Andrea Wright, Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea (New Texts Out Now)

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Nov 21, 2024 Arabian Peninsula
Andrea Wright, Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea (New Texts Out Now)

Andrea Wright, Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea (New Texts Out Now)

By : Andrea Wright

Andrea Wright, Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea (Stanford University Press, 2024).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Andrea Wright (AW): Today, workers in the Arabian Peninsula are unable to form unions and to go on strike to change their working conditions. In the oil industry, most laborers come from South Asia and the Philippines. Building on my previous research on Indian labor migration to the Gulf, I wrote Unruly Labor because I wanted to understand what historic factors shaped restrictions on worker organizing and learn about how the contemporary racialized labor hierarchies of the Gulf came into being.
... it investigates the evacuation of politics from the oilfields and the formation of racialized labor hierarchies.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

AW: Unruly Labor is history of the oil industry in the Arabian Sea that centers the workers who built and maintained the industry. Looking at the 1930s through 1960s, each chapter of the book begins with strikes by both mobile and local workers and considers what factors impacted worker solidarities. Unruly Labor also examines how oil companies and governments responded to these strikes. This examination demonstrates how oil became increasingly connected to national security and how this connection between oil and national security negatively impacted workers’ ability to unionize and go on strike. 

Historically, scholars have attributed restrictions on worker organizing in the Arabian Peninsula to the continuation of pre-oil social relations, and scholars have also argued that oil wealth negatively impacts the development of democratic institutions. Recent scholarship has called into question assumptions about the “timeless and traditional” Gulf and critiqued the idea of the “resource curse.” One notable example is found in Timothy Mitchell’s book Carbon Democracy, where he discusses how the materiality of oil impacted political organizing. Unruly Labor joins in this conversation—it investigates the evacuation of politics from the oilfields and the formation of racialized labor hierarchies. It does so by analyzing the relationships among oil companies, workers, and local and imperial governments. Unruly Labor describes how workers shaped corporate management practices and governance as they went on strike and made economic and political demands. In turn, this book explores how the contours of worker actions were also shaped by oil company practices, including segregating workers based on their nationality. By situating oil production and labor movements in the contexts of both imperialism and decolonialization in the mid-twentieth century, we see the changing ways workers formed solidarities and the impact of social movements—including nationalism and anti-imperial struggles—on worker solidarities. Unruly Labor documents how new understandings of citizenship and rights worked in conjunction with discourses that connected oil to national security to limit the political possibilities of oil workers’ strikes.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

AW: My first book, Between Dreams and Ghosts, investigates contemporary Indian labor migration to oil projects on the Arabian Peninsula. It is based on my archival and ethnographic research on the experiences of Indian workers and the process of migration. While I was researching and writing Between Dreams and Ghosts, I became interested in what historic factors shaped contemporary labor regimes in the Gulf, and I began to conduct archival research to learn more. The results of this research are presented in Unruly Labor.

While Between Dreams and Ghosts and Unruly Labor examine different time periods and focus on different topics, there are multiple themes that connect the two books. Both books emphasize inter-regional connections, and they center the Arabian Sea as a dynamic, interconnected arena where ideas, people, and goods circulate. In addition, both argue that discussions of migration and oil production need to look beyond abstract models based on concepts like supply and demand or scarcity and surplus. Instead, these books consider the everyday experiences of individuals, and they historically and culturally situate these experiences. Both books’ attention to global processes and local relations allows us to better understand contemporary capitalism, including how corporate profits are created through the production of difference within the supply chain, how global inequalities are naturalized, and how local relations and values impact capitalism.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

AW: As I was writing this book, I wanted it to be of interest to scholars and also accessible to individuals who are not experts but who are interested in topics like global history, oil, the Middle East, and labor history. I hope readers will gain insight into the multiple groups—oil company managers, government officials, and workers—that actively shaped the oil industry and governance in the Arabian Sea. By considering the interactions among these groups over time, I hope it is clear that practices that are seen as unchanging or holdovers from the past—like the current treatment of workers—were actually constructed over time. I also hope readers will develop an appreciation for the struggles of workers globally by learning about the process by which workers in the Gulf were denied their rights to unionize or strike and how this was legitimated as governments and oil companies mobilized discourses of political and economic stability.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

