 a'n meddwl ychydig ar y blau. Ond yw bod hi'n deall? Roedd yma'r dweud o'n mwyblo ni, dyma'n dros Tres S, roedd yn fawr ar â'r genlyniad o'r ddiweddau i'w gael. Roedden nhw'n meddwl yma a'r fwrdd a'r supporters a ddechrau ac mae Yn Yn Ysgrifennol, ym Nesaf, yw'r anghynu a phamili. Dwi'n rhaid o cyfr慶fyn ar fy rannu, ond wrth i twfodus, a'i pobl yn allan feddwl yma. sydd chi'n mynd a ddim yn ymddangos ac yn dweud yn defnyddio yw, ac mae fydden nhw i gyd supportede. Ynglynch gan gserwn i fynd i gwaith i ddau gwylliant yma oedd dyma, cymdweithio'r cyffredin iawn o'r gweithio'r gweithio mi yw gwneud yn ddefnyddio. A byddwn ni'n ffraith gweithio'r gweithio'r ysgrifennu'r gweithfael o'r holl. Mae'n gwiraill o'n aeth i'r brifau sy'n gwneud yma sy'n gweithio'r cyfrifennu. Mae'r ffordd yn ymddangos i'n ddiwrnod yn wych yn ymddangos. Mae'n gwneud yn rhoi. Mae'n ei eifindu i'r pasachau ar gyfer. Mae'n celebu yn ymddangos i'r newid. Mae ydy'r cyfrifiad o'r cyfrifiad o'r cyfrifiad o'r cyfrifiad. Mae'n gweithio'r cyfrifiad. Mae'n neud i chi'n arfer o'r ddechrau gyfreithwyr. Yn ymddangos i'n gweithio'r cyfrifiad roedd yn amlwg. Mae'n gweithio'r cyfrifiad o'r dechrau. Ac ydych chi'n deall, dyna'n fiam i'n fath yma, yna yma, yma, yma, yma, yma. A ych y bwrdd yn gweithio, rydyn ni'n wneud yn digwydd. Dwi wedi cael ei fod yn rhan o'r rhan o'r gwrdd i'r 645 oed, a'r 7 o'r gwrdd yn y fawr. Yn ymlaen i chi i bwysig o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnodd yma, yw y 7 o'r cyfnodd cyfnodd cyfnodd cyfnodd cyfnodd cyfrannu. Yr Ardalhau Clyliannol, Mae nhw'n gwbod amdano i'r gwleidwyr bod nhw'n gorfodaeth nifer ystod fyddion gyda diwyddiant sydd wedi yn y mwrth tylad. Mae'n iawn wedi gweld ar unrhyw panell erbyn yn ychydig pethau. Gwyddiad hynny gwych pethau, gryddo i mi, ac rwy'n dderbyn i'w rhai ffewyr o freidwyr ysbytol. Mae'n gwyb Pwneidol a'i gyd. Roedd fyddo i wedi nhw'n gallu gweld gan wneud fwy o'r amdaliad yn ysbyt. a she is a brilliant scoller. She is a great citizen of Søas. But I have never ever heard her talk at lecture-length about her research. So I'm really looking forward to that, this evening. That's going to be great. Professor Clealy will be introduced by Professor Clare Hemings. Professor Hemings is a professor of feminist theory and has worked at LSE's Gender Institute for 15 years. Her main research contributions are in the field of transnational gender and sexuality studies, he's particularly interested in thinking through the relationship gyda ffordd lleolau a'r gwaith sefydliadau ystod i'r wych yn fwyfyrdd yn gy譜 i gael gael y mynd i'w gweithio'r ffordd lleolau a'r gwaith yma. Yn ystod, ym Mhemi Gwyrddon a'r Argynethau, mae'r Cyllid gyfwyrd yn ffyrdd i'r cyllid gyfwyrdd ac yn ystod i'r cyllid gyfwyrd, a'r cyllid gyfwyrd yn cyllid gyfwyrdd, yn lleol, ac yn myfyrdd, ac ond mae'r cyllid gyfwyrd yn cael y cyllid gyfo'r myfyrdd gyda'r iawn i gael. Mae'n annodd wedi ei gael y cyfnod o gyfleol yn Llywodraeth Clylion. Dwi'n enw i gorau, rwy'n gweithio, rwy'n gweithio, rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio. Dwi'n gweithio'n gweithio. Yn eitwch gweithio, dr Leesa Hajar i'r ffordd yn ddiweddar â'r gwaith. Now she is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This year she became the program chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut and will her she travelled from, to be here with us tonight from Beirut. We all of us really appreciate that, it's a great review to come. Her research and writing chapters on law and legality, war on conflict, human rights and torture, she serves on the editorial committees of Middle East report in the Journal of Palestinian Studies. mae'r bwysig yn ysbyt yn y bwysig o'r llwch antytau llwyr yn y Unedig. Yn ymgyrch, Professor Heddo ac Professor Clylyr, rydyn ni'n meddwl i'w cyffredig, sy'n mynd i'r ymgyrch i'n adroddau fach o fagorau yn ddod amser. Roedd ymgyrch yn ymgyrch iawn, sy'n meddwl o dron, war, llwch. Oni, Llywodraeth, mae'n meddwl, Professor Clylyr yn ymgyrch. Llywodraeth yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn y solmate. Bydden ni ddygol o ddiolol iawn i wybod. Mynd yw'n gweithbeth i fynd gweithio'r barod a i chi ddweud o'r gyfnod o'r ystafell yma, gan y dyma'r gwaith o'r gweithbethau. Rydw i'n falch i ni'n rhaid i chi. Yn ymlaen i, mae'r gwaith yma. Yngynnu i'r gwerthu i'r adael yma yn ysgolfyddeiddoch chi'n rhaid i chi'n f adm ni ddaeth i chi. Rydw i fe fydd ydy'n gweithbethau, sy'n rhoi dewis a lefyd, ond mae'n meddwl o'r rh Wildiedd Unedig, felly yw'n meddwl, ond mae'n mynd i holl gwybod. Sefydl i'r wallaeth, maen nhw'n defnyddio'r profesi y cilydd. Yn cyfnoddodd, roedd chi'n meddwl i'r neoen. Rwy'n meddwl i'r bobl rhaid o'r chael wedi'i meddwl o'r wgwyrshodon. A llwyddaeth Edyn Rhavenscraft sortwch yn llwyddaethu'n meddwl i'r wgwyrshodon. Ieithio llwyddiol wedi gweld yn gwneud. Mae'n mynd i gywethaf yn amlwn i, ac mae'r ddod yn gweithio'n gweithio'r byd, mae'r ddod yn ymgwybod i'r gweithio'r profesi Lale Calilly. A dyna'r oedd yn cwylio'n gweithio'n gweithio, yn ymarfer gan gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'r byddwch ar hynna. Mae fyddwn i'r Lale, yn y restaurants i Soho, yn 2006, mae'r gweithio gweithlo cyllid yma, yn ystod yn gweithio gyda gyda'r ddweud, hynny'n dda i'r rhan o gyfryd a chael gydyddolon nhw'n gweld nhw'n gweithio'n gweld. Rydym yn gallu'n gweithio'n gweld a'r byddau arall yma, ond rydyn ni wedi'n gweithio'r ddwy flynedd a'r enthysiathiau o'i ddwy'r ffrindiau Lale, bod yw nhw'n gweithio'n gweld nhw. As we grunted and collapsed in so many small heaps, Lale realised she was not going to get anywhere until we were refreshed and so took charge. Ordering, bubbles and nibbles, chivying us to the table and effectively hosting us until we recuperated. Now I think back on that, that might have been the moment that we decided that she would be the perfect treasurer of the journal. I was lucky enough to sit next to Lale that night and was drawn into the orbit of this remarkable woman who has become such a treasured friend. Within four hours we had shared our own trajectories through intellectual and geographical locations. I think mine took a couple of minutes, yours took a somewhat longer. Expressed enthusiasm and disgust for various kinds of food and ways of preparing them. Established a common socialist feminist analysis of various political