Understanding space, politics and history in the making of Dubai, a global city
Date
2015-02-13
Authors
Mathew, Nisha Mary
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Abstract
This dissertation is a rewriting of Dubai's urbanity as global history. Drawing on
documentary and ethnographic evidence, it revisits both popular and academic
notions of the global city in Dubai as a novel entity, highlighting the ways in which
such notions remain tethered to analyses of the city's superlative urban forms and
iconic architecture in the 21st century. While unpacking the politics of capital and
dynasty in denying Dubai a history prior to globalization as well as silencing the
city's other pasts and histories of global connections, I present a city that is a material
embodiment of social, cultural, spatial and political processes. Tied to pre-existing
structures and rather long periods of economic, social and political change within the
canvas of global history, I argue that these are processes that constitute the subject of
history and therefore ought to be studied as such. My study of Dubai documents
these processes as connections and entanglements between particular spaces and
times, illustrating how such connections and entanglements facilitated, staged and
legitimized by the city, have essentially been global in their effects and have had
consequences not just for Dubai but for other spaces as well. In doing so, I offer a
picture of the global city in Dubai as social reality rendered through processes and
practices addressed from below rather than as a standalone political, cultural and
financial symbol of 21st century capital.
My narrative of Dubai takes recourse to an Indian Ocean history of trade, migration
and capital flows as key forces shaping processes of urbanization in the city-state for
close to two centuries. It further explores the ways in which the Indian Ocean as a
distinctive social, political, financial and most importantly, monetary geography
interlocked with a post-war international system of nation-states and their monetary
geographies to create particular trajectories and social constituencies of capital and
commodity flows defining Dubai. It is these trajectories and social constituencies of
capital, commodity and monetary exchange, mapped by and at the helm of which are
Indian migrants, traders and entrepreneurs who have traversed it in imperial and
post-imperial times, that have fed into Dubai's diverse pathways of globalization in
the 21st century.
Description
A Thesis Submitted to the Department of History, Faculty of Humanities,
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, in fulfilment
of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
University of the Witwatersrand
Johannesburg, 2014