profit from land reclamation.74 The authority to magically create land out of the sea is also a form of accumulation by dispossession, an enclosure of a space held in common – the sea – for the purpose of speculation and sales.75

Infilling coastal areas with material dredged from the sea introduces sedimented marine pollution into liminal coastal areas and shorelines.

It may come as a surprise that sand is one of the world’s biggest traded commodities by volume (if not value). Of the nearly 59 billion tonnes of material mined every year, 68 to 85 per cent is sand and gravel. The world consumes more than 40 billion tonnes of sand a year – used for construction, land reclamation, shoreline development, and road-building – a rate far faster than the natural replenishment of the stuff by rivers or on beaches.76 Remarkably, the abundant sand of the Arabian deserts on the Peninsula is thought inappropriate for making concrete. Concrete mixing requires angular sand, which is either marine or riparian, mined from beaches or rivers.77 Desert sand, eroded by winds, is far too rounded and smooth.78