and cultural concerns within Scotland, the US, Australia and Palestine argued quite fervently about same-sex civil unions and whether these confirmed or opened up the status quo. Mercilessly mocked people who believe in work-life balance, named our relationships past and present as well as common friends, talked about Lale's decision to have may her beautiful daughter and my decision not to have any children and laughed and laughed and laughed on the 73 bus back to north east London. By the time I got home, re-energised from having stolen some of Lale's sparkle, I could barely remember what a London life without Lale in it felt like. You will all, I think, recognise the Lale of this brief anecdote as resonant with the Lale whose intellectual achievements we have come to celebrate this evening. For me, I learned two primary things about her that night that have remained true. First, I caught a glimpse of Lale's deep intellectual life, underwritten by the real political and ethical commitments that drive and sustain her. And second, I already felt galvanised by the extraordinary energy that she brings to that life and to those commitments. Lale's intellectual contributions will be well known by most of you here and let me remind you of some of them. Her first book, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine, The Politics of National Commemoration, published by Cambridge in 2007, drew on her PhD research at Columbia University in Political Science where she worked with the late Professor Charles Tilly. Her second monograph, Time in the Shadows, Confinement Encounter Insurgencies, published by Stanford in 2013, was the winner of the Susan Strange Best Book Prize of the British International Studies Association and the 2014 Best Book Award of the International Political Sociology Section of the ISA. Both books combine empirical research, the first through detailed ethnography in the refugee camps in Lebanon, the second through interviews with former detainees of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and Israeli detention camps and prisons, but also with military officers, guards and interrogators. She combines that with detailed archival and theoretical work to bring alive for the reader the complex political contexts Lale intervenes in. She is also the editor of Modern Arab Politics 2008 and co-editor with Julian Shwedler of Policing and Prisons in the Middle East, Formations of Coercion from 2010. As part of her immense work on feminist review, Lale has co-edited two special issues, War with Pam Aldrid and Amal Treacher in 2008 and Water with Root Vitsa Andriesovic in 2013. She is also the author of more than 30 journal articles and book chapters on both areas you would expect that she covers in her research, but also on additional areas of ethics, of social science research, gender, memory and nation and the uses of happiness and pleasure for good and evil. Despite these amazing accomplishments, Lale did not always expect to be a political scientist. She received her BSc in chemical engineering from the University of Texas in 1991 and she spent some years working as a management consultant before moving on to graduate study. Lale herself tends to speak of these as distinct phases in her life, but as a theorist of narrative, I prefer to draw out the unexpected continuities. In consulting, Lale would have honed her natural skills at engaging people and learned how to get people to tell her things whether they wanted to or not, much as she must have got military officers to tell her things they wouldn't tell most of us. And I suspect too that she would have learned to be suspicious of trends, knowing that the next great thing is just around the corner and thus learn not to value a theory for its shine even near, but for what it may or may not help us do. Perhaps for a longer time, the relevance of chemical engineering might have been a bit more obscure, but now that Lale is knee deep into her ESRC-funded project on military logistics and ports, this knowledge must surely be coming in a little more handy. When I think of Lale, I think of movement. Born in Iran and moving to and through Australia, the US, Scotland and England, Lale is a mobile thinker in lots of different ways. Not only does she travel for work and for pleasure, not necessarily separate, of course, back and forth, back and forth to Lebanon, Dubai, Malta, Belgium, France, Spain, Syria, Palestine and the US to name but a small handful, Lale also crosses disciplinary and political borders in her research. This intellectual and literal mobility enables her to cross-fertilise ideas and histories and makes her restless for a truth under the noise and hubbub of perpetual motion. I say this not to glamourise exile or migration, but to speak of Lale's tenacity in recognising but also moving across boundaries and borders in her work and in all her engagements with others. Lale throws herself, body and soul, into the thick of her research sites, setting up blogs, posting political journalism and poems and recently, of course, travelling on a container ship while reading classic maritime novels as well as writing her exemplary academic texts. In all her work, which returns us to and will not let us ignore the violence and degradation that characterise global power relations, Lale also seeks to develop an ethics of connection and representation, tracing threads of human value and pleasure that constitute lifelines to sustain those on the edges of society and of political community. I think this is one of the reasons why Lale is such an amazing role model for her colleagues and students, that she exemplifies the engaged researcher we would all like to be, a real intellectual, and never leaves us mired in devastation. Violence will constrain and decimate people's lives, but so too we will find ourselves, quote, cycling on the Corniche and swimming in the sea, unquote, as the subtitle of Lale's AHRC-funded project, Politics of Pleasure, in Lebanon reminds us. If you go online and google Lale Khalili images, which I recommend, which I did before this inaugural, you will see a sequence of photos of Lale in action. Her staff page and Facebook page see her talking animatedly, probably to one of her myriad PhD students, hands in motion so that they remain blurred in front of her, emphasising her point, looking in