Andrea Wright’s Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea examines the politics of oil and labor in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula from 1945 to 1970. The book’s central concern is why, during the middle of the twentieth century, “worker strikes became increasingly fragmented, and workers faced growing restrictions on the right to strike” (3). It argues that new labor laws and corporate practices, alongside the rise of exclusionary conceptions of nationality and nationalism, led workers to become less likely to form “class-based solidarities.” Governments and oil companies also increasingly “invoked security as they sought to curtail strikes, including through militarized responses” (11). The result, Wright contends, was the “evacuation of politics from the oilfields” (16) and the racialization of nationality.

The work is organized around seven chapters, each of which begins with an anecdote about a strike in a different nation–state. Chapter 1 begins with the 1946 strike at the oil refinery in Abadan, Iran, which Wright presents as an example of class solidarities superseding ethnic, linguistic, and national barriers. Chapter 2 moves to Kuwait in the 1940s and 1950s, with the argument that corporate hiring and management practices fragmented workers along the lines of nationality and shaped the formation of the Kuwaiti state bureaucracy and citizenship system. Chapter 3 posits that Indian workers in Bahrain increasingly deployed the discourse of citizenship, rather than class, after Indian independence, and examines why the newly independent Indian state struggled to defend the rights of its citizens abroad. Chapter 4 discusses Aden in the 1950s, where Indian workers adopted nationalist discourses even as their organizing efforts were undermined by an Indian emigration system that allowed employers to efficiently replace striking workers. Chapter 5 yields a discussion of labor law in Bahrain, focusing on how Arab nationalists in the 1950s excluded non-Arabs from the nascent labor movement while corporate and imperial authorities drafted legislation designed to disempower workers. Chapter 6 traces how the power of Qatari workers, exemplified by a series of strikes in the 1950s, was undermined by the hiring of contracted noncitizen workers and the imposition of restrictive labor laws. Chapter 7 describes how, after strikes in Abu Dhabi in the 1960s, oil company managers used the discourse of energy security and contract labor to suppress worker protest. The conclusion jumps to the present day, arguing that midcentury systems of labor control remain largely unchanged.

The most compelling sections of Unruly Labor present a historical ethnography of corporate and state practice that illuminates the relationship between the Gulf and South Asia. This account begins in chapter 1, which traces the evolution of British imperial systems of indentured labor to the vast recruitment infrastructure that spans the Indian Ocean today. Chapters 3 and 4 draw on archival records from the newly independent Indian government to illustrate the challenges of defending noncitizen labor rights in an age of nation–states. Such transnational work is essential to understanding the origins and durability of the migration regimes of the Gulf states, and here Wright’s work is both novel and valuable. Unruly Labor illustrates the importance of studying the region as imbedded within the Indian Ocean and suggests potentially fruitful avenues for future research.

Unruly Labor is on shakier ground, however, when it makes sweeping arguments about politics and society in the Persian Gulf. More engagement with the extant historiography could have significantly sharpened the work’s broader interventions. Most directly related is this author’s 2020 dissertation, which draws on a range of both English- and Arabic-language sources that Wright does not cite and addresses a number of themes central to Unruly Labor. Wright’s argument about the “evacuation of politics” from the oil fields would benefit from more engagement with Middle Eastern labor history, especially accounts of how imperial powers sought to channel and diffuse labor protest. Recent histories of oil and resource nationalism, such as Christopher R. W. Dietrich’s Oil Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Giuliano Garavini’s The Rise and Fall of OPEC in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2019), challenge Unruly Labor’s argument that oil companies had effectively resigned themselves to the inevitability of nationalization by the 1960s. Works on oil labor, including Katayoun Shafiee’s Machineries of Oil (MIT Press, 2018) and Touraj Atabaki, Elisabetta Bini, and Kaveh Ehsani’s edited volume Working for Oil (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), would nuance Wright’s arguments about the origins of—and reasons behind—corporate practices of racial segregation and subcontracting. Finally, recent works on citizenship in the Gulf, notably Noora Lori’s Offshore Citizens (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Claire Beaugrand’s Stateless in the Gulf (I. B. Tauris, 2018), Natasha Iskander’s Does Skill Make Us Human? (Princeton University Press, 2021), and Omar AlShehabi’s Contested Modernity (Oneworld, 2019), elaborate on how citizenship and migration regimes have been understood, and contested, by both elite and nonelite actors.