AW: I am currently working on a couple of new projects that look at energy production, community organizing, and governance. One of these projects studies the global depoliticization of labor in the second half of the twentieth century and connects these changes in workers’ rights to the environmental degradation caused by the oil industry. It does so by examining how labor laws, environmental regulations, and human resources practices that were established in the United States were implemented globally. This global history analyzes worldwide trends in strikes and community organizing from the 1940s to the mid 1990s, and it puts these global trends into context using case studies from multiple countries, including Bahrain, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom, and the United States. 

I am also working on an ethnographic project about variations in green infrastructure development. Looking comparatively at green energy initiatives in the United States, India, and the Arabian Peninsula, this project considers how ethnonationalism and other factors shape the development and implementation of green energy projects. Focusing on “green” natural gas refineries, commercial-scale solar projects, and the responses of local communities to these projects, this research attends to how the unequal environmental and economic impacts of green energy are informed by racism, class inequalities, and nationalist narratives.

J: Why is citizenship so important for our understandings of labor and the oil industry?

AW: Citizenship played a critical role in determining the efficacy of workers’ strikes. First, from the 1940s to the 1960s, worker strikes increasingly fragmented along national lines. In part, this was driven by the pride felt by workers from newly independent countries, like India and Pakistan. It was also due to segregation by oil company managers based on workers’ nationalities. Another factor was that workers were usually better able to advocate for their rights when they appealed directly to their own government. For example, in the early 1950s, all of the Indian workers who were employed in the building British Petroleum’s refinery at Aden went on a hunger strike. During this strike, these workers appealed to the Indian government for support. In response, the Indian government temporarily halted the migration of Indians to work at the Aden refinery construction project. Such interventions made oil company managers keenly aware of the power of workers to appeal to their own governments and the disruptive potential of government interventions. One way that managers responded to this was by increasingly hiring stateless workers. In addition, in the mid-twentieth century, oil company executives and government officials actively campaigned for restrictive labor laws that favored employers, and they pushed for militarized responses to worker strikes and other disruptions to oil production. Unruly Labor demonstrates that as restrictive labor laws were implemented and strikes were increasingly responded to with police and military force, fewer locals were hired in the oil industry, particularly as laborers. Instead, oil companies hired foreign workers who had limited recourse to governmental support.

 

Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 5: Writing Labor Laws, pages 115 to 119)

In 1954, local workers at the Bahrain Petroleum Company (Bapco) refinery in Bahrain went on strike demanding their rights. According to Bapco managers, this strike was influenced by people from outside Bahrain and directed toward the government, not the company. A Bapco manager, Leigh Josephson, recalled the strike:

They got to the students, the younger group of people. Yes, there was a lot of unrest among the young people. They not only went on strike. . . . well, they never did go on strike against the company. They tried to, but they were not successful. They did a lot of damage in town—broke windows, set service stations on fire, set a bunch of our busses on fire at our bus depot. Just malicious. It was opposition—a group of young people. A lot of them were our trainees—our young student trainees that we had sent off to England for training and then coming back to Bahrain. All they would say is, “We want our rights!” That’s all I ever got out of them. 

Josephson described the strike as a violent outburst. He also reported that workers were organized and demanding rights, but he characterized these demands as nonsensical:

This group was so militant in the refinery, and they came marching up and tried to come through [the] hall in a group. I just went out and confronted them. I said, “What is your beef? Why?” “Well, we want our rights.” “Well, what rights do you want?” They wouldn’t tell me. They just wanted “our rights.” . . . In my view, they had no reason to complain about their rights. They were getting a free education. I told these boys, “We’re paying for your education; the government gives you free hospital, free schools; you don’t have to pay any taxes. What more do you want? You’re being treated very well.” I couldn’t get them to agree, so I just alerted our security to bring in the government security people. They were still pretty radical, so the local security came in, plus our security, and just loaded them on the busses and sent them home.

