Humanitarianism and racial capitalism in the age of global shipping

In what ways does humanitarianism uphold racial capitalism? The article draws on and expands Cedric Robinson’s arguments about the relationship between humanitarianism and racial capitalism in his Black Marxism. It does so by focusing on the Mission to Seafarers in the countries of the Persian/Arabian Gulf. The Mission has worked alongside state institutions and businesses, both before and after independence from Britain, to facilitate maritime trade through these Arabian ports. In the context of seafarer exploitation, these institutions – the extractive, the governing and the caring – need to ensure worker productivity to facilitate racial accumulation of capital. I argue that the Mission acts as part of the structure of political economic order to produce a racially striated, capitalist politics of care to individuated and atomised seafarers, acting to conciliate conflicts between seafarers and shipowners, maintain seafarer productivity and diminish the possibility of collective mobilisation.


Introduction
The Mission to Seamen (whose name was changed to Mission to Seafarers in 2000) is an arm of the Anglican communion and formed in 1856 to minister to British sailors travelling to the colonies (Kennerley, 1989). As the British maritime empire expanded and consolidated in the latter half of the 19th century, the missionary work of salvaging seafarers -these 'muscles of empire' (Broeze, 1981) -would also grow exponentially. The Gulf emirates were crucial nodes in the empire and were governed via protectorate arrangements by Britain since the turn of the 20th century. Between 1961 and 1971, Britain ceded its protectorates over Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Muscat and Oman, and the Trucial emirates (which subsequently federated in the United Arab Emirates (UAE)). Throughout the time that the British maintained its protectorates in the Gulf, the colonial government officials refused to grant the Mission permission to open offices or clubs for seafarers in the petroleum and dry cargo ports of Persian/Arabian Gulf emirates. The Mission was only able to do so a few years after the independence of those emirates from Britain.
The central puzzle of this article is this: if the work of the Mission to Seafarers was co-extensive with and imbricated in the British empire, why did colonial officials in the Gulf prevent it from establishing a presence there? And if the work of the mission entailed humanitarian work and Christian evangelism, why were the Muslim rulers of Bahrain and the UAE amenable to entertaining and supporting the work of the Mission? In other words, what explains the shifts in the relationship between humanitarian organisations, state institutions and seafarers in the Gulf states after the Second World War?
To respond to this puzzle, I argue that the maintenance of capitalism in the Gulf, both before and after independence, has been centrally predicated on racialised labour regimes, and humanitarian work is embedded and implicated in these regimes of labour. The mechanism for the maintenance of racial capitalism in the Gulf has been adaptively dynamic and has changed in response to contestation by the workers and to cataclysmic political transformations (e.g. decolonisation). The humanitarian activities of the Missions, though often exercised with sincerity and commitment, reinforce racialised hierarchies of labour, depoliticise subject populations, circumscribe popular discontent and facilitate the accumulation of capital. I argue that colonial officers excluded the Missions not only because other mechanisms of control -often outsourced to businesses -existed, but also because the presence of the Missions in the ports implied the presence of often militant and politically organised seafarers. However, after independence, in order to maintain productivity among workers, but without the possibility of collective mobilisation, humanitarian organisations were welcomed, albeit in a circumscribed and surveilled manner in keeping with imposition of broad strictures on labour organisation. Their orientation was towards a practice of individualised care.
The broader aims of this article are twofold. The first is substantive. This article aims to show the importance of humanitarianism in shoring up racial capitalism in the Gulf by conceptualising how it worked alongside governing institutions and corporations, and acted like a safety valve by providing care to attenuate the worst effects of capitalist depredation. These governing institutions suture together global geopolitical alliances, colonial officials, local rulers, government experts and bureaucrats, corporations, humanitarian organisations and even unions. The article shows the interdependence of the Mission and these institutions, and how in its encounter with the seafarers themselves, the Mission's chaplains acted to conciliate conflicts, discourage dissent and encourage meekness.
The second interrelated aim is methodological. This article gives an affirmative response to the question posed by Jenkins and Leroy (2021: 16) in their introduction to a volume on Histories of Racial Capitalism: 'How well does the concept of racial capitalism travel to various global contexts?' I take seriously Stuart Hall's (2019) exhortation to think conjuncturally -grounded in specific times, places, histories, and contexts -(p. 314), in order to reveal 'new interrelationships and interdependencies [. . .] created across the boundaries of nationhood and region'. This article aims to show the conjunctural particularities of racial capitalism in the context of the Arabian Peninsula, and the acute relevance of Cedric Robinson's (1983) formulation of racial capitalism to seafarers as mobile and labouring subjects and to our understanding of the working of humanitarianism within spaces of work.
To make my argument I proceed in four steps. First, I will discuss the relevance of 'racial capitalism' as a conceptual tool for understanding the exploitation of mobile subjects, and the significance of seafarers' work for understanding racial regimes of labour globally. Next, I will describe how racial capitalism has functioned in the Gulf via an examination of the role of the shipping industry there. I will follow this by discussing the importance of Mission to Seafarers' humanitarianism in working with corporations and government institutions in the Gulf both before and after independence. I focus on the Gulf because the colonial regimes there are so recent, and because they are states built by racialised workers who have minimal rights and who experience varying degrees of itinerancy and mobility throughout their lifetimes. Finally, to bring all the threads of the argument together, I explore the relationship between the Mission to Seafarers and the workers themselves and discuss how humanitarian governmentality reproduces racial capitalism.
The research for this article draws on the as yet uncatalogued archives of the Mission to Seafarers housed at the Hull History Centre in the United Kingdom. In addition, the project has been informed by ethnography aboard containerships and at ports, interviews with three chaplains at various maritime missions in the Middle East, and seafarers and maritime unions representatives in a number of seafaring countries. I have also followed seafarers on public and private English-language message boards and have engaged with them around issues of abandonment and humanitarian aid.

