ABSTRACT
In 2007, I was taken aback when I saw an ad for Jumeirah Beach Resort, a Dubai luxury hotel complex, occupying a full page of The New York Times magazine. The ad depicted the helipad of the Burj Al Arab luxury hotel. A helicopter had just landed. In the foreground, a tall, beautiful blonde woman in an elegant white dress, dark sunglasses, and shiny jew-elry walked powerfully toward the reader. In the background were various bellhops, wearing the red blazer and bowtie uniform of the Burj staff. The bellhops, whose seemingly South and Southeast Asian extraction surveyed a fair sweep of the Indian Ocean, were carrying the wealthy European woman’s luggage and following her, presumably to one of the fleet of wait-ing Bentley cars in front of the hotel. This vignette reminded me of a more famous image from around a century ago, which appears in the chapter on the Gulf in the 2006 book A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire by the historian Sugata Bose. In this picture, pith-helmet wearing Englishmen ride on the backs of Indian and Arab coolies who, along with their human cargo, are forced to carry the Englishmen’s luggage from boats in the Gulf onto the shore. The setting then was the visit by British viceroy Lord Curzon to his Gulf dependencies, specifically the Trucial Emirates (the current UAE, Qatar, and Oman), in 1903.