Josephson reported that he told the striking workers to come back to work when they were “ready to talk sense.” The strike then continued for several weeks, and according to another Bapco manager, the strikes ended after the population felt “suffering from lack of wages as well as of gasoline and kerosene.” Following the strike, about 50 percent of the employees were rehired. 

Josephson’s and other Bapco managers’ engagement with this strike in 1954 illuminates three themes that emerge around worker strikes in the Arabian Peninsula in the 1950s and the response of oil companies and governments to these strikes. First, Bapco managers identified the leaders of strikes as young men who oil companies had sent to England for additional education. This resonates with descriptions of strike leaders at other oil projects in the early 1950s. For example, in 1953, Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco) managers noted that the leaders of a large strike were workers that the company had sent to the United States or Lebanon for training. Second, managers characterized workers’ call for rights as misguided or incomprehensible. As managers described their response, they pointed to benefits such as free education or hospitals. This response depoliticized the claims made by striking workers—managers interpreted workers’ claims to be about personal benefits and ignored workers’ claims for political or workplace changes. Such responses also articulate a paternalism that was often used by managers in regard to calls for self-determination or development. Third, managers used local security forces to end the strike after attempts to “talk sense” failed. This militarized response reflects the potential dangers strikes posed to the local government, the British administration, and oil companies and draws attention to how local governments, the British administration, and oil companies collaborated to end strikes.

The 1954 strike described by Josephson was just one of multiple large strikes that occurred in Bahrain between 1954 and 1956. At that time, nationalism, along with anti-imperialism and pan-Arab movements, mobilized large numbers of Bahrainis, including those employed in the oil industry. In addition, the magazine Sawt al-Bahrain (Voice of Bahrain) spread an anti-colonial message, criticized Bapco, and argued for better working conditions for workers at the oil refinery. 

The strikes that occurred in Bahrain from 1954 to 1956 built upon unrest that occurred during Moharram in 1953 and the subsequent formation of the High Executive Committee, later renamed the National Union Committee. The committee drew upon pan-Arab nationalism, religious rituals, anti-imperial sentiments, class inequalities, antagonism with non-khalijis, and solidarity with Palestine. The committee’s popularity was seen to be a response to dissatisfaction with increasing government control over commerce, increasing numbers of migrant workers in Bahrain, and that Bahrain was experiencing a slower pace of development than in Kuwait and locals were being promoted a slower rate than in Saudi Arabia. The success of the movement was seen in its ability to bridge sectarian and class divisions within Bahrain. The resulting organization, the General Trade Union, was able to attract thousands of members in its first few months. 

Low-levels of worker unrest continued in Bahrain, and in late 1956, there was a large strike. Bapco managers described this strike as indicative of an emerging nationalism and characterized the strike as the “first serious friction” between Bapco and its employees. Particularly influential at that time was Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal Company on July 26, 1956. People living and working on the Arabian Peninsula, including Indian and Pakistani workers, participated in demonstrations in support of Egypt. After Israeli, British, and French forces invaded Egypt in late October and early November 1956, these demonstrations intensified—there were calls to boycott English companies, worker strikes, and sabotage at oil projects. During these strikes, popular sentiment was believed to be with Egypt, and massive public support limited the local governments’ ability to respond. Finally, British troops entered Manama in November 1956, the committee was disbanded, and its leaders were jailed. 

