Abstract
This is a very accessible history of the Persian Gulf in the longue durée, written for an academic audience but also suitable for a non-specialist readership. As is clear from the conclusion to the volume, Allen James Fromherz has conceived it with current geopolitical issues in mind, looking back at the past with an eye to the future: ‘If the United States withdraws, many of the answers about the Gulf's possible future are to be found in its extraordinary past’ (259). This bold statement ends an ambitious book organized around the history of individual regional ports from antiquity to the present. Fromherz analyses their rise and fall as the embodiment of different historical eras, presenting the region as a long-standing space of global interaction and exchange. For the reasons discussed below, this volume will appeal to regional specialists, particularly scholars interested in the premodern period and engaged in debates about regional globalization and empire. Maritime and global historians will find the book's focus on regional ports instructive. Yet the volume offers a broadly based and wide-ranging historical survey of the region, rather than keeping a consistent focus on maritime littoral societies. The general reader will find plenty of food for thought, particularly in light of current events.
The first half of the volume covers the pre-Islamic and early and medieval Islamic periods. It focuses on Dilmun, the ancient Sumerian trade emporium in present-day Bahrain (Chapter 1); on Basra under Abbasid rule (Chapter 2); and on Siraf, the capital of the Persian Shi’i Buyid dynasty in the eleventh century (Chapter 3). Starting around 1500, the second half of the book concentrates on the age of European and American expansion. Fromherz uses the history of the trade post of Hormuz, located at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, and that of Muscat in Oman to illustrate the consolidation of the Portuguese and British empires, respectively (Chapters 4 and 5). Lastly, the development of Dubai since the Second World War is analysed as representative of the current phase of regional globalization (Chapter 6).
The first five chapters make for very lively reading, offering some fascinating and insightful accounts of communities of traders and scholars, and of regional developments. Making use of Arab, Muslim and European sources written by chroniclers, travellers and diplomats, the chapters show Fromherz's skilful mining of primary sources and his attention to detail. In Chapter 6, ‘Dubai: The Global Gulf in a Global Age (1945–Present)’, the discussion of the region in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is less engaging. Fromherz paints a rosy picture of the social and political cost of modernization and focuses primarily on the ruling families and elites of rich Arab Gulf states, often adopting an apologetic stance. Dubai's much publicized success story is contrasted with what Fromherz sees as the relative failure of Saudi Arabia and Iran – for him, countries beset by religious extremism.
As the author emphasizes in the introduction to the volume, Gulf ports are excellent entry points to study the history of regional and global connections (32). This book is a timely reminder that, over millennia, these ports provided continuity to a regional maritime world, connecting land, sea and world empires. Their history shaped a common Khaliji (‘Gulf’) culture, which united Arab and Iranian littoral societies. This unity makes an instructive contrast with the political and ethnic tensions that beset the region today, which are largely the result of the territorial and maritime boundaries established in the twentieth century. While the reader is often reminded of regional unity, global connections are pursued unevenly throughout the volume. This is partly because the connective histories of port cities and societies – as embodied by particular networks of exchange and movement – do not receive consistent attention (in some cases, understandably, due to the lack of sources).
Besides making a case for a global Gulf, one of the central arguments pursued in the volume is that the region has produced cosmopolitan port polities that have been able to thrive at the edge of large imperial systems, often as autonomous entities. Fromherz rightly challenges the notion that the Persian Gulf in the early and medieval Islamic eras was an imperial backwater. In Chapter 2, ‘Basra: Where Islam Became a World Religion’, he argues that, in the ninth and tenth centuries, the city was central to the prosperity, cosmopolitanism and intellectual life of the entire Islamic world, despite (or because of) its peripheral position in relation to Baghdad, the capital of the land-based Abbasid Empire. This chapter successfully traces Basra's development as a thriving commercial hub reaching as far east as China, a crucible of intellectual life, and a hotbed of radical ideas and experimental thinking.
Using the example of multicultural Hormuz under Portuguese rule and comparing it with Portugal's colonial venture in the Americas, Fromherz questions the paradigm of European hegemony in the age of global maritime expansion, but he overemphasizes the role of the Gulf on the global stage. He argues that ‘the cosmopolitan and autonomous Khaliji way of life continued to flourish’, and that life in Hormuz and the Gulf shaped the cosmopolitan ethos of the Portuguese (154). While this was certainly true at the regional level, his claim that Portuguese rule in Hormuz ‘upsets some of the deepest assumptions of world history’ should be re-evaluated as perhaps a bit far-fetched (154). As elsewhere in the volume, the conflation of the regional and global scales leads to generalizations.
In fact, the volume's title makes explicit that the Persian Gulf has been the centre of the world. This claim is pursued vigorously: ‘World history began in the Persian Gulf’ (jacket); ‘The Gulf is the first and oldest example of a globalized space’ (36); and ‘World trade began in the Gulf’ (39). The importance of commercial centres like Dilmun can be hardly overstated, as it connected ancient Mesopotamia to the Indus Valley – both considered in the West as the cradles of civilization. Yet one wonders whether these claims to Gulf primacy and centrality contravene the polycentric ethos of global history and its critique of linear and western-centric notions of historical change. By the same token, The Center of the World also champions the exceptionalism of the Gulf region – an idea that is still subject to considerable debate in regional historiography.
This is a well-written and erudite history. Its ambitious scope and agenda explains some of its shortcomings but does not detract from the overall value of the book.