The Agrarian Studies Colloquium presents Scott Erich:
“The Subterranean Sea.”
This chapter juxtaposes two natural resources that loom large in histories of the Arabian Peninsula: pearls and oil. Pearling and fishing were once the largest industries in the Persian Gulf, until they were eclipsed in economic importance by oil in the mid-twentieth century.
This transition “from pearls to oil” is often discussed in the historiography of the region as abrupt: an overnight leap from fishing villages to rentier states. This chapter instead focuses on the messy transition between these resource regimes, taking material cues from the fact that pearl reefs and oil fields inhabit the same stretches of the sea, and the fact that oil in this region is fossilized planktonic life from a prehistoric ocean. Drawing on the methods of ethnography, historical anthropology, and critical geography, this chapter takes the actions of present fishermen, colonial histories, and deep time into consideration. Conceptually, foregrounding the materiality of pearl reefs and oil fields coheres what might appear to be unwieldy resources, timescales, and geographies together in the present, where groaning steel rigs and bobbing skiffs crowd each other at sea. Accordingly, this chapter views the overlapping geographies of extraction in the Gulf as setting up not only a clash of economic life.