In the 1950s, worker actions were shaped by historic labor relations at oil companies, anti-colonial discourse, and pan-Arab nationalism. As pan-Arab nationalism gained strength and facilitated some worker solidarities, other workers, particularly non-Arab workers, were decreasingly likely to participate in broad-based worker actions. As the Bahraini government, British government, and oil companies tried to mitigate the impact of worker strikes, they wrote labor laws that limited workers’ rights and supported the rights of employers. These labor laws, implemented in 1958, differentiated citizens from noncitizens and drew heavily from restrictive labor laws written in the United States. As British government officials, oil company managers, local government officials, and labor leaders drafted and discussed these laws, the process overcame tensions and coordinated the interests of these groups. These laws discouraged strikes and made collective worker action challenging. In doing so, they disallowed tactics that workers could use to change to working, living, and political conditions, and they provided a rationalization for local police forces and imperial militaries to respond with violence to strikes.

Labor Relations at Bapco and Unrest in Bahrain

In the High Executive Committee’s publications and pamphlets, they outlined a number of key issues that resonated widely in Bahrain. Many of these issues were long standing, and they centered on labor relations at Bapco and pan-Arab nationalism. These issues were informed by anti-colonial sentiments, with both American-owned Bapco and the British administration based in Bahrain described negatively as colonizers. To understand a broader context for the strikes that occurred from 1954 to 1956, this section will explore labor relations at Bapco in the 1940s and 1950s, and the following section will look at pan-Arab nationalism.

Questions over the number of Bahrainis employed in the oil industry and the position that these workers held were key issues since the beginning of oil production in Bahrain, and they continued to be issues in the mid-1950s. After assuming the throne in 1942 following the death of his father, the ruler of Bahrain, Sheikh Salman bin Hamad al Khalifa, strove to increase the number of Bahrainis employed by Bapco. This was challenging, however, because most Bahrainis worked as laborers, and large numbers of laborers were not consistently needed by the company. As a result, many Bahrainis were hired as laborers when Bapco was undergoing construction projects, but they lost their jobs once construction projects were complete and they were no longer needed. One example of this is when, in January 1945, Bapco was preparing to slow its construction phase, and the company expected to “set free” 4,500 laborers over the coming six months. When new construction began, however, many of these same workers were rehired. Due to the pace of construction projects, from 1940 to 1950, the overall number of Bahrainis employed by Bapco appears relatively stable, but workers experienced little job stability. At the same time, the number of foreign workers increased.
Jan 12, 2024 Lebanon
Samuel Dolbee By :
Samuel Dolbee

Samuel Dolbee, Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (New Texts Out Now)

Samuel Dolbee, Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Samuel Dolbee (SD): Historians are of course a product of historical circumstances, and I am no different. I conceived of, researched, and wrote this book in the shadow of the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Arab Spring and Gezi Park protests. I wanted to think about the environment as a material force in human history, I wanted to think of how it shaped/was shaped by human migration, and I wanted to think of how people used the environment as a means and object of protest, rebellion, and violence. I was also responding to a scholarship on the end of the Ottoman Empire and beginning of something else that I saw as divided—divided temporally between the Ottoman and post-Ottoman periods, divided spatially between different Ottoman provinces or post-Ottoman states. So in writing an environmental history of the Jazira region I was attempting to write an integrative account of the empire-to-nation story, one that was rooted in an environment that crossed borders and, in doing so, accounted for what borders meant in people’s everyday lives.
I also attend to how the fate of locusts was closely linked to the fate of humans, among them Arab and Kurdish nomads, Armenian deportees, and Assyrian refugees.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

SD: The book is an environmental history of the Jazira region—an arid area stretching roughly between the Tigris and the Euphrates at the foot of the Anatolian plateau, which is today northeast Syria, southeast Turkey, and northwest Iraq. I tell this history by focusing on the region’s distinctive locusts. I trace how they were essentially eradicated by the mid-twentieth century and explain how that allowed for an environmental transformation, as a land once denigrated as a useless desert became Syria’s most productive agricultural lands in the twentieth century. Throughout, I also attend to how the fate of locusts was closely linked to the fate of humans, among them Arab and Kurdish nomads, Armenian deportees, and Assyrian refugees. It was not simply that these different people were often compared to locusts by others. It was also that their lives were profoundly shaped by them: they fled to the edges of cities when locusts ate their pastures, they ate locusts when they had nothing left to eat, they watched helplessly as locusts devastated their cotton crops, and, by the 1930s, they suffered from the chemicals sprayed to kill locusts. What this last example meant was that people compared to locusts also were hurt by pesticides intended to kill locusts, the figurative and the real converging in painful ways. Thus through locusts and these people, I account for how the Jazira transformed from a site of nomadic settlement campaigns in the 1870s, to the killing fields of the Armenian genocide during World War I, to the most agriculturally productive region of Syria in the twentieth century, and, finally, to the heartland of ISIS—briefly—in the last decade.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

