Abstract
This book seeks to contribute to rethinking and reorienting the history of the Persian Gulf from approximately the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century.1 As such, it highlights long-term regional trends that are often obscured in treatments of the modern era focusing on new nation-states. The important role the Gulf plays in connecting the Arab and Persian shores is emphasized, as is the region’s maritime orientation toward the Indian Ocean rather than the land-based empires of the Middle East. The Persian Gulf and its littoral constitute a distinct region that deserves to be studied over a long period of time to better understand the evolution of present-day states and societies.
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Notes
Nelida Fuccaro, “Pearl Towns and Early Oil Cities: Migration and Integration in the Arab Coast of the Persian Gulf,” in The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity, ed. Ulrike Freitag, Malte Fuhrmann, Nora Lafi, and Florian Riedler (London: Routledge, 2011), 99–116.
K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, Seas in History (London: Routledge, 2003), and his article, “Littoral Society: The Concept and the Problems,” Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (2006): 353–54.
Also Abdul Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010)
Edward A. Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History, New Oxford World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)
and Abdul Sheriff and Engseng Ho, ed., The Indian Ocean: Oceanic Connections and the Creation of New Societies (London: Hurst, 2014).
Jean Aubin, “Les princes d’Ormuz du XIIIe au XVe siècle” in Journal Asiatique 241 (1953): 77–137 and “Le royaume d’Ormuz au début du XVIe siècle” in Mare Luso-Indicum II (1973): 77–179; M. Reda Bhacker, Trade and Empire in Muscat and Zanzibar: Roots of British Domination (London: Routledge, 1992)
Patricia Risso, Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the Indian Ocean, New Perspectives on Asian History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995) and Fahad Bishara, “A Sea of Debt: Histories of Commerce and Obligation in the Western Indian Ocean, 1850–1940” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2012).
Hala Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf 1745–1900 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997)
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804–1946 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) and “Baluchistan: Nature, Ethnicity, and Empire in Iran’s Borderlands,” The Journal of the Middle East and Africa, vol. 4 no. 2 (2013): 187–204.
Michiel Baud and Willem Van Schendel, “Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands,” Journal of World History vol. 8 no. 2 (1997): 211–42; quote here is on 234.
S. B. Miles, The Countries and Tribes of the Persian Gulf, 2 vols. (London: Harrison and Sons, 1919; repr. Reading, UK: Garnet Publishing, 1994).
Arnold T. Wilson, The Persian Gulf: A Historical Sketch from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928).
J. G. Lorimer, ed., Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, ‘Oman and Central Arabia, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1908 and 1915; reprint Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, England: Archive Editions, 1986) in 9 volumes.
Robin Bidwell, “A British Official Guide to the Gulf: A Review,” The Geographical Journal, vol. 138, no. 2 (1972): 233–35, quote is on page 234.
J. B. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795–1880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968)
Briton Cooper Busch, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1894–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).
Stephanie Cronin, “Writing the History of Modern Iran: A Comment on Approaches and Sources,” Iran 36 (1998): 177.
Peter C. Valenti, “Creating a New Historiography of the Persian Gulf: The Case of Qatar,” New Middle Eastern Studies 1(2011): 1–23.
See especially Frederick F. Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
James Onley, “Indian Communities in the Persian Gulf, c. 1500s–1947,” this volume, and his The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers, and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also John M. Willis, “Making Yemen Indian: Rewriting the Boundaries of Imperial Arabia,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 no. 1 (2009): 23–38.
The best-studied group so far is the Indian community of Muscat, with the classic study by Calvin H. Allen, “The Indian Merchant Community of Masqat,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 44/1 (1981): 39–53
and more recent treatment by Chhaya Goswami, The Call of the Sea: Kachchhi Traders in Muscat and Zanzibar, c.1800–1880 (New Delhi: Orient Black Swan, 2012).
Jörg Matthias Determann, “Dynastic Periodization and Its Limits: Historiography in Contemporary Arab Monarchies,” Der lslam 91/1 (2014): 97–98.
Ehsan Yarshater, ed., A History of Persian Literature, vol. X, Persian Historiography, ed. Charles Melville (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012) is a recent comprehensive treatment, although the Persian Gulf is barely mentioned.
Ali M. Ansari, Modern Iran: The Pahlavis and After, 2nd ed. (Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2007), 1.
Abbas Amanat, “The Study of History in Post-Revolutionary Iran: Nostalgia, Illusion, or Historical Awareness?,” Iranian Studies 22, no. 4 (1989): 6. See the collection of articles in Iran in the 20th Century: Historiography and Political Culture, ed. Touraj Atabaki (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009).
Lawrence G. Potter, “The Consolidation of Iran’s Frontier on the Persian Gulf in the Nineteenth Century,” in War and Peace in Qajar Persia: Implications Past and Present, ed. Roxane Farmanfarmaian (London: Routledge, 2008), 125–48.
Madawi Al-Rasheed, “Political Legitimacy and the Production of History: The Case of Saudi Arabia,” in New Frontiers in Middle East Security, ed. Lenore G. Martin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 28.
Jörg Matthias Determann, Historiography in Saudi Arabia: Globalization and the State in the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014).
Madawi Al-Rasheed, “Knowledge in the Time of Oil,” in Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula, ed. Rosie Bsheer and John Warner, Jadmag Pedagogy Publications, Issue 1.1 (Fall 2013), 12.
Benjamin Thomas White, The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 211.
Eric Davis, Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 3.