Racial capitalism and mobile subjects in the age of global shipping
The antiracist revolts in the Anglophone world in the last decade have been followed by scholarly expositions of race and racism in the study of world politics (Anievas et al., 2015;Freeman et al., 2022;Harper-Shipman et al., 2021;Persaud and Sajed, 2018;Rutazibwa, 2020;Sabaratnam, 2020;Shilliam, 2020;Vitalis, 2000Vitalis, , 2017 even if the discipline of International Relations as a whole maintains a 'norm against noticing' racism (Vitalis, 2000: 333; borrowing from Toni Morrison). However, despite a nascent revival of interest in Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism, 'racial capitalism' as a concept has made fewer inroads in International Relations (but see Al-Bulushi, 2022;Ali and Whitham, 2021;Danewid, 2019;Holtermann Entwistle, 2022;Ince, 2022;Wearing, 2021, and a range of other writings outside the discipline cited below), as have seafarers, whether historical or contemporary. This is surprising given the importance of racialised regimes of labour, and especially of racialised mobile peoples (seafarers, logistics workers, migrants and refugees), in our globally interconnected world.
Cedric Robinson first defined racial capitalism as the embedding of feudal racialised hierarchies in the processes of capital accumulation. As Robinson (1983) writes, the dialectic of proletarianization disciplined the working classes to the importance of distinctions: between ethnics and nationalities; between skilled and unskilled workers; and . . . between races. The persistence and creation of such oppositions within the working classes were a critical aspect of the triumph of capitalism. (p. 42) Robinson, writing in the early 1980s, borrowed the term from South African political economists and activists who used the concept of 'racial capitalism' to describe accumulation of extractive capital under apartheid: 'Racial differentiation was institutionalised within the South African working class on terms which perpetuated the profit rates of the mining industry' (Legassick and Hemson, 1976: 4; also see Hudson, 2018 for a brief but incisive history of the usage of the term in South Africa). In borrowing the term, Robinson expanded it to include places beyond apartheid South Africa, and transform the concept into a generalisable theory.
Robinson's Black Marxism performed a number of virtuosic manoeuvres: The book offered the Black Radical Tradition as the future of anticapitalist political mobilisation. But it also provided a history of 'Blackness' and the intertwining of slavery and capitalism. Although some have pointed out to the definitional flexibility of 'race' in the book (see, for example, Go, 2021), this flexibility and contingency of the concept of race is precisely what makes the concept of racial capitalism so powerful. This capaciousness means that race -in its many guises and shapes -is a logical necessity to capitalist accumulation, even if it is itself shapeshifting and context-specific.
Where Black Marxism differed from previous analyses of the relationship between racialisation and capitalism was that it retrojected racialisation to feudal times (see Heng, 2018 on race in the European Middle Ages). Strikingly, Robinson locates the origins of the processes of racially striated accumulation in the dependency of pre-capitalist European economies on the labour of mobile populations. Analysing this process of absorption of pre-existing differences into capitalism and the striation of migrant labour as a means of producing a structure of capital accumulation is also what set apart the South African version of racial capitalism (see Legassick, 1975;Wolpe, 1972: 426) from other discussions of the relationship between racialisation and capitalism. In Robinson's account, the racialisation of the working class and the very invention of race as an ordering mechanism began in Europe with warring feudal masters drawing on immigrant labour not only as agricultural workers but also as recruits to endless continental wars. Robinson (1983) writes, 'There has never been a moment in modern European history (if before) that migratory and/or immigrant labor was not a significant aspect of European economies ' (p. 23). Mobility, being out of place, was, is, central to the making of exploitable communities of workers. This insistence on the dependence of racialisation on mobile labour makes the theory of racial capitalism relevant to the case of seafarers, as well as other mobile populations (see, for example, Chari, 2021;Danewid, 2019;Holtermann Entwistle, 2022;Manjapra, 2018;Valdez, 2021 in discussion of migrants). As Robinson and his most astute followers have shown, the concept of 'race' itself transformed from one context to the next, rapaciously devouring a range of differences and transmuting them into 'race' wherever exploitation was needed: the earliest forms of racialisation targeted Slavs and the Irish (Robinson, 1983: 4; also see Heng, 2018). In the Western hemisphere, the depredations of slavery produced forms of racialisation differing from those of Europe. In the European colonies in Asia and Africa, capitalism expanded by 'seizing upon colonial divisions, identifying particular regions for production and others for neglect, certain populations for exploitation and still others for disposal' (Lowe, 2015: 150). For accumulation to continue, this 'loss, disposability, and the unequal differentiation of human value' (Melamed, 2015: 77) must be perpetually produced and made congruent with specific contexts, specific moments, specific social and political relations.
It is also noteworthy that Robinson himself also discussed humanitarianism, albeit briefly, in his Black Marxism. In his appraisal of the role of Christian missions during slavery, the book is circumspect. Robinson argues that the 'cruelty that the planters found necessary inevitably exceeded the latitudes indulged by the more humanitarian fractions of the plantocratic society' (Robinson, 1983: 160). Robinson acknowledges the complex and contradictory position of the missions who were at once a part of the 'plantocratic society', but who also challenged the extremities of its cruelty. His subsequent discussion of abolitionist missionaries similarly takes account of the tensions in the positions they assumed within the hierarchies of racial capitalism in the time of chattel slavery (Robinson, 1983: 161-164).
Robinson's theorisation of racial capitalism is relevant to the Gulf context today, because it provides conceptual tools that allow for understanding how race and class articulate for mobile subjects there. Differences in background, language and familial and geographic belonging in the Gulf have been transmuted into formal and institutionalised categories under British colonial administration and have shaped social relations and processes of capital accumulation for decades to come. Capitalist accumulation in the Gulf countries, especially since the discovery of oil, has been dependent on the work of racialised migrant labourers. Work hierarchies, mobility and immobility, the quality of living quarters and wage structures have all been determined through a colonial calculus of race and class, enforced through both coercive and hegemonic means (Bsheer, 2018;Buckley, 2013;Holtermann Entwistle, 2022;Iskander, 2021;Khalili, 2020b;Vitalis, 2007;Wright, 2021, inter alia). But the economies of Gulf countries have also depended on a less visible category of workers: the seafarers who carry oil and hydrocarbons away and who bring in the cargo necessary for the vast projects of construction and industrialisation.