SD: It is my first book, so I suppose I can only say (or, better, hope) that it is a departure from the abysmal creative writing I did in my younger years.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

SD: A challenge I had in the early stages of my research was to simply describe the place I was researching. Most people did not know what the Jazira was. And I often invited blank stares and a change of subject when I used the accurate yet unwieldy characterization of “the hinterlands of Aleppo, Diyarbekir, and Mosul.” At the fragile early period of research this sort of response could be crushing. But part of what sustained me was that other times, too, people—typically with some family connection to the place of the Jazira—knew immediately what I was talking about. And they would ask startlingly revealing questions, questions about Rojava, questions about the Armenian genocide. These were far from neutral topics to bring up with a stranger in Turkey then or now. I hope people from the Jazira can see something of their worlds and their families’ worlds in this book. I should note, too, that although peripheral, the Jazira has a way of bringing in important people. Mark Sykes, Ziya Gökalp, Gertrude Bell, and Midhat Pasha are just a few of the famous people who ended up there, and writing about it.

On a scholarly level, there of course has been huge growth in recent years in the field of environmental history of southwest Asia and north Africa. There is also justified skepticism of the field, given the long legacy of racist, environmentally deterministic scholarship that seems to align with it. What I hope my book shows—and what I know the work of many colleagues shows—is how connected environmental history, social history, and political economy are. We can argue about agency of locusts all we want, but peasants in 1930s Syria had little doubt about whether locusts could powerfully affect their lives, and they had very sophisticated critiques of the government’s inability to help them in this regard. It is the assumed disconnection of human politics from nonhuman nature (a disconnection we assume at our peril!) that shapes these views, and this itself is a historic development. I have also been inspired and in awe of the brave and meticulous work of many scholars on the history of the Armenian genocide. Part of what I am trying to do with the book is join them in integrating this event into regional history—as opposed to an event that falls into a sort of temporal black hole between the Ottoman Empire and its end and a spatial one in the often forgotten Jazira region. So I wanted to examine what the genocide looks like, and what unexpected episodes of resistance and survival appear if we look at the Jazira before, during, and after the genocide rather than just as an endpoint. 

Finally, I will add that in this series an earlier participant whom I admire described how his work was a product above all of his “undisciplined reading habits.” I do not think I can boast of being a reader of such eclectic scope as he, but I do feel similarly in that some of the books that most shaped my thinking were about Japan, the Central Valley of California, and Ukraine, stretching across environmental history, political economy, critical geography, history of science, and borderlands history. If any undisciplined readers out there with no interest in the Ottoman Empire find this book and like it, I will be very grateful. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

SD: I thought I was working on disease—and I still have a project fermenting there—but I am also slowly realizing I have something on the way about plants and trees and migration. A few years ago I was sitting with a friend in a town by the Euphrates and we were reading about the history of the town on our phones and its legacy of silk production and, hence, mulberry trees (the leaves of which were used to feed the silkworms). I looked up and realized we were sitting under mulberry trees, and mulberries littered the sidewalk all around us. I think part of what attracts me to these topics is the timescale of trees—they outlive their original owners and planters in some cases, and the same trees from the past might even remain alive today. So I am interested in, for example, how the grapevine-pest phylloxera in the Mediterranean led to the expansion of grape cultivation and raisin production around Izmir, then its demise, and then how the Greek-Turkish population exchanges led to refugees bringing their grape vines with them elsewhere. Or the centrality of poplars and eucalyptus trees to villages built for genocide survivors by an Ottoman Armenian agronomist. Or how the “Antep pistachio” became invented as a product of the Republic of Turkey. It also means that, in addition to filling up my phone with pictures of historical documents, I also now, thankfully, have a lot of tree pictures. And more excuses to eat grapes and pistachios as a research experience.