concentration at her interlocutor, clearly in her element. In another, you see Lale looking quizzically at another speaker outside the frame, or in another, smiling at the camera drinking a mint tea, insisting on her point at the podium, or hugging a friend and colleague. In these images, in her writing, and in our celebration of Lale's professorship, we are witnessing a friend and colleague who finds herself in exactly the right place. Congratulations, Professor Khalili. Hello, everyone. I'm going to be fiddling with this robe, so I'm just going to wear it in a jaunty way. Okay. First, the Oscar speech. I'd like to first say, I'm incredibly pleased that given that Paul is stepping down in September, I'm so incredibly happy that he presided over these events. You have brought incredible grace and energy to situations which have been incredibly hard, and I'm incredibly grateful that you're here. Please, everybody, applause for Paul. I'm unbelievably moved by Claire's introduction, and I think it was very excessive, and the only reason I'm not weeping is because I'm wearing liquid eyeliner, which my daughter wanted to wear. But what pleasure it is to have Claire and Lisa introduce me and give the vote of thanks to have people that you love also be the people whose work and brilliance you respect and you feel your fellow travellers and intellectual soulmates. So thank you very much to my lovely BFFs for being here for me tonight. It's also pretty kick-ass to have three really, really energetic women professors on the day. So I'd like to acknowledge my beautiful kids, Mae and Pablo, who are going to be bored out of their minds, I'm sure, but they're going to be here just an hour. I didn't let you bring your gadgets in, so just see if you can bear it for a bit. And all the friends who are here, I'm so grateful to you for having been here, for being here now and for having been here for me for years, and I'm especially happy to see loads of my colleagues from my department and from across Seras here. One of the things about working in this place is the collegiality, the unfailing solidarity, the intellectual brilliance, the sense of reciprocity, humour and profound ability to party are all surely envied by anyone else working in other universities here. I'm very happy and moved to see so many of my former and current students here in the audience. You make my life as a teacher a joy, your intellectual curiosity, your boundless enthusiasm, your belief in the power of political mobilisation, this is so-as after all, your total absence of cynicism. Teaching you is still a privilege and a joy at a time when universities seem so rapidly to be transforming into enterprises made for profit and customer service where our customers are government and businesses. So thank you for being you and for making so-as the extraordinary place that it is. Last but not least, I want to thank the amazing colleagues who have organised the evening quietly and behind the scenes and so unbelievably efficiently. Payal Galgani, Elin Irmasi, Tom and Katie, our colleagues in design, Jerry in audiovisual, Glen who's taking photographs and our colleagues in catering and cleaners who will clean up afterwards, who are putting the food up upstairs who have made this evening possible. So thank you to all of you as well. And so now to the lecture. Call me Ishmael. I'm only being half facetious. Those of you who know me well know that for the last two years, I've been interminably, perhaps mind-numbingly, speaking about Herman Melville. In fact, people have been taking bets about whether or not I'll bring up Melville tonight, so go on ahead, exchange money. And especially about Moby Dick. With my obsession with the books, they're indipitously coinciding with my fixation with all things maritime, ports and transport related. Edward Said introduced Moby Dick as one of the finest works of fiction with daring aesthetic beauty and terrifying intensity. In the 1950s, while interned in an immigration detention centre at Ellis Islands in New York, the great Trinidadian theorist, thinker, historian and revolutionary, C.L.R. James, wrote an entire book about Moby Dick in which he described this unwieldy, beautiful, hilarious, profound book as the ultimate narrative of a seafaring proletarian international. I also begin with Melville and with Moby Dick, which many have called an allegory of American imperial power, because some of this story which I will tell today will be impossible to tell if one remains within the bounds of the geographical area that graces my title, the Middle East. Melville, in a sense, anticipates the global geography of commerce and trade, and even as Britain ruled the waves, also foresees an American century whose contours have been defined by naval conquest and commercial expansion. Melville also tells the story of what is today called globalization, a really far too baggy a phrase denoting the kinds of global movements of goods, raw materials, products and people which Melville wrote about with almost all of his novels taking place at sea where boundaries are less clear, national belongings far more provisional, and the rigid hierarchies that characterize shipboard discipline are always fragile and subject to the consent or refusal of those at sea. And the sea is also where, despite these blurrings, power always resided in a metropole that had enough capital to be able to afford to send forth ships upon the deep. I begin with Moby Dick, also because Melville recognized so brilliantly the traffic between war and trade and the sea routes which both navies and merchant mariners traversed in their conquest of the world. He wrote perceptibly and with an ironic twist that, and I quote, if American and European men afford warships, now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them fire salutes to the honor and glory of the whale ship which originally showed them the way and first interpreted between them and the savages, end quote. Notwithstanding the language that bears the mark of both his sarcasm and its time, Melville had no illusions about the expansionist politics of whaling or that warships followed whale ships in bloodily laying claim to distant lands and distant seas. Melville's many brilliant nautical novels trace the maritime routes via which far corners of the world are woven together and distant