Colonialism, the slave trade, capitalism and empire have all been crucially dependent on maritime transportation. Seafarers, as exemplary mobile populations, have made possible the workings of global capital, the planetary factory and transoceanic trade. At the same time, the character of their work -peripatetic, precarious, super-exploited and subject to racial striations -prefigures other forms of precarity among migrant workers and landbound logistical labourers. This precarity is the outcome of ossification of global racial hierarchies, offshoring, 'outsourcing . . . and a host of other forms of organized abandonment' (Gilmore, 2011: 257).
Today is a new age of global shipping, as up to 90 percent of all goods we use travel by sea. At the same time, seafaring today is defined by the increasing invisibility of the workers themselves (Cowen, 2014: 195); detachment from kin and support networks (Markkula, 2011); captivity to exploitative contracts (Dua, 2019); ephemeral workplace relations with other seafarers (Chua, 2017); dual wage regimes determined by one's global location (Bonacich and Wilson, 2008;Khalili, 2020b); variegated hierarchies of border-crossing defined by categories of papers one carries (Stevenson, 2003); intensified quarantine controls (Khalili, 2020a); and most significantly, the simultaneous decline in the activity of trade unions and the intensification of seafarers' welfare needs. The structural conditions in which seafarers have laboured over the course of the last century have seen them exploited in colonial regimes of racialised labour (Balachandran, 2012; see also Ashiagbor, 2021; van der Linden, 2010); then employed in split/racialised global labour markets (Bonacich, 1972;Tilley and Shilliam, 2018); and eventually ministered as objects of humanitarian charity (Fassin, 2012;Feldman and Ticktin, 2012).
A significant technology of control through which seafarers are racialised is the offshore ship registries which the International Transport-workers' Federation calls 'flags of convenience'. Flags of convenience allow the registration of ships in a country where employment and environmental regulations are lax; maritime income taxes non-existent; fees, other tariffs and requirements for insurance scant or wholly absent; and inspection of ships' conditions and enforcement capacity are meagre (Carlisle, 1981;Khalili, 2020b). Ships flying flags of convenience are much more liable to accidents and abandonment. A database maintained by the International Labour Organization on abandoned ships indicates that more than 90 percent of the abandoned seafarers hail from Asia and Africa and a disproportionate number of them are Indian. Furthermore, despite African seafarers constituting a small proportion of the world's maritime workforce, they are overrepresented in abandonment cases. These mobile workers are made disposable by globally accepted legal offshoring mechanisms which are egregiously experienced in states where even minimal worker protections are not present.

The mission and the power structures in the gulf
In his classic article on 'The Limits of the State', Tim Mitchell (1991) argues that 'the institutional mechanisms of a modern political order are never confined within the limits of what is called the state'(p. 90). These institutions of power are not necessarily 'a single, totalized structure of power. On the contrary, there are always conflicts between them, as there are between different government agencies, between corporate organizations, and within each of them'. In such structures, 'forms of civic rights, subordinations and different articulations relative to state power are as critical to the social order as the organization of economic life' (Drayton, 2022: 284). Alongside first the colonial and later the postcolonial governments, corporations -and especially British Petroleumhave been parts of the political economic order on the Arabian Peninsula. The hydrocarbon companies have from the start had a large multinational workforce in Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Aden and the Trucial Emirates and had perfected modalities of discipline and control on land (Bsheer, 2018;Buckley, 2013;Chalcraft, 2011;Iskander, 2021;Khalaf et al., 2014;Khalili, 2020b;Vitalis, 2007;Wright, 2021, inter alia). The oil and merchant economies of the Gulf, as well as the processes of construction and urban development that occurred so rapidly over the course of several post-WWII decades, depended on the importation of goods and exportation of oil aboard ships. As such, shipping firms (both local and European), oil companies, and merchant firms all also depended on a vast phalanx of seafarers for transporting their cargoes (Khalili, 2020b).
To ensure that these populations of workers, on land and at sea, remained docile and controllable, direct coercion and violence were used against protesters (Bsheer, 2018;Chalcraft, 2011). Laws were passed that banned unionisation in some Gulf states (Vitalis, 2007: 145-157), while in others, even if unions were allowed, the British officials intended them as bulwarks against communism and as channels for the political 'education' of a people deemed 'backwards' and politically immature (Khalili, 2020b: 211). Residential segregation and a variegated topography of rights ensured the striation of workers into different categories, subjected to different forms of governance and exploitation. State and corporate policies are often difficult to prise apart in these states. The territorialisation and adaptation of global forms of corporate and state practices in the Gulf have meant context-specific forms of racialisation (predicated on the management of migration and mobility), as well as variations in the kind of institutions involved in governance of labour, including humanitarian organisation.
In what follows, I will address the central puzzle of this paper: why did the colonial government resist the Mission to Seamen establishing a presence in the Gulf, but the post-independence rulers in Bahrain and the UAE have actively welcomed the organisation's humanitarian work?

The Mission to Seafarers
In the 18th and 19th centuries, maritime Christian ministry grew with the expansion of British imperial ambitions across the oceans. Colonisation, maritime commerce and naval warfare demanded a more substantive and organised set of spiritual services and ideologies specifically targeting mariners. In addition to shipboard and Thames-side ministries evangelising to British seafarers (Kverndal, 2009: 23-25), some missions set their sights on Asian and African seafarers who were employed on imperial ships and who often formed communities in British sailortowns (Milne, 2016). The missions in these neighbourhoods not only evangelised the seafarers, but also recruited them for ships going east, and interceded on their behalf with authorities when the seafarers were abused onboard (Salter, 1873: 157;150-151). In these sailortown missions, 'outside agitators' were banned from recruiting seafarers for unions or political parties (Visram, 2002). The Mission to Seamen, which first emerged in 1856 to evangelise to British seafarers, grew exponentially as the empire expanded and consolidated in the latter half of the 19th century. By 1914, the Mission's churches and institutes (or clubs) throughout the empire surpassed 150 in number (Kverndal, 2009: 65). These now number around 200.