J: Should we judge this book by its beautiful cover? 

SD: Yes, please! It is all thanks to the work of the brilliant graphic designer and illustrator, Meredith Sadler. From a laughably simplistic stick-figure rendering of locusts that I drew, Meredith created something I find quite stunning. She additionally did all of the maps in the book. Also noteworthy is that the lower left of the cover reveals small hills known as tell. These were not naturally occurring geological formations but rather the accumulation of dirt on the ruins of ancient cities. European travelers and Ottoman officials alike saw these hills and believed they meant the Jazira could be a densely populated agrarian powerhouse for the empire. What they did not know was that locusts were actually using these very same hills for different purposes: to both procreate and lay eggs. I am glad the detail made it onto the cover, because I think it powerfully captures the complicated relationships embedded in environmental history that bring together both cultural and material histories. Locusts were using an ancient human infrastructure to feast on the expanding grain cultivation of the Ottoman Empire. The hills that made humans dream of a different future for this region were the same hills that locusts were using to prevent that future.

 

Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pp. 1-9)

“The desert journey continues very boringly,” wrote a reporter for the Istanbul newspaper Akşam in the summer of 1928. The train was headed eastward from the outskirts of the Syrian city of Aleppo. “To pass for hours in the middle of a brown expanse amid suffocating heat in a train car that is always shaking is,” the reporter complained, “unpleasant.” It would get worse. Suddenly, a droning insect flew into the train car. And then another. They were locusts. Someone closed the windows. But the insects continued to collide into the side of the train “incessantly.” In their percussive onslaught, the reporter might have heard the rhythm of the region’s recent history. After all, it was these creatures that had helped make a landscape that witnessed nomadic sedentarization campaigns, the Armenian genocide, and interwar refugee resettlement. The train hurtled onward.

The most common locust in the region was the Moroccan locust (Dociostaurus marocannus; Turkish: Fas çekirgesi; Arabic: al-jarad al-marrakishi). The name derived from where a Swedish entomologist first “discovered” the creature. In reality, the insects lived in a wide range of places, from Morocco to Central Asia. In most years, they remained harmless grasshoppers, but sometimes – because of a mix of precipitation, population density, and weather – they accelerated into what is known as their “gregarious” phase. Their population exploded, and their physiology changed. They swarmed and ranged up to 200 kilometers (124 miles). They blotted out the sun and consumed nearly everything in their path. In the words of one observer, they left nothing behind but “black stumps and their own excreta.” They were particularly destructive in zones of expanding cultivation, where planted fields existed alongside their preferred desert and steppe egg-laying grounds. In fact, the insects seemed so connected to human cultivation that elsewhere they were referred to in Arabic as the “human locust” (al-jarad al-adami). 

Unbeknownst to the bored reporter on the train and overshadowed by infamous figures such as Sykes and Picot, the locusts on the railway in 1928 were in their own way etching borders. In their flight, destruction, and perhaps even excrement, they mapped out an agroecology known as the Jazira – now largely forgotten to those who live outside of it – that stretched from the Tigris to the Euphrates at the foot of the Anatolian plateau. Extending between the cities of Aleppo, Diyarbekir, and Mosul, the Jazira was arid yet fertile, straddling the line where rain-fed agriculture was possible. For centuries, the Jazira functioned as an administrative unit. But when the Ottoman Empire worked to transform the region in the mid-nineteenth century, it attempted to do so through provinces that divided the connected landscape. When locusts moved across the Jazira, they did so beyond the bounds of provincial borders and often beyond the control of state officials.