shores are incorporated into a network of production, pillage, trade and conquest. Viewing a map of, so if you look at that US whaling ship, all of the blue lines were the whalers going around the world. It's an extraordinary image produced by a big data person who does really interesting work, actually. Viewing a map of maritime trade of whaling ships and other, sorry, other merchant marine covering the surface of the seas and connecting continents, one becomes intensely aware of how those cartographies of trade were co-extensive with subsequent geopolitical ambitions of the US. Perhaps the most influential, I mean, look at this, you can see the Philippines, you can see the Hawaii islands, which were annexed, you can see colonization, places that the US actually directly colonized on this map. Perhaps the most influential advocate of this geopolitics of conquest at the end of the 19th century was Alfred Thayer Mahan, his influence of sea power upon history, argues that the primacy of sea power is a means of securing commercial advantage worldwide. Mahan writes, the profound influence of sea commerce upon the wealth and strength of countries was clearly seen long before the true principles which governed its growth and prosperity were detected. To secure to one's own people a disproportionate share of such benefits, every effort was made to exclude others, either by the peaceful legislative methods of monopoly or prohibitory regulations or when these failed by direct violence. The US annexation of the Hawaiian islands, its colonization of the Philippines and Caribbean islands, including what is now today, Guantanamo Bay, a section of Cuba, and today's pivot to Asia also contain echoes of Mahan's admonishments. These maps have to be understood as maps both of geostrategic naval expansion and of commercial ambitions of a fast industrializing nation seeking markets overseas and secure trade routes and geostrategic anchors in various corners of the world. Today, the commercial ships traversing the sea are no longer whalers, but include container ships, oil and chemical tankers and bulk carriers. It is worth noting the extent to which these cobwebbed seas tell us about how the world economy still depends not on the virtual or fictive or not only on the virtual and fictive but on the stubbornly material and concrete. Speed is so valued today in its various guises as efficiency, as packets of data traveling wirelessly or through cable connections, as quicker delivery time, as higher productivity and shorter communication time, but speed is still not necessarily a characteristic of the vast majority of the world's goods travelling at sea. As the great theorist and photographer of seaborn labour and trade, Alan Secular wrote, large-scale material flows remain intractable. Acceleration is not absolute. The hydrodynamics of large capacity hulls and the power output of diesel engines set a limit to the speed of cargo ships not far beyond that of the first quarter of the 20th century. It still takes about eight days to cross the Atlantic and about 12 to cross the Pacific. Further, although living in London, which is the banking centre of the world, makes us think that the most value produced is in fictive commodities, speculated futures, money moving or being forged literally sometimes through manipulation of labour, financialisation and various other instruments, and the transmission of value through ether. In fact, travelling through ports will tell you that things, many things, most things, are still concrete, solid, earth-bound, dense. Of the material that is carried in the largest volume in tonnes by far is still the raw commodities extracted from the earth and transported from one point to the other. These are the basic stuff from which everything else is made and the basic stuff which still runs the engines of the world. Oil and gas, which are the blue segments there, this is the tonnage of the goods travelling on ships, and what are called the five main bulk cargoes, iron ore, coal, grains, buccite or alumina, and phosphate, which is the brownie beige bit above the blue. But manufactured goods matter, of course, too. Although the bit that shows the containers at the very top, the grey bit, seems much smaller in terms of tonnage, given that most likely it is manufactured goods, it will have higher value. Further, the whole point of containers is an increase in the density of the materials transported, more and more weight per volume, packed in ways that fewer people facilitate smaller volumes, moved over a vaster span of space in bigger ships in less time than before. Already, in mid-19th century, Karl Marx was envisioning the spread of world markets connected through networks of production and webs of maritime and rail transport. In Gondrysse, he famously wrote, the more developed the capital, the more extensive the market over which it circulates, which forms a spatial orbit of its circulation, the more does it strive simultaneously for an even greater extension of the market and for greater annihilation of space by time. And perhaps looking at the largest container ports in the world, give some indication of where the raw materials, in particular coal, oil and iron ore, travel to and the finished products are loaded from. It is perhaps no surprise that nine of the top ten, and the number ten is missing, I have to make sure that all of those fit. The nine of the top ten container ports in the world are located in China, Singapore and Korea. What is perhaps more surprising is that Jabal Ali Dubai appears in the top ten and that it is ahead as a container port and that it is ahead of the biggest European port Rotterdam by a couple of places. Rotterdam is the 11th container port, although it's ranked sixth in all cargo beyond containers. And this is what I want to speak about today, the emergence of these ports in the Middle East. It is not surprising that the world's most significant and high-volume oil terminals would be located in the Arabian Peninsula. Perhaps what needs explanation is something Rafifziade, who I'm really excited to be working with on this project, pointed out to me the other day that all the glitzy development plans and development visions of all the countries of the Arabian Peninsula seem to have logistics as a pillar of their development plans for the near and