A Burning Sea: Geopolitical Arbitrage and Value Across the Indian Ocean

Dhows have long traversed the Indian Ocean making it what some scholars have called, “the cradle of globalization.” Today, dhows or vahans from Kachchh in western India continue to traverse old Indian Ocean routes, becoming crucial intermediaries in global shipping. Following Yusuf, a contemporary seafarer trading in goods on a dhow across the Indian Ocean, this paper situates the diesel trade in the Persian Gulf within a longer history of arbitrage in the Indian Ocean. Since the Gulf Wars, dhows have been trading in diesel in the Persian Gulf, often against sanctions regimes. Rather than disrupting historical forms of Indian Ocean trade, these sanctions regimes amidst wars in the region have produced opportunities for profit for dhow seafarers such as Yusuf who voyage across multiple jurisdictions to produce value through a form of “geopolitical arbitrage,” where commodities such as diesel become currencies and vice versa. Tracing the movement of Yusuf across the Indian Ocean, the paper argues that sanctions regimes in the Indian Ocean have created a geopolitical climate in which value is produced at multiple scales through the intersection of these logics, the body of the sailor becoming the site for capturing value and crafting sovereignty at sea.