Many aspects of the Mission to Seamen's relationship to the objects of their evangelising is familiar to those who have studied the entanglement between Christian missions and imperial ideologies, practices and institutions (Cox, 2002;Skinner and Lester, 2012: 740;Stanley, 1990;Viswanathan, 1998, inter alia). In some places, the Christianity the missions brought was adopted and indigenised; in others, it was vociferously resisted. Many 19th-century British missionaries saw colonial commerce as a part of God's plan for civilising Asians and Africans (Cox, 2002;Stanley, 1990). Sometimes, Anglican missions represented the empire while simultaneously contesting commercial enterprises that exploited the indigenous populations, in what Jane Samson has called 'protective supremacy' (Samson, 1998: 50-54). In many instances, titans of commerce funded missions at home and abroad. John D Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, hoped his missionaries could encourage the workers in his mines and factories to have 'higher thoughts than labor agitation' (Colby and Dennett, 1996: 15). He, like many other robber barons of the gilded age and their charitable foundations, funded overseas missions in all the places where the United States had imperial interests (Bourmaud, 2020: 166;Cleland, 1952: 203-24;Colby and Dennett, 1996: 24). In most places, beyond the questions of conversion and subjectivisation, missions established welfare institutions that allowed the church and the empire to gain hegemony over the indigenous populations. Education and healthcare were seen as modernising practices that 'helped provide a crucial legitimizing ideology of development to the colonial State, receiving in return much-needed subsidies' (Maxwell, 2005: 289). This was also the case in the Arabian Peninsula, where the missionaries' primary focus from the 19th century onwards was the provision of healthcare and education (Walther, in press;Al-Sayegh, 1996;Tamimi, 2000).

The ambivalences of governments relations
The Mission to Seamen in the Gulf differed from many of the missions that went forth to evangelise in the colonies for two distinct reasons: first, the Mission served mobile workers as workers rather than as colonial subjects embedded in a particular colony, and second because its arrival in the Gulf coincided with the final decades of British empire there, rather than its heyday. It also differed from other missions in that the local colonial governments were often unwilling to provide the necessary resources the Mission required, and delegated service to seafarers to the chaplains employed by British corporations, and especially oil companies. 1 The smooth functioning of commerce depended on the productivity of seafarers. To serve these workers, the corporations employed chaplains, often in collaboration with or on secondment from the Mission's London headquarters. The Mission, like the oil companies, was global and acted as a conduit for the modular transfer of institutional forms and knowledges from one place to another and the territorialisation of these forms and practices there. For example, the Mission to Seamen suggested to an officer of the British Tanker Company that seafarers' clubs in Port of Spain, Trinidad or at Pernis oil terminal in Rotterdam could serve as models in the Gulf. 2 The British governmental bodies in the Gulf were another story.
Discussions about establishing a mission to seafarers in Bahrain go back to 1947 and show the British colonial officers in Bahrain reluctant to allow a Mission club for seafarers there. There were several reasons for this: fears about subversion, as well as racist notions of which categories of seafarers may need support in far shores. The British officials in Bahrain worried that visiting seafarers might transmit forms of discontent among local workers. In one letter, the British political agent warns about the seafarers' arrival bringing 'in its wake problems of jails, police, importation of drink, sexual immorality such as were experienced when troops were stationed in the Island [during the Second World War]'. 3 A Mission club could be the site of encounter between seafarers from different ships and countries and between them and the local population. The British were also concerned about seafarers carrying with them anticolonial or subversive materials or becoming the proverbial outside agitators (Chalcraft, 2011;Khalili, 2020b: 205-206). The work of colonial extraction was more important than salvation or civilising missions, and the British worried that as in past instances, seafarers on ships travelling between imperial ports could transmit ideas and news about anticolonial struggles, harbourside strikes and shipboard mutinies. The date of this memo is instructive as well: the early months of 1947, as the end of empire in India loomed.
Perhaps most significant was the racial hierarchies to which the colonial government subscribed and which shaped its position vis-à-vis the Mission. In the decades after the Second World War, two categories of freighters arrived in Gulf ports: hydrocarbon-carriers which visited oil terminals managed privately by the oil companies, and dry bulk cargo vessels which arrived in the ports managed by the government. While the oil companies allowed the Mission to operate seafarers' clubs on their private premises, the British protectorate officials did not allow Mission clubs in dry cargo ports controlled by the colonial government. One implicit reason was that the British colonial officers were reinforcing the colour line: At least until the 1970s, throughout the Gulf 'most of the dry cargo ships carried Indian crews, but many of the tankers carried Europeans, e.g. Dutch, Norwegians, etc'. 4 The latter were seen as deserving of facilities (provided via the Mission and the oil companies), but the Indian seafarers arriving in British governmentcontrolled ports in the Gulf were not considered worthy of the care of a Mission club. The policy reinforced the hierarchy between European and non-European seafarers. A club serving the seafarers in the cargo port in Bahrain was finally permitted in 1982, 11 years after Bahrain had become a sovereign state.