medium term future. But we all know that the brilliance of plans and visions are not adequate ways of understanding the politics of something, that there are hidden or invisible structures, processes and constraints, unintended consequences and unforeseen obstacles, accidents, happenstance and conspiracies that all operate to throw a spanner in the machine of such planning. So for the remainder of this time, I want to talk about why I think the Middle East is so intensively focused on logistics today, but also what are the historical processes that have underwritten and continue to impel the building of ports and maritime infrastructures in the region? As I just mentioned, and as just Claire mentioned, it's not surprising that the, actually Claire mentioned something else. As I just mentioned, it's not surprising that the Arabian Peninsula would be the main transport hub for export of oil for crude oil. As Claire mentioned, I was on a container ship and I spent a lot of time in the wheel room taking photographs of the radar screens because the route was really interesting to me. And this image is one I took on the recent trip from the radar screen in the wheel room. Our ship was steaming along the eastern coast of United Arab Emirates. So we're in the Gulf of Oman. And this dense concentration of triangles indicating ships is just outside of a port called Fajaira. This density of ships at anchor waiting their turn to load petroleum products because Fajaira is primarily a chemical and petroleum product port is apparently repeated all around the Arabian Peninsula. The International Energy Agency's statistics, this is an EIA slide, but it's based on International Energy Agency statistics, on the world's oil choke points are of course also indicative of the significance of the Arabian Peninsula, where the volume of oil transported is more than a third of the maritime oil supply in the world. The rest goes in pipelines or from other directions, but you can see how thick the line is leaving the Arabian Peninsula in various directions. But then the next question is, what accounts for Jabal Ali port being ranked in the top 10 container ports in the world? Or the current emphasis on investing in other transshipment ports there? First, an explanation, what is transshipment? Some ports are transshipment ports, meaning that they act as a special kind of hub where much larger ships unload goods that are then shipped on smaller vessels or other forms of transport, rail or trucks to the surrounding regions. In this regard, Jabal Ali is fascinating. A bit more than 50% of all the goods passing through Jabal Ali are in fact transshipments, not quite as high as Singapore, where the percentage is 80%, but it's very high nevertheless. Given that the main trading partners for Dubai are China and India, one can assume that a significant percentage of the transshipment flows are from China to Dubai and from there to India, Saudi Arabia, Iran and surrounding countries. One temptation and a good one is to think of these trade routes as a kind of echoes of the oceanic grooves of trade carved by the significant 19th century Indian Ocean ships, a kind of ghostly permanence of root making in the sea itself. These routes are familiar routes, scented with spice and odorous with dead bondage, slavery and the depredations of various India companies and so many other neocolonial companies involved in extraction and production and trade. But the story of the Indian Ocean trade of the 19th century is perhaps most significance to me because it is clear that since then a great many ports in this corner of West Asia have fallen and a great many ports have risen in their places. And this is a great deal of the puzzle I'm trying to sort out to explain why Aden, Basra and so many old and venerable Iranian ports have been replaced by ports in new places, Jabal Ali, Salala, Khur Fakan and so on. You can see from that image that the Persian Gulf landing points are all in northern Gulf rather than in southern Gulf where now the biggest ports are. And here's a provisional answer that the geopolitics of war-making has been crucial to the politics of capital accumulation in the Gulf. And both of these would have been impossible to imagine without the invisible seniors that connect the world together, that move the limbs of war and trade, the maritime trade in goods and raw materials. Wars are fought to protect trade routes, much of it maritime routes. International laws were first articulated by Grotius in justification of colonial control over maritime routes. Hydrographic charts and land maps were the necessary tools of the merchant and naval ships furrowing the sea. I spent a lot of time staring at Admiralty charts which are the currency of these container ship trips. They are still used extensively in these trips and these Admiralty charts were first produced by the Hydrographic Office of the Admiralty as a means of imperial expansion, maritime imperial expansion for Britain. So much of what we pass over as the everyday furniture of our lives or politics or social relations have their roots in this struggle over commercial and naval supremacy at sea. Historians of military logistics tell us that when armies moved across the surface of continents, they were often followed by crowds of roughly 50 to 150% their size of people providing a whole range of logistical services to this moving army. Napoleon was so successful in the wars he fought, including those he fought against the British in Egypt and Syria in the struggle over access to India, not only because he had a great strategic mind, but because he had at hand a formidable administrative apparatus that ensured supplies for his army were always there. In Europe, these supplies were not requisitioned forcibly from the Europeans, as had been the common practice beforehand, but sent from behind the lines by the first ever instance of trains actually used for these purposes. In other locales, including Egypt and Syria and later Russia, where Napoleon failed, his failure was as much a flaw in his logistical planning and enforceable requisitions and plunder of local goods needed to supply his army as the actual exigencies of battle. In fact, it was a Napoleonic innovation in European land wars to send commissionaries ahead of the military, and I quote from a military historian, in