Imperial offshore: Aden and the infrastructure of Empire

Thesis

This dissertation explores the British colonial port of Aden (1839–1967)—at its height, the fourth-busiest port in the world—as a key site of infrastructure in the development of empire and global capitalism. More than a logistical hub, Aden served as a space of regulatory and territorial innovation that helped insulate global capital from the claims of labour, law, and national sovereignty. The study thus presents Aden as a central node in what I term imperial offshore—a legal and spatial practice of rule that established zones of exception where standard regulations were selectively suspended, prefiguring the free trade zones and corporate governance of the neoliberal offshore economy.

Foregrounding infrastructure, the study examines how legal, logistical, and commercial systems tethered Aden to wider imperial networks—and how a diverse cast of actors, from colonial administrators to Indian capitalists and Yemeni labourers, animated and contested these systems. This infrastructural approach challenges dominant narratives on multiple fronts. Drawing on diverse sources—including hitherto unexamined family archives and community records in Gujarati—I show that, contrary to colonial claims, the making of Aden was driven not only by British imperial planners but by non-Western, predominantly Indian capitalists whose investments, speculations, and attendant risks formed elemental building blocks of British statecraft in the Indian Ocean.

More fundamentally, by focusing on Aden as an ‘interstitial site,’ this dissertation opens analytical space for examining empire and capitalism not from the agricultural or industrial edges which ‘bookend’ them, but from the middle—the in-between sites and infrastructures that regulate connectivity, mediation, and circulation. This methodological reorientation serves a broader theoretical purpose: rather than framing the Middle East through theoretical models imported from elsewhere, it takes seriously the region’s own historical experience as a generative force in the making of global capitalism.

Authors: Toussia Cohen, I

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-nz4nzpbj8
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: capitalism; Arabian Peninsula; Middle East; infrastructure; British Empire; Parsis; Aden; Indian Ocean; offshore; South Asia