While in the post-WWII years, British colonial officers were reluctant to allow the Mission to establish itself in the Gulf, the postcolonial governments and ruling families, counselled by British advisors, were more amenable. This was likely because the ruling families and their advisors saw the Missions to Seamen as part of the port infrastructure so central to the work of commerce and trade, and pivotal to the economic development plans of the newly independent states. The Mission to Seamen's office in Dubai opened in 1972, a year after the end of formal British protectorate arrangements there in 1971. The opening of the office coincided with the inauguration of Dubai's first mechanised port, Mina al-Rashid. Port Rashid quickly became a busy node of trade, replacing the recently decolonised Aden -now the capital of the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen -as a transit port for British trade (Khalili, 2020b: 63). A facility with pool and bar for the seafarers was opened a few years after the Mission opened its offices. As a later report explained, the Seafarers' Centre started up in a small way in 1977 and after much effort from the Missions to Seamen Head Office and from local interests, predominantly British [. . .] The Centre has extensive facilities -some financed through the ITF Seafarers Trust grants backed by the Mission to Seamen -and because of the US/UK naval visits, can see a throughput of over 90,000 seafarers per year. 5 Jack Briggs, the British commander of Dubai Police, and Bill Duff, the long-time Scottish advisor to the ruler of Dubai Sheikh Rashid, had prevailed upon him to donate the land. Both men were said to 'have the ear of the Ruler'. 6 This allowed for the cost of serving seafarers to shift from the oil companies to the Mission (especially as efforts were underway to nationalise the oil companies). Naval visits by European and American seafarers further justified the club.
The relationship of the mission with the local rulers in this period is opaque. The Mission archives contain less about the local governments or the rulers, and more about their senior functionaries -most of whom were white British businessmen until the 1990s. Where the ruling families are mentioned, the reports of the local Mission officers are circumspect and coded. In one instance, the Dubai chaplain reports to the Mission headquarters about a ship where the Filipino, Burmese and Palestinian seafarers had not been paid because of disputes between two putative owners of the ship. The chaplain writes that the all-British advisory committee members 'are against being overtly involved because of the political position with a very important local family', likely the ruling family or one close to it. 7 Before independence, the British government used coercion for landside workers, outsourced the care for British and European seafarers to the oil companies, and neglected any consideration of non-white seafarers. After the formal withdrawal of British troops and colonial officials, and with the adoption of the above technologies of racialisation, the local governments looked to civic and advisory organisations -the Mission among them -to fill the gaps in services and welfare left by the racially striated protectorate government. The Mission's work in Dubai is shaped by two factors in this period. On the one hand, they offered humanitarian support no one else would. But they also continue to have a presence at the grace and favour of the ruling families and their British advisors. In essence, they provided welfare in lieu of governments (Elbourne, 2016), when the allocative functions of states and its generous handouts were directed to citizens and affluent expatriates.

Corporations in the age of tankers and containerships
The independence of the Gulf states between 1961 and 1971 occurred concurrently with broader transformations in global labour markets. In the Gulf (and elsewhere), colonial regimes of labour shaded into new modalities of racial capitalism dependent on mobile populations of migrant workers. These new technologies of racialisation included (a) the fragmentation of the workforce by nation of origin and language (where Arabic had been the lingua franca); (b) the consolidation and sharpening of disciplinary measures such as deportations for landside workers; and (c) the formalisation of racialised wage hierarchies and differential work amenities both on land and at sea (Khalili, 2020b: 181-201).
Colonial racial hierarchies continued to shape the political and economic orders after independence, with some variation between different states. Even after the British had formally ceded governance to local rulers, they influenced local politics via their work as advisors, bureaucrats and managers in corporations and government departments. And despite the gradual nationalisation of the British and other foreign oil companies over the next two decades, British engineers, technicians and managers still dominated these corporations well into the 1990s. This influence was so pervasive that Anglican expatriates formed significant communities of co-religionists that were financially 'supported by [. . .] contractors, architects, builders and British companies' 8 in these states. A partial exception to this rule was Kuwait, which became independent 10 years earlier than the other emirates, already boasted a bureaucracy predominantly peopled by Kuwaitis, Palestinians and other Arabs, and had an assertive and active merchant class whose firms and corporations competed with British and other European firms (Al-Khatib, 2007;Al-Nakib, 2016;Ghabra, 1987;Hanieh, 2011;Tétreault, 1995) The British also dominated the board of trustees of the Mission when it was finally allowed to operate in the Gulf. The Mission trustees in Dubai in 1973 included managers of shipping agencies Gray MacKenzie and Gulf Agency, John Harris and Partners Architect, the P&O Company, and Dubai International Shipping Company; the resident engineer, harbourmaster and port manager at Port Rashid, the chief of police, and the advisor to the ruler of Dubai, all of them British. Even the representatives of the two Arab-owned shipping firms, Kanoo of Bahrain and Kuwait Shipping Company, attending such meetings were British. 9 A decade later, the committee overseeing the Dubai Mission included a different all-British cast, including a journalist and the chief accountant of the UAE Ministry of Defence. 10 In Bahrain, the members of the Mission's Board in 1982, when the first Mission club was opened, were also all British and included the harbourmaster, the head of port security at the cargo port (Mina Sulman) as well as representatives from large shipping companies, the oil company BAPCO, Bahrain Aluminium and Standard Chartered Bank. 11 A 1975 letter from the Anglican chaplain of Dubai to the Mission headquarters maps corporate connections and speculates about which companies could be of help to the Mission. For example, P&O, the company described as a 'sinew of empire', 12 'give[s] considerable help to both the Church and my work here in the port, having, for example, provided the car recently free of charge'. 13 Most other companies listed in the chaplain's letter were European. Arab-owned companies were considered not to 'be helpful, but an approach to their Liverpool office would be more helpful'. Furthermore, the rest of the shipping firms were said to be 'of mixed nationalities, many from the Far East, and Flags of Convenience. A lot of work needs to be done here, but there is no point appealing for their help'. 14 The global colour line even ran through the corporations, with the Mission focusing on Euro-American firms.