order to organize the resources of this or that town and set up a market. Of course, on particular military trains, which was often fought over for permanent basis to be established. The diffusion and proliferation of roads and other means of transport markets and civilian institutions have in the vast majority of instances gone hand in hand with war making. And the infrastructure of the market is also the same infrastructure used for war fighting. So wars, while destroying so much, have also been the underlying engine of economic and political transformations that are not always visible. Military historians, for example, traced the emergence of the vast network of railroads across Western Europe if you've ever gone into railing. You know you recognize what an amazing network it is. It actually goes back to the logistic lines that fed the different sides of European wars, often fought by the French and the Prussians as far back as Napoleon. The extensive highway systems that so characterizes transportation in the US has always had to do with the supply lines that fed and clothed the conquerors of indigenous lands there. And even today, the impetus for construction of new roads and highways, for example, comes from the necessary infrastructural support demanded by the defence and aerospace industries and the vast network of military and intelligence spaces in that country, which is why if you've ever driven in the US, you recognize that's the south in the US where a lot of this defence and aerospace industries concentrated has some of the best roads in the nation. Aden and Bastra became the significant ports that they did in the course of the 19th and early 20th century because they were not only transit points, entrepôs and transshipment ports for goods coming from India, but also because the British Empire's vast networks of naval hegemony and control required fuel, food and supply way stations. That this still holds true has become clear to me in the course of my research thus far, only a few months into the project, and especially through the travels in the region. A look at the density of the ports today in the Arabian Peninsula shows the extent to which the growth of maritime transport infrastructure has had connections to war-making. Of course, oil is a factor, but many of the ports highlighted above are not necessarily primarily or even secondarily oil ports. A constant war economy since at least the 1950s has been crucial in reshaping the sector and the geography of the region. Think of the closures of the Suez Canal during the 1956 and again 1967 wars, the latter time for a total of eight years. That led to the economies of scale embodied in the super tankers that became so much of part of the trade in the region and which eventually actually the emergence of these super tankers became a significant factor in the growth of the rocketing economies of Japan, Korea and later China. Think of the anti-colonial insurgency in Aden that led to the British withdrawal from that corner of the Arabian Peninsula and the fall of Aden from its superior position as a merchant port when decolonisation happened. Think of the US presence on the peninsula in Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Oman, secretly and privately in Saudi and in Yemen. And the role of US Army Corps of Engineers and the role that the US Army Corps of Engineers has played in the construction of ports there, including managing the construction of Salala Port, which as you saw on the list that I put up is now one of the largest ports in the Middle East. Think of the shifts in finance and insurance from Beirut to the city-states of the Gulf during the Lebanese Civil War. Think of the manner in which Kuwait and Dubai became intrepos for Iraq and Iran, respectively, during the latter's long and devastating war in the 1980s. Think of the 1980s tanker wars in which the US hegemony in the Gulf was consolidated. And as Toby Jones has shown, formal US sovereignty was extended over crude tankers that were flagged to the US as if they were tiny fragments of US sovereign power floating in the Gulf. And of course this declaration of sovereignty over tankers was happening exactly at the same time as the US merchant marine was being entirely disbanded with ships now flagged to other countries and especially to flags of convenience which are registered in countries like Liberia, Panama, or Cyprus that obey few rules as far as labor conditions, environmental obligations, or other legal obligations were considered. I myself was exposed to the intense embedding of ports and transport infrastructure in these imperial matrices of capital and coercion during my recent trip on the container ship from Malta to Jabal Ali. This was an extraordinary experience. This was the ship I was on. 365 meters long, 50 meters wide, 290 meters high. It's not 200 meters high. It's 90 meters high. Sorry, that would be pretty amazing. This was an extraordinary experience in every way and I've written about the diaries out in my blog but I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the things that most struck me while steaming through the Arab seas. This is the route that we took from Malta to Jabal Ali. These are Southern Mediterranean, Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Oman, and the Persian Gulf. Of course, it was lovely and warm when you guys were having a really cold winter here. On the one hand, this experience of annihilation of space by time was entirely real. However, provisional, slow and bounded, it still is by constraints of politics, geopolitics and geography. What I want to do is I want to show you a little video of floating of the ship and just to give you a sense, this is going through the Red Sea and that sound is the sound of the engine. So you can see there is this kind of a slow movement but the sea is completely full of container ships. There's something powerful, beautiful, amazing, epic about this enormous ship moving through the sea at 23 knots, which anybody, I didn't know anything about what these speeds meant, but 23 knots is damn fast. On the other hand, time is still there. That clip was less than a minute long and yet it felt really long. It takes time to move physical objects. It takes human beings to drive the trucks and operate the cranes and drive the ships, at least in places where labour