Pearls, Oil, and Depth in a Persian Gulf Resource Frontier

• In Event: Speculative Practices in the Making of Deep-Ocean Frontiers I

Abstract

From 1853 to 1954, dozens of foreign entrepreneurs sought to profit from the Persian Gulf’s bountiful oyster beds – home to millions of pearl-bearing Pinctada radiata – and were turned away by British officials who propped up the local fishery. Skin-diving for pearls was perilous and difficult work: for centuries, only indebted and enslaved divers from around the Indian Ocean would sail to the banks for the summertime dive. But when the 1853 Perpetual Maritime Truce between Britain and the “Pirate Coast” (now the U.A.E.) guaranteed safe passage in the Gulf, British, French, and German capitalists tried to deploy trawlers and copper-helmeted diving dress to gather oysters from points deeper than the outermost limits of skin-divers. To enact their policy of deterrence, British imperial officials blended local custom with European maritime norms, begetting a novel arrangement of property at sea where the ocean’s depths were exclusive for extraction (to “Arab divers”), while its surface was free to all for navigation (a policy that would later be mirrored by the Exclusive Economic Zones created by UNCLOS). This depth-surface distinction hardened when foreign firms began to prospect for oil in the Gulf; in 1954, British Petroleum hired Jacques Cousteau and his Aqua-Lung divers to search for Cretaceous-era fossils in the substrate below the pearl banks – signs that would point to the presence of oil. Building on archival and ethnographic research, this paper seeks to outline the “nature” of marine natural resources in imperial processes of prospecting, speculation, extraction, and governance off the Arabian Peninsula.

Author

• Scott Erich, CUNY Graduate Center