The Mission's chaplains were self-aware about their relationship with the British corporate officials. An undated note from the late 1980s, for example, acknowledges the depth of collaboration between the Mission and British corporations in Dubai, but mentions that 'the committee is now in a period of change. In the past it has been run by a committee of "ancient Brits" who have lived here for years and have a lot of influence with the government and other bodies'. 15 Similarly, the Bahrain Mission's chaplain mentions the need for 'an Arab patron who will add extra "weight" to the BISS [British and International Seafarers' Society] committee and prevent an all-expatriate appearance'. 16 The inclusion of Arab corporate officers, however tokenistic, was a response to the assertiveness with which local bourgeoisie and their firms now engaged in business competition with the European and American firms (Hanieh, 2011).
War also intensified the transformation of not only the Missions but also the kind of corporations and government and military bodies that took root in the region. The Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, and especially the Tanker Wars during its last 4 years, proved particularly devastating to the seafarers whose ships were attacked. The cessation of those hostilities was followed almost immediately by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the massive ramp-up of military forces in the region and the eventual assault by the United States and its allies against Iraq. The 1990s were marked by the enforcement of No-Fly Zone over Iraq by US and British forces. And, of course, the War on Terror hostilities began in the early 21st century and still affect the arrival and departure of the US forces from bases in the region. Successive wars proved good for business in the Gulf and stimulated the growth of local and regional firms slowly displacing the dominance of the British there (Khalili, 2020b;Walsh, 2012: 45). Throughout these decades seafarers crossing through the waters of the Gulf -the vast majority of them from Asia -were subjected to state violence, bombing, missile attacks and other more mundane processes of 'securitisation'. 17 The Mission archives abound with accounts of shipping firms largely indifferent to the plight of their terrorised seafarers. The wars provided an occasion for humanitarian intervention by the Missions to seafarers as war victims, rather than as workers. The files include discussions of rescues of seafarers injured in war, or processing of their bodies when they were killed, work that should have really been performed by their employers.

Localisation of power and capital
Following the cataclysmic financial, economic and policy changes in the 1970s (often aggregated together under the label of neoliberalism), and especially with the end of the Cold War, regional centres of capital, often closely aligned with the United States, began their dramatic ascent. Dubai was among these regional centres. The consolidation of its place as an entrepôt port, host of free trade zones, commercial and financial centre and fateful staging ground for the US War on Terror all saw shifts in the makeup of its political order. Although some of the 'ancient Brits' still held court in its glitzy hotels, it also became an offshore destination for capital from all corners of the world, but especially the countries of Asia and Africa. Many of the transformations in the nature of the political economic order after independence can be summarised through Frantz Fanon's (1963: 152) acerbic remark that localisation of capital was about 'the transfer into native hands of those unfair advantages which are a legacy of the colonial period'.
The postcolonial moment generated new demands and movements by subaltern subjects around self-determination, antiracism and economic justice. The NGOised Christian missions had to respond to these changes (Compton Brouwer, 2010: 261;Barnett, 2011;Hearn, 2002;King, 2019;Maxwell, 2005;Ngo, 2018;Vongsathorn, 2012). The shifting of seafarer recruitment from the North Atlantic eastward also changed the character, workplace rights and preoccupations of seafarers served by the Missions. These shifts, along with the effective transformation of the Mission into a secular charity at the beginning of the 21st century, also changed the relationship between the Mission and states and corporations in the Gulf. Though not exactly adversarial, the connections between the Mission and the corporations became less cosy than before. The advisory boards of the local Missions today are no longer stacked with British company men, and the NGOisation of the Mission has transformed the grounds of the relationship of the Mission and these local companies.
I have thus far analysed the ambiguities and ambivalences of the Mission to Seafarers within the colonial and postcolonial political economic order in the Gulf in the last 70 years. In the next section, I will discuss the complexities and contradictions of their work with the seafarers themselves in ways that shore up the racialised forms of labour there.

The abject objects of humanitarian salvage?
As Christian missions have transformed over time, one constant has been the missions' tutelary or paternalistic approach to those being evangelised (Foster, 2015;McAlister, 2018). For such tutelage to be seen as possible and effective, the object of missionary work must be cast as vulnerable; 'the more vulnerable the object of charity, the more satisfactory the emotional, religious or humanitarian reward' (Vongsathorn, 2012: 870). But vulnerability can be insidious, as it divides mobile communities into those who are vulnerable and thus worthy of sympathy and those who are not or are construed as not being vulnerable. In addition, a focus on vulnerability downgrades other forms of injustice (e.g. socioeconomic and systemic) that should garner as much, if not more, attention (Sözer, 2020). The redemptive impulse to serve the vulnerable has two salient characteristics. First is the familiar trope of white saviours riding to the rescue of vulnerable subjects who are often racialised. The second is that respite from individualised forms of misery is gifted by kindly humanitarian organisations, rather than taken by intransigent or militant subjects. In this section, I will attend to these aspects of the Missions' humanitarian work.

Race and nation
One of the most striking changes in the work of the Mission to Seafarers in the Gulf over the period covered in this article was the shift from serving British (or European) seamen to working with a far more diverse and international group of shipboard workers. The global colour line -which defines wages and incomes based on race or national belonging -had long been present aboard ships, and seafarers received differential treatment on the docks depending on their nationality (Balachandran, 2012;Bonacich and Wilson, 2008). But these differences became more dramatic after the 1970s. Changes to the structures of shipping in the moment of decolonisation, the spread of open registries and much laxer rules on dual wage regimes aboard ships reduced the number of British and other European merchant mariners, while dramatically expanding the ranks those from the global South (Sampson and Wu, 2003: 125). 18 In 2021, the International Chamber of Shipping and BIMCO counted nearly 1.9 million seafarers worldwide, with the Philippines, Russian Federation, Indonesia, China and India representing 44 percent of the world's maritime workforce (UNCTAD, 2021: xx). To give a sense of the change in numbers, while 2000 Filipino seafarers worked at sea in the 1960s, by 2021, their numbers had grown to 380,000 (McKay, 2007: 622;UNCTAD, 2021: 114). The encounter between the Missions and the seafarers was structured by these systemic transformations. Even if local politics and the chaplains' personalities and commitments determined how they may have treated non-white seafarers across time, awareness of racialisation became far more prevalent from the 1980s onwards.
