Reefs, Routes, and Extraction in British Mandate Palestine: Mackerel, Barracuda, and Reef Fish in the Gulf of Aqaba

This paper explores mackerel (scomber scombrus), barracuda (sphyraena), angelfish (pterophyllum scalare), and Red Sea clownfish (amphiprion bicinctus) in the Gulf of Aqaba. It traces British wartime (1940s) efforts to imagine and implement the Gulf as an “alternative” fishing frontier for Palestine. While this imperial project ultimately failed to produce a sustainable or profitable fishery, its ambitions and breakdown offer critical lessons about the limits of colonial power, ecological knowledge, and governance at sea. Drawing on colonial reports, correspondence, and technical surveys, the paper shows how British administrators attempted to identify commercially valuable species, introduce new fishing technologies, and reorganize fishing labor in the Gulf of Aqaba. Reef-associated fish such as angelfish and clownfish resisted these efforts: their dependence on coral habitats, limited mobility, and sensitivity to environmental disturbance undermined large-scale extraction. Pelagic and predatory species such as mackerel and barracuda appeared to align more closely with colonial visions of mobile, scalable fisheries, linking the Gulf to regional markets and trans-imperial trade routes. Yet even these species proved difficult to discipline into stable systems of production. The failure of the Aqaba scheme thus becomes analytically productive: it reveals how ecological complexity, reef vulnerability, and fish behavior disrupted imperial designs, exposing the sea not as an empty frontier but as a multispecies field of constraint and negotiation. And as British colonial officials are citing Palestinian fisherpeople in the Gulf of Aqaba archives as “lazy,” “backward,” and needing “modernization,” this paper reveals the ever-present racialization of people, their labor, and their relations to fish, but also offers an opportunity to write a history that is tied to the currents of justice. It shows how colonial extraction was shaped as much by ecological resistance as by political intent, offering enduring insights into the entangled histories of empire, environment, and Palestinian waters.