Border-crossing movement persisted after the end of the Ottoman Empire, when the insects – and the railway – ensured that Syria and Turkey were curiously linked. The railway had been built in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire with the aim of connecting Berlin and Baghdad. After the Ottoman Empire dissolved in late 1922, a number of successor states emerged in its place, including the Republic of Turkey and the French Mandate of Syria under the neocolonial League of Nations. In the process of dividing once-unified imperial holdings, French and Turkish officials sought a borderline to separate Turkey and Syria and the Ottoman past from the post-Ottoman present. They found such a demarcation in the railway. As the railway moved east of Aleppo, it became the actual border between the countries, Syria to the south of the line and Turkey to the north. Officials thus transformed an infrastructural project intended to rejuvenate the Ottoman Empire into the actual dividing line between post-Ottoman states. Locusts paid little heed to these divisions. In the key of one map depicting the insects’ cross-border range, officials had replaced the symbol denoting the railroad. In lieu of the Ottoman infrastructure-turned-cleaver of post-Ottoman states was the thick blue line denoting the range of the locusts. What the map characterized as “the border of the winged” extended from Syria into southeast Turkey.

As locusts moved across Ottoman and post-Ottoman borders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they animated a mobile ecology entangled with people, including Arab and Kurdish nomads, Armenian deportees, and Assyrian refugees. The groups occupied different relationships to states, with some objects of reform and others targets of destruction. Yet in the Jazira, all of these people encountered locusts, which they variously fled, feared, and, in some cases, ate. They were also connected culturally. In fact, all of these groups found themselves compared to the insects at one point or another. Locusts of power, then, refers to the way that locusts shaped not only the “everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence,” as Marx put it, but also the imagination of people in the Jazira. The play on the phrase “locus of power,” moreover, alludes to the significance of the Jazira’s place on political and environmental margins for this kind of power.

Indeed, in moving on the edge, both locusts and these groups of mobile people sometimes managed to evade state officials. As a result, locusts and the many moving people of the Jazira might seem marginal in the sense of being unimportant. But in fact, they were marginal in the literal sense of being on the edge of desert and non-desert, one province or nation-state and another. And this place gave them power, similar to what Stephanie Camp, borrowing from Edward Said, has termed a “rival geography.” While this position allowed them to carve out some measure of autonomy, these forms of resistance or agency did not exist separately from the structures of power against which they were articulated. Like the Pacific coast of Colombia, the wintertime snows of New England, the small plots of postrevolutionary rural Haiti, or the floating coast of Beringia, the Jazira was a space that simultaneously protected and limited its people. Its landscapes could be used as a weapon, but the mix of arid ecology and political borders also made the Jazira a place into which people might escape.

But it would not remain so. If locusts made the region seem a wasteland to outsiders, the Jazira’s status also invited violent efforts at demographic engineering. In 1858, Ottoman officials could do little against locusts but compel peasants to collect the insects’ eggs and pray that a Sufi-blessed holy water might attract the insectivorous starling. By 1939, people all across the Jazira could realistically imagine a world without locusts thanks to chemical insecticides and expanded cultivation. Across this same time period, the Jazira shifted from being the site of nomadic sedentarization campaigns to the killing fields of the Armenian genocide to the location of interwar refugee resettlement. With the virtual eradication of locusts, the region known for its verdant grasses and flocks of sheep became some of the region’s most productive cotton- and wheat-growing lands in the twentieth century. At the same time, its people also became defined and targeted in relation to nationalist projects in new ways. Monocrop agriculture and minefields fortified the border that locusts – and people – had once easily crossed. Nevertheless, the Jazira and the power of its place on the edge would not be gone forever. Its particular political ecology has been the scene for various imaginings of Armenian, Assyrian, or Kurdish national homes, and in 2014 even became the heartland of the so-called Islamic State. Though often presented as outside of history, these recent events are connected to the region’s legacy of agrarian development, state violence, and popular resistance.