The Infrastructural Embodiments of Laleh Khalili's Sinews of War and Trade

The Infrastructural Embodiments of Laleh Khalili's Sinews of War and Trade Neelofer Qadir, Kelvin Ng (bio), Sabine Mohamed (bio), Sritama Chatterjee (bio), and Johan Mathew (bio) the potency of Laleh Khalili's (2020b) Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula is undeniable. In the alchemy of conversations since the book's publication, ethnographers, historians, and geographers have described the study as "magisterial" (Dua 2021) and "an instant classic" (see Mohamed's contribution to this Codex). The book is eight chapters, divided into sections that focus first on informational and infrastructural logics on land and sea, followed by sustained attention to people across sectors of finance, law, politics, and labor; the final chapter meditates on war as foundational to capitalism. Throughout the book, Khalili shifts our gaze between the spectacular and the mundane, deftly combining methodologies that parallel the scope of her argument: ethnography and interviews based on container ship travels; archival research across major and minor repositories that hold trade journals, newspapers, reports, and correspondence; poetry and prose, notably, Munif's Cities of Salt that illuminate the rich cultural histories of the Arabian Peninsula (see also Ziadah 2020). These interwoven practices provide microhistorical attention to the intimacies of colonial and monarchical rulers while sketching out the macroscale of war and trade. We dip below the waterline as Khalili orients us to the shallow waters of the Gulf, which require tremendous infrastructural intervention both onshore and underwater. Considered from the sea (Bishara 2022), these infrastructural interventions include the dislocation of fishing villages, ports, and refineries built, of harbors dredged (Khalili 2020b, 54). Jatin Dua's (2021) assertion that the book is "amphibious" not only helps us apprehend how Khalili navigates capitalism's oceanic and terrestrial tentacles [End Page 52] but also offers us a way to think about the plural temporalities that constitute the sinews at the heart of the book. In the four contributions that follow, we learn how Khalili's scope, methodology, and analytic insights might be mobilized toward opening multiple avenues for research. Kelvin Ng appreciates Khalili's attention to everyday landscapes of logistical sublime, made and remade, that show us uneven and discordant histories of capitalism that are not limited to Euro-American parameters. Through sinews, Ng argues, we can grasp how even territorial expansion can be seen as shot through with maritime logistics. Sabine Mohamed approaches Sinews of War and Trade from the Red Sea, which allows her to reflect on ways that, in eastern Africa as elsewhere, "borders are tethered to infrastructure," with implications that are at once terrestrial and aquatic, and how the maintenance of borders and infrastructures is also dialectically constitutive of (international) political frictions. She offers "queer choke points" as both strategy and analytic for interrupting the circulations of capitalism, moving away from their common understanding as "unwanted and inadvertent consequence" and toward otherwise possibilities of remaking the world. Sritama Chatterjee notices granularity as method and operational anchor of Khalili's book, which attends to the ripple effects of granular material on maritime geographies around primary infrastructural bases. She shows how we might shift from conceptualizing crisis as an event to a product of capitalism and state governance (colonial and postcolonial); within this shift, and with Khalili, Chatterjee reflects on her own work on the unevenness of brown as the processes of racialization of geographies, which disproportionately impact indigenous communities' watery spaces. Johan Mathew takes up elasticity, that is, the elasticity of sinews, as (therefore) the elasticity of capital, up until the point that these lines tear (rupture or "choke," as Mohamed puts it). Mathew notes that racial hierarchies are a key infrastructure of global capitalism, not a relic of an unenlightened past but innovations designed to capitalize on the dire straits of postcolonial economies. Like Chatterjee, Mathew thinks with Khalili to show that brownness is not monolithic through an examination of the slowly violent division among different groups of workers, who themselves are bargained as global labor by the elites of remittance-dependent states. Urgently, for our understanding of the historicization of racial capitalism across multiple geopolitical sites, Khalili refuses the disciplining impulse of linear time; rather, she reveals the sedimentations of its infrastructures and...