Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea
A Crown Seminar with Andrea Wright
December 3, 2025
11 AM–12:15 PM
Register for virtual attendance.
Today, most oil workers in Gulf countries are migrants from South Asia and the Philippines, working in extreme heat and hazardous conditions. They are barred from striking or forming unions, and those who protest risk arrest or deportation. But this wasn’t always the case. In this Crown Seminar, Andrea Wright, in conversation with Noora Lori, draws from her new book Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea to explore a forgotten history of labor activism in the oilfields of the Arabian Peninsula. Between the 1930s to the 1970s, workers organized strikes, influenced corporate practices, and helped shape both local and imperial politics. Wright’s work traces how this political influence was gradually dismantled in the mid-20th century, as changing ideas of citizenship and rights emerged alongside narratives linking oil to national security, and shows how this history continues to shape labor conditions in the Gulf today.
Andrea Wright is Class of 1952 Distinguished Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the College of William & Mary.
Noora Lori is an associate professor of international relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and a former Goldman Faculty Leave Fellow at the Crown Center.