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Abstract

Until now the Persian Gulf has been regarded as a border zone of the Middle East, on the periphery of cultures and empires, and as such the Gulf region, which includes the present-day countries of Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, has not received the attention it deserves from historians. This volume, however, will focus on the unifying factors that have historically led to this region’s distinctiveness, and not on the divisions that have arisen with modern statehood. For the first time, the Gulf will be viewed as a civilizational unit that should be studied in its own right over a long period of time.1

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Notes

  1. D. T. Potts, The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, vol. 2, From Alexander the Great to the Coming of Islam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 349–50.

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  2. “Location on the shore transcends differing influences from an inland that is very diverse, both in geographic and cultural terms, so that the shore folk have more in common with other shore folk thousands of kilometers away on some other shore of the ocean than they do with those in their immediate hinterland. Surat and Mombasa have more in common with each other than they do with inland cities such as Nairobi or Ahmadabad.” Michael N. Pearson, “Littoral Society: The Concept and the Problems,” Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (2006): 353–54.

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  3. Rupert Hay, The Persian Gulf States (Washington, D. C.: The Middle East Institute, 1959), 148.

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  4. John Peterson, “Oman’s Diverse Society: Northern Oman,” Middle East Journal 58, no. 1 (2004): 34. The Political Agent enumerated the languages as: Arabic spoken by natives; Persian by some natives of Persia who have settled recently in Oman for trade purposes as well as by some families who are of Persian extraction and whose residence dates from the Persian occupation of Muscat; Baluchi by the Baluch fishermen and others who form the majority of the servant class throughout State; English by the Political Agent and his staff, as well as certain Goanese and other merchants; French by the French Consul and certain Belgian arms merchants; Swahili by Negro slaves and their relatives; Somali by natives of Somaliland who visit Oman’s shores yearly in search of dates, etc.; Hindustani by the large bulk of the educated population; Sindi by Hindu merchants from Sind and by the Khoja community who have within the last century settled in Oman and are rapidly coming to be regarded as part of the Arab population; Gujarati by a number of Hindu traders from the southern part of Bombay Presidency, residence of some of whom in Oman dates back for 150 years and possibly more; Portuguese or Goanese by the Goanese population, merchants, domestic servants, etc., who number a dozen souls or more; Pushtu by Baluch and Afghan arms’ dealers who are still to be met with occasionally in bazaars; Armenian and Turkish by Armenian merchants and secretaries and by a few Turkish soldiers who having deserted from the Turkish army operating in Yemen have migrated east, and taken service under the sympathetic ruler of Oman.

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  5. W. G. Grey, “Trade and Races of Oman,” Quarterly Journal of the Mythic Society 2, no. 2 (January 1911), p. 4. Somali, Portuguese, and Armenian could probably be deleted from today’s list.

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  6. Juan R I. Cole, “Rival Empires of Trade and Imami Shiʿism in Eastern Arabia, 1300–1800,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 19, no. 2 (1987): 177–203. In this important article, Cole traces how “the Baharina [indigenous Shiʿi Arabs of Bahrain] gradually traded the radical, egalitarian Ismaʿilism of the ninth through 11th century Carmathian movement for a more quietist version of Shiʿism—the Twelver or Imami branch—which Sunni rulers considered less objectionable” (p. 178).

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  8. AHR Forum, “Oceans of History,” The American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 717–80. These articles treat the history of the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Mediterranean; notably, the Indian Ocean is absent.

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  9. Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: A Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities 1500–1730 (Washington, D.C.: Mage, 2006), 601.

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  11. A good example is J. B. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf 1795–1880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968; repr. 1991).

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  12. A source of inspiration for this book is the work of Braudel on the Mediterranean (Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., trans. Siân Reynolds, 2nd. rev. ed. [New York: Harper and Row, 1975]).

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  13. Only one recent book by a scholar from the Gulf has embraced a Braudelian approach to the area (M. Reda Bhacker, Trade and Empire in Muscat and Zanzibar: Roots of British Domination [London: Routledge, 1992]).

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  14. Braudel’s insights have now been applied to the Indian Ocean: see K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);

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  15. also Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, Seas in History (London: Routledge, 2003). The French historian Jean Aubin set the standard for investigating the history of the Persian Gulf with many studies highlighting the role of Hormuz. See especially “Les princes d’Ormuz du XIIIe au XVe siècle,” Journal Asiatique 241 (1953): 77–137 and “Le royaume d’Ormuz au début du XVIe siècle,” Mare Luso-Indicum II (1973): 77–179.

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  16. A concise and helpful overview of the expansion of merchants and Islam in the Indian Ocean is provided by Patricia Risso in Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the Indian Ocean, New Perspectives on Asian History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).

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  17. Another ambitious effort to tie together the modern history of the western Indian Ocean is by Beatrice Nicolini, Makran, Oman and Zanzibar: Three-Terminal Cultural Corridor in the Western Indian Ocean (1799–1856), Islam in Africa 3 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2004). An Iranian scholar, Mohammad Bagher Vosoughi [Muhammad Baqir Vusuqi], has recently produced a stream of publications on the Persian Gulf in the medieval period. For example, see Tarikh-i muhajirat-i aqvam dar Khalij-i Fars [The History of the Emigration of Peoples in the Persian Gulf] (Shiraz: Intisharat-i Danishnama-yi Fars, 1380/2002). The numerous works of Willem Floor on the Gulf from about 1500 to 1800 contain a wealth of valuable detail and must also be mentioned. See especially The Persian Gulf: A Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities 1500–1730 and The Persian Gulf: The Rise of the Gulf Arabs; The Politics of Trade on the Persian Littoral, 1747–1792 (Washington, D.C.: Mage, 2006 and 2007).