Marc Valeri, “Identity Politics and Nation-Building under Sultan Qaboos,” in Lawrence G. Potter, ed., Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf (London: Hurst, 2013), 185.
For more on Shi‘i histories, see Determann, Historiography in Saudi Arabia, 89–94 and 167–74. Also Laurence Louër, Transnational Shia Politics: Religious and Political Networks in the Gulf (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 11–44.
Peter Lienhardt, Shaikhdoms of Eastern Arabia (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001), 119–20, 123–24.
Willem Floor, “The Trade in and Position of Slaves in Southern Iran, 1825–1925,” Studia Iranica 41 no. 2 (2012): 255–94
Jerzy Zdanowski, Slavery and Manumission: British Policy in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf in the first half of the 20th Century (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 2013)
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
and 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.
Amin Moghadam, “The Other Shore: Iranians in the United Arab Emirates between Visibility and Invisibility,” in Cultural Revolution in Iran: Contemporary Popular Culture in the Islamic Republic, ed. Annabelle Sreberny and Massoumeh Torfeh (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 253.
James Onley, “Transnational merchants in the nineteenth-century Gulf: the case of the Safar family,” in Transnational Connections and the Arab Gulf, ed. Madawi Al-Rasheed (London: Routledge, 2005): 59–89; quote is on 79.
Alan Villiers, Sons of Sinbad (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1940; reprint 1969).
Nelida Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama Since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 229–31.
This process is described in Anne Coles and Peter Jackson, Windtower (London: Stacey International, 2007), 174–85.
These cities need to be studied comparatively, and can benefit from work done on nearby regions. See especially Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the 16th–20th Centuries, ed. Frank Broeze (Kensington, Australia: New South Wales University Press, 1989)
and Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, ed. Leila Tarazi Fawaz and C.A. Bayly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
Samia Rab, “Sharjah: Seascape Urbanism in a Khaliji Port City,” in Proceedings of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) (Montreal, Canada: ACSA, 2011). Additional details in letter, December 13, 2013.
Abdel Razzaq Takriti, Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman, 1965–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). See the interview with the author at www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/15521/new-texts-out-now. However, note the critical review by J. E. Peterson in The Middle East Journal 68, no. 2 (2014): 328–30.
See further Mohammad Taghi Razavian, “Iranian Communities in the Persian Gulf: A Geographical Analysis” (PhD diss., University of London, 1975); Pirouz Mojtahed-Zadeh, “Diaspora VI. In the Persian Gulf States,” Encyclopedia Iranica, vol. 7 (1996): 379–80; Nelida Fuccaro, “Mapping the transnational community: Persians and the space of the city in Bahrain, c. 1869–1937,” in Transnational Connections and the Arab Gulf, 39–58
Moghadam, “The Other Shore: Iranians in the United Arab Emirates,” 247–65; and Eric Andrew McCoy, Iranians in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates: Migration, Minorities, and Identities in the Persian Gulf Arab States (Proquest, UMI Dissertation Publishing, Sep. 1, 2011).
Marc Valeri, “Nation-Building and Communities in Oman Since 1970: The Swahili-speaking Omani in Search of Identity,” African Affairs vol. 106 no. 424 (2007): 479–96
Madawi Al-Rasheed, “Transnational Connections and National Identity: Zanzibari Omanis in Muscat,” in Monarchies and Nations: Globalisation and Identity in the Arab States of the Gulf, ed. Paul Dresch and James Piscatori (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 96–113
and Mandana E. Limbert, In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani Town (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 134–63.
The bidoons are increasingly a subject of research. See, for example, Claire Beaugrand, “Statelessness & Administrative Violence: Biduns’ Survival Strategies in Kuwait,” The Muslim World 101, issue 2 (2011): 228–50.
For an interesting historical take see Timothy Insoll, “Changing Identities in the Arabian Gulf: Archaeology, Religion, and Ethnicity in Context,” in The Archaeology of Plural and Changing Identities, ed. Eleanor Conlin Casella and Chris Fowler (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 2005), 191–209.
Madawi Al-Rasheed, “Introduction: Localizing the transnational and transnationalizing the local,” in Transnational Connections and the Arab Gulf, ed. Madawi Al-Rasheed (London: Routledge, 2005), 4.
Also Fred H. Lawson, “From Here We Begin: A Survey of Scholarship on the International Relations of the Gulf,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 36 no. 3 (December 2009): 351.
Neil Partrick, “Nationalism in the Gulf States,” in The Transformation of the Gulf: Politics, Economics and the Global Order, ed. David Held and Kristian Ulrichsen (London: Routledge, 2012), 61.
See here Ahmad Ashraf, “Iranian Identity IV: In the 19th and 20th Centuries,” Encyclopedia Iranica 13 (2006): 522–30.
For a thoughtful discussion see Abbas Amanat, “Iranian Identity Boundaries: A Historical Overview,” in Iran Facing Others: Identity Boundaries in a Historical Perspective, ed. Abbas Amanat and Farzin Vejdani (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1–33.
Justin Gengler, “Understanding Sectarianism in the Persian Gulf,” in Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf, 31–66. Also Fanar Haddad, Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Visions of Unity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011)
and Toby Matthiesen, “A ‘Saudi Spring?’: The Shi‘a Protest Movement in the Eastern Province, 2011–2012,” Middle East Journal 66 no. 4 (2012): 628–59.
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© 2014 Lawrence G. Potter
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Potter, L.G. (2014). Introduction. In: Potter, L.G. (eds) The Persian Gulf in Modern Times. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137485779_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137485779_1
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