as 1805, and in the process obtaining very favourable terms from the Sharīf.4 Yemen coffee exports still increased based in the northern ports of Mocha and Hodeidah despite Haines’ attempts to entice the trade to Aden from as early as 1839. However, his increased efforts were continuously thwarted by the wily regional ruler Sharīf Hussain. But, as disputes between the Sharīf and the Zaydī Imām of Yemen began to intensify, the balance of mercantile power began to swing in favour of the British and their entrepôt at Aden. When the Zaydī Imām attacked the Red Sea coastal area in 1844, leading to the final capture of Mocha, by 1848 all business in the port was halted. As a result, within 18 months, all caravans at Ḥujariyah and Sana’a were bringing their loads of coffee to Aden. Yet, despite this development, American vessels avoided trading with the port, dissuaded by unfavourable custom rates and uncertainty over the availability of goods. In 1853, the East India Company declared Aden a ‘free port’, thus solving the problem and ensuring that from then on export shippers of all nations in the lower Red Sea directed their vessels to Aden.
By the time Haines departured as the first British Resident of Aden for the EIC in 1854, a sizeable Arab and Indian trading community was consolidating its grip on the markets of North East Africa, Red Sea ports and the Yemen. In the same year, contracts for export coffee from the port were recorded at $184,000. However, as Aden grew the neighbouring ports of Mocha, Shuqrah and Bīr Aḥmad were seriously affected as increasing trade with American, French and German ships made Aden the primary focus of their trading activities. In his term of office as the East India Company’s Resident at Aden, Captain Haines worked endlessly to develop and expand the port’s commercial potential. In 1847, he recommended the construction of a second customs post at the port’s main pass in order to register the trade from there and a pier was completed at Ma˓allā in 1855, which allowed merchants to establish the main customs post there by 1864.5 The rapid growth in the port’s activities ensured that Arab, Indian and Persian traders in cotton goods, coffee, gums, spices and cloves, situated at the port of Zanzibar, quickly relocated their businesses at Aden. Although the port returns for 1855–6 reveal that the bulk of the port’s trade was with India, particularly Bombay, 30% was with the United States. By 1856–7, France had surprisingly overtaken both India and the US in trading at the port, but it was predominantly British ships, providing the mail steamer service, that dominated Aden’s traffic (29,000 tons/year between 1852–5 compared with 80,000 tons/year of non-British vessels).6 Suprisingly, it was not until 1857, when Captain Luke Thomas began commercial operations in Aden, that a British trader was finally established at the port.7
British mail ships, largely P&O vessels after the termination of the government mail service, were given priority at the harbour and were provided with buoy berths. Until 1857, all other vessels were required to lie at anchor in the inner harbour and, where British mail ships had port company pilots, other merchants had to employ the services of Red Sea pilots until the establishment of the Aden Pilot Service in 1848. Steamships required an incredible amount of coal, all of which was shipped to the port by a fleet of colliers from the British ports of Cardiff, Newcastle, Liverpool and Hull – ports that were soon to see the settlement of Yemeni merchant seamen in the dockland areas. The draft limitations in Aden’s Western Bay meant that the colliers were required to discharge their loads in the outer harbour to draft 17 feet before unloading the remaining coal in the inner harbour.
At the dockside, the labour required to handle all cargoes was mobilized and organized through the system of a muqaddam. The muqaddam acted as a ‘foreman’ or, ‘leader’ of small, freelance labour gangs for anyone wishing to employ them. The chief duties of the muqaddam was to recruit and employ local men individually, keep the labour gang together, fill the places of those who fell sick and provide sufficient men to meet the needs of the port employers. Serangs (Bosons) and tindals (Boson’s mates)8 supervised the actual work, with the serang accepting or refusing the services of the muqaddam as they saw fit. This degree of partiality was open to a system of small bribery, known locally as ‘al-ḥaqq al-qahwah’ (literally, ‘the right of coffee’), which meant that for a small ‘service charge’, usually set at a nominal fee – the price of a cup of coffee – an individual could buy his place on to a muqaddam’s gang, or a muqaddam could ensure work for his gang by greasing the palm of a serang or tindal. Ansari refers to the role of the muwassiṭ or muqaddam as:
Serangs and ghat serangs – labour agents, moneylenders and lodging house-keepers rolled into one (and therefore very powerful men) – were already established in Calcutta and Bombay … Yemeni and Somali maritime employment was organised and controlled in a similar way: muqadams (similar to serangs) were charged with supplying labour from their own tribes and negotiating contracts to the best advantage of the shipping companies and themselves. 9
The muqaddam system was used by Haines from the earliest days of the British presence in Aden, specifically in the construction of the fortifications and the garrison erected around the port. Labourers not only found their way to Aden from the tribal highlands of Yemen, but they came from as far as Egypt and Iran. The overwhelming majority of labourers, however, were from Mocha or the hill-farming communities of northern Yemen. As a result of labour migration, Aden soon became a cosmopolitan community comprising of Arab, Indian, Somali and Persian workers and traders. It was through this very particular and effective employment process that Aden quickly developed a competitive edge over all the other coal bunkering stations and colonial ports. During the 1840s and 1850s, it was estimated that a third of Aden’s population were hill farmers from the northern hinterlands, who would return to their mountain villages to sow their crops and then harvest them from June to October every year. This annual migration left the port with a serious shortage of labourers. Another third came from Mocha as the changing fortunes of the once-famous coffee port was slowly reduced to little more than a fishing village when the coffee merchants and traders relocated to Aden.
2.1 – A picture postcard view of British Colonial Aden, circa 1960.
In the early years of British control of Aden, migrant labourers usually settled in poor makeshift wooden huts along the dockside. However, by 1856, the EIC’s Assistant Resident at Aden introduced a policy of tearing down the temporary huts at the same time that he was clearing the water tanks at al-Tawāhī. Hut occupiers were offered plots on which to build stone houses which meant that by 1867 there were 1840 permanent houses for a population of 17,564.10 A survey conducted at Ma˓allā in 1881 revealed that 15% of Aden’s population was homeless, 60% were semi-settled in ‘kutcha’ houses, which suggests these were homes of Indian settlers, and the rest occupied stone houses. By 1870, the population of around 22,000 was dominated by migrant port workers who frequented the coffee houses in search of work, to take their recreation, eat food and, in many cases, collect their wages from the muqaddam, who was also often the coffee house owner. The size of Aden’s population remained fairly constant until after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Thereafter, steamers gradually began to replace the square-rigger ships, which made longer voyages around the Cape to China and India. More steamers inevitably meant more coal at Aden whose status was further boosted as an important refuelling and trading port when the triple-expansion engines for steamers were introduced in the 1880s accelerating the numbers of vessels passing through the port. Yet, as the port became increasingly busy, the facilities and harbour conditions at the docks had hardly improved. It was only after a parliamentary debate in 1885 and the subsequent formation of the Aden Port Trust in 1889 that the British government and the mercantile community at Aden arranged for a major dredging and reconstruction of the docklands, which enabled the mooring of the biggest ships of the day to berth at the port. The end result of the muqaddam system of employment and migration flow meant that many Yemeni lascar crews were discharged in Europe, and did not return to Aden; instead, a number of pioneer Muslim settlements around the ports of Marseilles, Amsterdam, Cardiff, South Shields, Liverpool and London emerged by the late nineteenth century.
As