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  18. Khaldoun Hasan al-Naqeeb, Society and State in the Gulf and Arab Peninsula: A Different Perspective, trans. L. M. Kenny (London and New York: Routledge for the Centre for Arab Unity Studies, 1990);

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  19. Assem Dessouki, “Social and Political Dimensions of the Historiography of the Arab Gulf,” in Statecraft in the Middle East: Oil, Historical Memory, and Popular Culture, ed. Eric Davis and Nicolas Gavrielides (Miami: Florida International University Press, 1991), 92–115 (with citations of relevant works).

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  20. Muhammad Ali Khan Sadid al-Saltana, Tarikh-i Masqat va Uman, Bahrain va Qatar va ravabit-i anha ba Iran (1933), ed. A. Iqtidari (Tehran, Iran: Dunya-yi kitab, 1370/1991).

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  21. See the thoughtful discussion in Patricia Risso, “Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Piracy: Maritime Violence in the Western Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf Region during a Long Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 12 (2001): 293–319.

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  22. Sultan Muhammad Al-Qasimi, The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1988).

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  23. The most thorough treatment is Charles E. Davies, The Blood-Red Arab Flag: An Investigation into Qasimi Piracy 1797–1820 (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1997).

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  25. Several collections of old maps of the Gulf have been published: see Dejanirah Couto, Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont, and Mahmoud Taleghani, eds., Historical Atlas of the Persian Gulf (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries) (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006);

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  28. For decades the standard history has been Arnold T. Wilson, The Persian Gulf: An Historical Sketch from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1928; repr. 1959).

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  29. This can be supplemented with Alvin J. Cottrell, ed., The Persian Gulf States: A General Survey (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).

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  30. A new treatment in Persian is Muhammad Baqir Vusuqi, Tarikh-i Khalij-i Fars va mamalik-i hamjavar [The History of the Persian Gulf and its Bordering Territories] (Tehran, Iran: Intisharat-i Samt, 1384/2005).

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  31. A book by Svat Soucek, The Persian Gulf: Its Past and Present (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2008) appeared just as this book went to press.

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  32. In the vicinity of the Gulf we have recent books on the history of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, which, like the Gulf, have recently become the focus of international attention and competition for petroleum resources: Charles King, The Black Sea: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

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  33. and Guive Mirfendereski, A Diplomatic History of the Caspian Sea: Treaties, Diaries, and Other Stories (New York: Palgrave, 2001). The Red Sea—a historical competitor of the Persian Gulf as a conduit between Europe and Asia—is another body of water that deserves further research.

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  34. The Society for Arabian Studies has recently carried out a Red Sea Project. Published proceedings to date include: P. Lunde and A. Porter, eds., Trade and Travel in the Red Sea Region, Society for Arabian Studies, Monograph No. 2/B.A.R. International Series 1269 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2004);

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  35. Janet Starkey, ed., People of the Red Sea, Society for Arabian Studies, Monograph No. 3/B.A.R. International Series 1395 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005);

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  36. and Janet Starkey, Paul Starkey, and Tony Wilkinson, eds., Natural Resources and Cultural Connections of the Red Sea, Society for Arabian Studies, Monograph No. 5/B.A.R. International Series 1661 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2007).

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  37. Material on the largest Arab port cities (Kuwait, Manama, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ras al-Khaimah, Muscat, and Mutrah) is collected in Richard Trench, ed., Arab Gulf Cities, 4 vols. (Slough, UK: Archives Editions, 1994).

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  38. See now Nelida Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama Since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). This important rethinking of the history of the Gulf focuses on urbanism and indigenous populations, as opposed to tribalism and external influences that have traditionally dominated scholarship of the region.

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  47. and George N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green, 1892; repr. London: Frank Cass, 1966), 198.

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  55. Vanessa Martin, “Slavery and Black Slaves in Iran in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Qajar Pact: Bargaining, Protest and the State in Nineteenth-Century Persia (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 150–69;

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  56. Thomas M. Ricks, “Slaves and Slave Traders in the Persian Gulf, 18th and 19th Centuries: An Assessment,” Slavery and Abolition 9, no. 3 (1988): 60–70.

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  57. Jerry H. Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis,” Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (April 1999): 215–24.

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  58. Kären Wigen, “Introduction,” in Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, ed. Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen, Perspectives on the Global Past (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʿi Press, 2007), 17.

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  59. This thesis is developed by M. R. Izady in “The Gulf’s Ethnic Diversity: An Evolutionary History,” in Security in the Persian Gulf: Origins, Obstacles, and the Search for Consensus, ed. Lawrence G. Potter and Gary G. Sick (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 33–90.

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  60. See Emma Nicholson and Peter Clark, eds., The Iraqi Marshlands: A Human and Environmental Study, 2nd ed. (London: Politico’s Publishing, 2002)

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  62. For a detailed description see W. B. Fisher, “Physical Geography,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 1, The Land of Iran, ed. W. B. Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 3–110; British Admiralty, Persia; and the appendixes in Cottrell, The Persian Gulf States, 541–666.

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  64. Refer to the excellent article, “Lar, Laristan,” by Jean Calmard in The Encyclopedia of Islam, new ed., 5 (1986), 665–76.

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  67. See Chapter 11, “Braving the Winds,” in Dionisius A. Agius, Seafaring in the Arabian Gulf and Oman: The People of the Dhow (London: Kegan Paul, 2005), 191–201. Matthee notes, for example, that there was a narrow window of opportunity for trading in Basra: ships departing from Goa in May, with intermediate stops, would arrive in Basra in July and had to depart again for India not later than October. Unfortunately, this corresponded with the hot summer months (see below, page 109).

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Lawrence G. Potter

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Potter, L.G. (2009). Introduction. In: Potter, L.G. (eds) The Persian Gulf in History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230618459_1

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