ANDREA WRIGHT. Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024). 312 pages. $28 paper. ISBN 9781503639423

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