is still more plentiful or cheaper or more vulnerable to discipline and deportation, which is why in Rotterdam, for example, Rotterdam is called a ghost port by the seafarers because almost everything on the port side is including the trucks that are driving around are automated. There are no humans driving them. But on the other hand, in the Middle East, they are still humans moving the containers. There's a person sitting in a crane way above this directing a kind of a puzzle work that is required. There's also, in addition to those containers, a couple of yachts being transported from, I think, Germany to China, where apparently there is a huge market now for luxury yachts. The main item being transported based on the number of refrigerated containers in there seem to be chemicals. So what was incredibly striking was the physicality, the materiality of maritime commerce. Second, what was striking was the extent of the security seas. I was expecting to see pirate ships in the pirate waters of Gulf of Aden. There was even a frisson of danger thinking about pirate skips trying to intercept us. Some adventures. I even wrote out a kind of a whale saying, if I get captured, we should take care of my mortgage. Instead, I'm serious. Instead, what I found was the extent to which, in fact, the prevalent kind of non-merchant ships on these waters are warships. And they're everywhere. The French aircraft carrier, Charles de Gaulle, was on its way to the Gulf there. And it actually identified itself to our ships and warned that there might be naval planes flying overheads. But so were a dozen other anonymous gray warships of various sorts often dwarfed in size by the massive container ships passing them by. They often cloaked themselves with no identifying information sent out, no flags, nothing that said where they were coming from. And on the little screen which shows the name of the ships, it was either not showing anything at all or it was blank. And the only way that you could tell there were warships, of course the Seafarers knew them all, but it was also they had these numbers on the side which I wrote down. And the ships that we passed included Dutch, Italian, Indian and Chinese warships. The route was similarly militarized. What was amazing, perhaps the most amazing bit of the trip other than arriving in the ports was going through the Suez Canal. And I had been on landside on Suez Canal, but never actually going through it. And what really struck me was that the entire length of the Suez Canal on the African side are layer upon layer of militarization. So this is the view. The canal is just here. There are sand berms all the way along. There are roads that only the military vehicles can take. And then there is that wall which is incredibly quite high and intercepted every kilometer by a watch tower which were manned and so I didn't dare photograph them. There are watch posts and outposts everywhere. And the ports themselves were also variously securitized. Some were more relaxed than others. But at Jabalalley, for example, what I was really struck by was that where the ships berth on the side of the port is actually separated by a security gate. So anybody coming off the ship cannot get into the port proper. They can only stay in that berth area. And in order for them to get in there, they have to go through a gate which has an electronic identification security thing on it. The third thing that struck me was the extent to which the destinations of shipping companies are bound up with not only complex commercial calculations, but also nationalist and geopolitical ones. Alliances between shipping companies seem to follow interesting geopolitical alignments. CMA CGM, the shipping company that I took, which is a French shipping company owned by a Franco-Syrian family with connections still to Syria and Lebanon, is in an alliance with the United Arab shipping which was once based in Kuwait and is now in the UAE. And that says something also about the movement of capital in the Gulf itself. And their third partner was a major Chinese shipping firms. The geography of these alliances itself is pregnant with stories of war, movement and commerce. And today these alliances influence which ports are visited, which routes are selected, which commercial deals are entered into. There's so much more that I can say, but we're running out of time here. In this long lecture, one significant element has been missing. And that element is the bodies that are necessary to the working of the machine. They are the seafarers, dockers, port workers, construction labors and millions of others who make the movement of ships and of goods across the sea possible. I began with Melville's Moby Dick. Melville is remarkable not only for his powerful and beautiful rendering of life at sea, but also for his sympathy for mutineers and slave revolts. But I want to instead invoke his enigmatic story, Bartleby the Scrivener, as I close this lecture. In that story, a frail man working in a dreary legal office, one day decides to refuse. He simply, undramatically refuses. I prefer not to. And his quiet enigmatic repudiation shifts something in the fundaments of his world. Something imperceptibly changes. In Deborah Callan's great recent book, The Deadly Life of Logistics, she speaks of the possible, quote unquote, disruption to the commodity flows that labour mobilisation can affect, of chokeholds that are not just geographical but human and that can become sites of resistance to the ceaseless grind of capital and violence. In my obsession with Melville, and as I read Callan's book, and now as I wind up this lecture, I could not but think of Bartleby. In the humdrum every day of his ordinary life, living a monotonous and precarious life, the hyper-managerialised, securitised, bureaucratised capital demands of us entangled as we are in sinews of war and trade. And I could not help but think of his refusal again and again. I prefer not to. Thank you very much. Well, I feel very privileged to stand before you on this stage to honour and thank Lallie Chleallee. Although I don't speak any farsi, I do know the meaning of June. Lallie June, you are the Juniust. I will have a few things to say about Lallie's magnificent contributions to scholarship, but let me start with a more personal reflection about how we forged our doppel