Between Dreams and Ghosts: Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil (2021).
Wright applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea, and reported the following:
Unruly Labor is a history of the oil industry in the Arabian Sea that centers the workers who built and maintained the industry. Looking at the 1930s through 1960s, each chapter of the book begins with strikes by both mobile and local workers and considers what factors influenced worker strikes and solidarities. Unruly Labor also examines how oil companies and governments responded to these strikes. This examination demonstrates how oil became increasingly connected to national security and how this connection between oil and national security negatively impacted workers’ ability to unionize and go on strike.Learn more about Unruly Labor at the Stanford University Press website.
Page 99 of Unruly Labor is located in the middle of Chapter 4: “Shaping Nationalism Outside of the Nation-State.” This chapter examines a hunger strike that Indian workers who were building an oil refinery in Aden went on in the early 1950s. The page describes workers complaints of religious discrimination against Hindus by oil company managers, including allegations that Hindus were not hired to work at this project due to their religion. This page also discusses both oil companies’ and the Indian government’s response to these claims. The page begins:Accusations of religious discrimination were effective in mobilizing action by the Indian government, and the government halted the recruitment of Indians for the Aden construction project based on these allegations. As government officials investigated claims of religious discrimination, Indian bureaucrats considered citizens not as a homogenous category, but within the specificity of India’s demography. Religion was a critical category for both oil companies and the Indian government, and government responses were informed by two seemingly competing views of India as a secular state and as a Hindu nation.Regarding the Page 99 Test, this page provides a good introduction to the book, but it only partially conveys the book’s main ideas. It reflects the book’s focus on the interactions among oil companies, workers, and governments. In addition, this page highlights that citizenship is critical concept in the book, and the reader is introduced to the importance of citizenship in determining the efficacy of worker action. However, page 99 does not present some of the other key concepts in the book, and it does not reflect the book’s focus on how the racialized labor hierarchies of the Arabian Peninsula came into being.
--Marshal Zeringue
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