More significantly, Unruly Labor suffers from a gap between its remarkably ambitious arguments and the limitations of its source base. Wright draws on some valuable and hitherto neglected archives—notably from the Indian government and British Petroleum. However, the author relies almost entirely on state or corporate records and exclusively on sources written in English. Wright never acknowledges that there is a wealth of Arabic- and Persian-language material, both primary and secondary, on oil, citizenship, and labor in the midcentury Gulf. Instead, she explains that she uses subaltern studies and “anthro/history” approaches to read corporate and imperial records against the grain. As a result, Unruly Labor at times misinterprets—or entirely misses—the role of local actors, whose actions are glimpsed only through the distorted and unsympathetic lens of the imperial archive. Although Unruly Labor claims to center how “workers themselves” shaped regional politics and labor hierarchies, it mentions just a single worker by name—one “Mr. Diaz” (104). Moreover, significant labor-led social movements—notably Kuwaiti trade unionism—receive only a passing mention or none at all. Workers come across as faceless and reactive, responding to corporate or imperial initiative. They may act “unruly,” but they do not speak.

The example of Kuwait illustrates the dangers of writing social history without reference to local sources. In chapter 2, Wright argues that workers built transnational solidarities during the strikes of the 1940s, but that over the course of the 1950s, class-based coalitions were successfully undermined by corporate and imperial policies that reified national categories. But voluminous Arabic-language evidence—including newspaper articles, memoirs, oral history interviews, and secondary sources—unambiguously describes cross-national collaboration as the rare exception to the rule in the early oil strikes of the 1940s and 1950s. Contrary to Wright’s account, Kuwaiti oil workers embraced increasingly transnational solidarities over time, as local conceptions of self were supplemented by Arab nationalism—which was itself superseded by Marxist, Third World–ist, and class-based loyalties by the late 1960s. Indeed, by the 1970s, the Kuwaiti labor movement had emerged as a powerful advocate for noncitizen rights. Not only did noncitizen workers participate in oil strikes through the 1970s, but many such strikes were launched, in no small part, to win greater rights for noncitizen workers. Unruly Labor erases this history of labor organizing, presuming that oil companies successfully manipulated workers by using xenophobia to fracture class solidarities. Readers are left with the impression that Kuwaiti workers were supportive of, or even responsible for, a strategy of divide-and-rule based on nationality that the country’s most prominent labor leaders fought against for decades and ferociously condemned as neocolonial, discriminatory, and racist.

Engagement with Arabic-language sources also changes how corporate and imperial records are understood, challenging many of Wright’s overarching arguments. Although corporate racism is a central theme of Unruly Labor, the work misses its most significant material implication: that oil companies hired a surfeit of white “senior staff” to act as strikebreakers, undermining the power of the strike. Oil companies turned to contracting not to prepare for the inevitability of nationalization, which they hoped to avoid well into the 1970s, but because their racist strategy of divide-and-rule was breaking down under pressure from workers and newly independent states. Wright’s argument about the increasing securitization of the oil fields also is unsubstantiated; oil companies freely deployed violence against their workers across the twentieth century. Nor did corporate and imperial practices succeed in depoliticizing oil labor. In the 1960s and 1970s, Kuwaiti workers ran for political office, introduced legislation, fought for the rights of noncitizens, championed oil nationalization, and repeatedly went on strike, often organizing in the oil fields themselves—hardly a successful “evacuation of politics.” A similar critique could be made with regard to Iran. Finally, the labor sponsorship system was produced not just by corporate and imperial officials, but by local elites, especially technical experts and business interests organized in lobbying associations. Its emergence—and, critically, its longevity—cannot be understood without reference to these actors, who operated almost exclusively in Arabic.

Scholars of the Gulf have long relied on the imperial archive. It is rich in many ways, as demonstrated by the best passages of Unruly Labor. But when writing social history, it cannot be the only source of historical truth. There is a limit to how far one can, or should, read against the grain—especially when a rich local archive is readily available.