In the Mission's archival correspondences and reports, patronising and sometimes downright racist attitudes towards seafarers are present, though relatively rare. In 1972, one Dubai chaplain laments that 'the poverty of some of these parts of the world is appalling -and their ignorance almost as bad. They act like children and have to be treated as such'. 19 In another report he complains about a tanker which had no air conditioning and carried British crew. Conditions were shocking, and morale very low indeed. I consider that the men were being asked to serve in very substandard conditions, and that this ship should be withdrawn from tropical waters, or crewed by Asians. 20 The casualness with which it was accepted that 'shocking' working conditions would be acceptable for Asian crews reflected the geographic determinism that structured racialised regimes of labour in colonial shipping. 21 In this form of thinking, geography is destiny and being born in hot climates and poor countries is seen as preparing racialised folks for taking jobs that white workers would not or could not. Hideous working conditions are, therefore, normalised for the former, if not the latter.
In another instance, the same chaplain stated that while he found particularly onerous contracts fine for 'Indian crew and officers', he was 'not so happy that this is the case with the UK officers'. 22 The lack of reflexiveness about how this attitude reflected structural forms of racial hierarchy is sometimes explicit. In one case, the Dubai chaplain was asked by the British Embassy to intervene with eight Sierra Leonian crew members on a Kuwaiti ship manned by British officers. The men had gone on strike in response to unfair terms of their contract. The mission officer calls them 'a truculent bunch of men' and tried to persuade them to reconcile with the ship's officers and owners. When he returned to the ship the next day to see it off, he encountered the seafarers again, who 'wouldn't even shake hands with me, but sent me up to "The White Boss" as I was his man! We can't always expect success'. 23 The chaplain's role in this instance was to allay worker intransigence on behalf of the 'white boss', himself connected to the British embassy.
While this chaplain's unashamed openness about his racism made visible racial hierarchies embedded in maritime forms of capital accumulation, the increasingly vociferous antiracist demands of the seafarers from the global South forced a reckoning on other chaplains. One long-serving chaplain in Bahrain concluded a reflection on his Christian service to seafarers with a question: 'Why [do I visit] ships of EVERY nationality? Because God is not an Englishman!! He is for everybody '. 24 With the internationalisation of the ships' crews, and as the seafarers demanded respect and dignity, this attitude became more prevalent.
One other persistent characteristic of the Mission's chaplains was their patriotic affection for Britain. As late as the 1990s, and with successive wars in the Gulf which brought naval ships especially of the United States and Britain to the region's ports, the national attachment of the Missions' officers to their countries is still noteworthy. Naval visits by British ships were greeted by the Missions with hospitality, warmth and delight, 25 and the chaplains were often excited to socialise with their British countrymen aboard warships frequently touring the Gulf. After these visits, nothing is said in the reports about the devastation that these ships had wrought during successive assaults, usually against Iraq. Such national attachments are of course a feature of missionary work, and no less in missions serving seafarers, as Virginia Hoel (2016) has shown in her research on the Norwegian counterparts to the Anglican Mission to Seafarers.

Militancy or meekness
Because seafarer communities are transitory, and seafarers themselves so mobile and hyper-exploited, they require resources and support from organisations that have the reach, power and institutional memory to represent them globally and across borders. Union membership in their home countries allows for one such institutional form of claim-making. In foreign ports, however, seafarers depend on International Transportworkers Federation and other global organisations. Around 10 percent of all abandoned seafarers are left to their fate along the coasts of UAE, and especially nearer the poorer northern emirates. The UAE is not a signatory to the various international treaties that would provide some degree of regulation and protection to the seafarers. Where unions are circumscribed, as they are in much of the Gulf, the Mission to Seafarers is the sole body capable of addressing the seafarers' myriad workplace troubles and ultimately their abandonment.
Since the 1990s, where the Mission is present in the Gulf, it has often acted quietly in concert with the ITF or its charitable arm, the ITF Trust, to refurbish club facilities and equipment. 26 At other times, Mission officers educated the seafarers about their rights, as, for example, one explained the work of ITF, unions and international seafaring regulations to Russian sailors in 1993. 27 In some instances, the chaplains' advocacy for the crew led to them being mistaken by the captain 'for a Union representative'. 28 Many of the reports are filled with enraged and frustrated accounts of injustices and accurate diagnoses of the exploitation of seafarers by the shipping companies, with the acquiescence of the governments which 'hide behind the protocol of ships' flags to avoid taking action to support their national'. 29 The more recent work of the Missions to highlight the plight of abandoned seafarers, to advocate for them not only locally, but also vocally and on the pages of international newspapers, similarly echoes what a global union may have done to alleviate workplace difficulties experienced by individual seafarers.
But in an earlier period, the chaplains often had more sympathy for the seafarers if the latter displayed meekness and deference. In a number of Mission reports, the chaplains facilitate reconciliation between seafarers and abusive ships' officers, 30 and counsel the workers involved in labour disputes to 'bend a little', 31 in the end benefitting the shipping companies more than the seafarers. In these cases, the chaplain's excuse is 'but they knew what they were signing on to'. 32 In some reports, disputes and worker strikes are blamed on 'one or two hardliners who were "winding up" the others'. 33 It is clear that in most cases, the seafarer is often from the global South, while the officer or the captain is European, so the conciliatory approach reinforces racialised workplace hierarchies. By papering over conflicts which are about structurally racialised global inequalities, the conciliation normalised the oppression. Militancy was not seen as a possible political strategy appropriate for racialised seafarers. While union militancy is available to seafarers from the Global North, those from the Global South, even if they hail from countries with seafarers' unions, such as India, are nevertheless required to depend on the charity of humanitarian organisations when in disputes on the Gulf coast.