gang or bond through our shared fascination with some of the very worst kinds of things that humankind is capable of. Now, while that might sound like a grim homage, I love Lallie for loving to hate the things that I love to hate. Torture, war, military occupation, targeted killing, and so on. We are weirdly and fabulously connected and energized by these shared interests. Now, our doppel gang or connection has a history. The first few times I met Lallie, who was much, much younger than I am, were at Mesa meetings, that's the Middle East Studies Association. And our encounters were fleeting, the kind one has at academic conferences. And each time it seemed she had a beautiful, then toddler in tow, first her first, her wondrous daughter Mae, and then her son Pablo, named for the poet laureate of the world, Pablo and Ruda. As I said, those were fleeting encounters. In 2009 I was on sabbatical and I was roving around Europe, looking for people who were working on American torture in the war on terror. And one of my scheduled stops was London. Now I knew that Lallie was following a similar research trajectory to me at the time and we'd interviewed some of the same people, we were researching the same things, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, CIA Black Sites, British Complicity with American Torture, and so on. So I was eager to compare notes with her. But I did not really know Lallie. So I emailed her and said I would be coming to London and would she like to meet for drinks or a coffee? Her reply was to ask me where I was staying. So I thought she was looking for a logistical answer to where we might meet. But I didn't actually have a place in London at the time I hadn't yet made a reservation. And so she, to make a long story short, she said why don't you stay with me? And I said okay. So I spent five days at her place with her, John, and the kids. And in those five days I fell in love with Lallie. What a mind, what principles, what humor and cynicism, what insights and irreverence, and what an awe-inspiring work ethic. Indeed at night we would sit around, I would watch law and order reruns and she would be pumping new info into golf 2000. And perhaps to people who are not like Lallie or me, spending hours or days actually talking about torture and prisons and war crimes would sound depressing. But for us, for Lallie and me it was exhilarating, illuminating, dopal gangering. I had found my intellectual soulmate. In the following few years, Lallie's life changed dramatically. In those years of transformation to some degree turmoil, Lallie produced Time in the Shadows. That book I can say without the slightest bit of exaggeration is a tour de force. If you don't own a copy you should run, not walk to a bookstore to buy it. Time in the Shadows blends a historiography of counterinsurgency warfare across many continents and eras. An ethnography of military detention and a comparative analysis of prisoner abuse and a political economy of confinement operations. There is quite literally no better book on any of the topics she addresses. So how does a Lallie follow a showstopper like Time in the Shadows? Her next act was intended to be an intermission of sorts, a break from torture and war. Lallie decided to embark on a study of pleasure. Sounds fun, right? Well happily for me the pleasure she wanted to study was concentrated in Beirut where, as happenstance would have it, I had lined up a job as a visiting professor at the American University of Beirut, which I'm now back at. In September of 2012 as I was moving to Beirut to take up my AUB gig and she was looking for pleasure, we overlapped. And we continued to do so as she made research trips to town on weeks when she wasn't with her lovely kids, Mae and Pablo. I will be eternally grateful that Lallie bequeathed to me her Beirut posi of friends. Her friends, now my friends, would wait her periodic visits as a perfect excuse to throw raucous Lallie Palooza parties. During that period, Lallie was frequenting the lefty bars in the Palestinian camps, the women-only beaches in the Shisha cafes to understand how people experience and understand pleasure and happiness. And watching her work was another life lesson for me. Lallie was working on pleasure at an especially unpleasurable moment when friends and allies, her friends and allies and research subjects were riven and alienated by conflicts racking Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. But studying, analysing and theorizing, pleasure was her task. So to do so, she let herself revel in all the poets and social theorists of pleasure and its contexts. In that transitional project, she unleashed her ferocious imagination. She let it off the chain. She theorized practice, pleasure as practice, as collective affect, as an economy of joy and its counterparts in suffering and disappointment. And those grounded revelations about a topic as elusive as pleasure, I believe, led her to conceive of her current adventure, the sea. Lallie has set her sights on the infrastructures and trajectories of the world that sea and the world of the seas. And she has regaled us tonight with the taste of salt, water and sea air filtered through the eyes and minds of a brilliant observer of too often ignored phenomena. Now, I would bet that we, all of us in those room and those of you watching later on YouTube, will never again see a container ship without thinking Lallie taught me how to see that. Lallie, you make the world, you study as you study the world. You are a poet, a political economist, an historian, an ethnographer, a philosopher, a traveler, a joker, a mother, a lover, a friend. You're a beautiful human being with an awe-inspiring intellect. Now, when I was invited by Lallie to give this thank you address, or I guess it's called vote of thanks, I joked that I would thank her for being part of my torture focused world and then I would wail, why did you leave me for the sea? But having read her blogs and heard her address tonight, I see the continuities of interests, thoughts and theories. She weaves threads of the world, empirical, imperial and literary threads, masterfully refashioned into original thought, and I am humbled again. Thank you, Lallie Joon. And now before we go up to Lallie Pallews of London style, let's all give it up, big time for Professor Lallie Khalil.