This bifurcation -legitimate militancy for workers from the global North and submission to a politics of humanitarian care for racialised workers -also taps into notions of who is deemed capable of autonomy and political subjecthood and who is not. Care is provided because workers must be productive cogs in the machine, but substantive redistributive politics or forms of labour militancy are foreclosed to them. This distinction was one that also appeared in the earlier, South African, analyses of racial capitalism, where white worker militancy led to creation of methods of control for racialised workers (Legassick and Hemson, 1976;Wolpe, 1972).
Since 2015, corporatist and conciliatory notions of workplace fairness are reflected in a Seafarers' Happiness Index produced by the Mission. The Index, which is produced four times a year, is supported by shipping and insurance companies, and 'gives an indication of the concerns facing seafarers on a quarterly basis, offering ship-managers an insight into wellbeing on board'. 34 Happiness, as in other workplace contexts, can become a technology of governmentality (Foucault, 1988: 18;Binkley, 2011). While the Index shows the working conditions aboard ships, it is also recognised by insurance and shipping companies as a useful instrument to increase economic productivity. Also, in fundamental ways, a universal notion of what makes for a happy worker does not take account of the specific ways that workers from different locales relate to their labour, workplace or employers.
What distinguishes humanitarianism from autonomous and collective claim-making by agential actors is the former's insistence on abject objects of humanitarianism, a grateful though piteously vulnerable recipient of the munificence of Christian charity. 35 Such humanitarianism, whether cast as white saviourism or not, focuses on resolving the problems of the individual seafarers, a kind of 'therapeutic individualism' (Vaidyanathan, 2019). But is an alternative possible? In a series of articles written as part of their Forensic Oceanography project, Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani argue for the complexity of radical activist NGO work with another group of vulnerable, racialised and mobile subjects, the Mediterranean boat migrants. On the one hand, such humanitarian work is but a band-aid managing systemic gashes in the fabric of solidarity and public feeling; on the other hand, however, such NGO activism not only works in a context of life and death, but it also helps to build alliances and new political forms of mobilisation Pezzani and Heller, 2019). In so doing, it steps outside of the terms of status quo political economic order.

Conclusion
In this article, I have argued that seafarers exemplify a racialised regime of labour where workers are peripatetic and precarious; and live under persistent threats of violence, organised abandonment by the governments and corporations (sometimes literally), and the weakness of collective agential institutions that can represent them. Furthermore, the working conditions of seafarers show the continuities and changes since colonial times, and the durability of hierarchies determined by one's place of origin, or perceived racial belonging. Second, I have examined the role of humanitarian organisations as part of the Gulf's political economic order in their complex and variegated relationships with governments and businesses. Again, continuities and ruptures in the practices of the Mission to Seafarers elucidate the centrality of racialised regimes of control and care established in the colonial era and gradually transformed in the intervening times.
The Gulf provides a particularly useful geographic setting for this study because the relative recency of colonialism allows us to see the transformations in the operations of racial capitalism in real time. In addition, the modalities of capital accumulation and regimes of labour control and discipline along with provision of care there are in many ways what all neoliberal political orders aspire to: enforced docility of the political subjects, circumscribed legal space for collective mobilisation or representation, confined possibilities for protest and political disruption, racialised hierarchies of labour in wage structures and working and living conditions, and a politics of individualised care ensuring productivity. The Gulf is, in a sense, a laboratory for experimentations in racial capitalism. It is important to note that the Gulf is not in any way exceptional and many of these provisions are those also in effect in other locales, such as Singapore or within the countries of the global North, especially with migrant and other racialised workers. This article has provided a sketch, albeit brief, of the shape racial capitalism has taken on the shores of the Gulf.
A further contribution of this article is to evaluate the role of the Mission to Seafarers, a landbound organisation serving racialised seagoing workers. As I wrote earlier, Robinson himself was ambivalent about the role of humanitarians in countering the violence of racial capitalism on the plantations. This ambivalence is also reflected here. On the one hand, individual seafarers are aided by individual chaplains who are wellmeaning and committed, sometimes even militant. On the other hand, structurally, the Missions function to bolster racial capitalism through their demobilising of collective action and ensuring worker productivity.
The Mission to Seafarers has long been embedded within a British community in the Gulf which has been at various times composed of colonial officials, advisors and bureaucrats, and corporate managers and representatives. It was permitted to operate with and within oil companies to serve tankermen that were until the early 1970 primarily European. But it was prevented from operating in the dry cargo ports, because the seafarers in the bulk cargo ships were from Asia, and because the colonial officers feared the transmission of subversive ideas from the seafarers' clubs to the local population. After the formal cessation of protectorate agreements between the British and local ruling families, British advisors encouraged the local rulers to give permission for such clubs to the Mission. This was partly because the Mission was by the 1970s seen as part of the infrastructure of modern mechanised ports and therefore pivotal to economic development there. It was also due to the corporations viewing the Mission clubs and institutes as necessary to the productivity of the seafarers on whose labour these importand export-heavy economies depended. In this process, racialised seafarers are seen as worthy of humanitarian compassion and care, though not of the right to collective and militant claim-making.
For a substantial part of its presence and work in Bahrain and the UAE, the Mission has acted to conciliate between the seafarers and ships' officers and owners. Meekness has been prized and militancy has been tamped down by the chaplains. The Mission provides individualised care to productive and docile seafarers when they are carelessly abandoned by ships' owners or where labour militancy is met with state force. In the context of deepening inequality and violence and, such instruments as happiness indices and humanitarian charity -reproduce the global colour line so crucial to the racial accumulation of capital.
Coming to grips with how humanitarianism can shore up this system of racialised exploitation of seafarers -despite the sincere intentions of the many humanitarians themselves -can also help us better understand how humanitarianism and capitalism work hand in hand in a time of increasingly mobile and racialised populations of workers, migrants and refugees.