History of Arabian Gulf 1750 – 1982
I suggest that students avoid artificially separating the history of the Gulf region from the Arabian peninsula as a whole. Many histories that have been written about the Arab Gulf countries have favoured this approach because it suited the emphasis on oil discoveries and move toward independent state formation that arose after World War II and in the 1970s. Separating the Gulf from the larger Arabian peninsula tended to uphold the view of this region as only obtaining a historical role with the discovery of oil and hence mitigates against the study of history before the 20th century. However a longer view of the Arab Gulf would find this separation to be difficult to maintain. For it is apparent that the Gulf Arabs in modern times had substantial contact and received migrations and trade from Arabs across the Arabian peninsula. That means, for example, that the rise of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab was not an isolated occurrence, just as the reality of European imperialism, the Dutch or the British over Gulf trade, commerce and shipping was also another reality.
I also suggest
that the study of the Gulf region may benefit from comparing the Upper Gulf
states, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar with the Lower Gulf states of the UAE and
Oman. I also suggest that the UAE in
this history is a key transitional state and region between the Upper Gulf and
the Lower Gulf as well as its historical and commercial ties with Persia / Iran
and the Indian Ocean trade.
Research on the
modern history of Arabia, the Arabian Gulf and its ocean based trading has
benefitted from new archival research and new paradigms of analysis. Among these are the comprehensive studies of
Rene Barendse, The Arabian Seas: The
Indian Ocean World of the Seventeenth Century (Barendse, 2005) and his massive
new project, The Arabian Seas: 1700-1765 (4 vols.) (Barendse, The
Arabian Seas: 1700-1765, 2009). There are several
useful localized studies of trade and the development of major port cities and
internal development during the 18th century, including Hala Fattah,
The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf, 1745-1900 (Fattah, 1999) and Thabit
Abdullah, Merchants, Mamluks, and murder : the political economy of trade in
eighteenth century Basra (Abudllah, 2001).
An essential
survey of Emirati economy and politics from the 17th to early 19th
century is H.E. Sultan Muhammad Al Qassimi, Power Struggles and Trade in the
Gulf 1620-1820 (Qassimi, 1999). In British
historiography the standard work is J.B. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf,
1795-1880 (Kelly J. B., 1968). A survey
history of the UAE from 1891 to the present is Muhammad Morsy ‘Abdullah, The
United Arab Emirates: A Modern History ('Abdullah, 1994). ‘Abdullah takes The Exclusive Treaty of 1892,
as his starting point to emphasize the creation of the Trucial States as a
British Protectorate and the role of British imperial interests. He only briefly considers the early 19th
century in the Gulf.
The Impact of Wahhabi, Omani and British Intervention on the Gulf Coast.
The Qawasim Emirate was challenged and ultimately split
apart from the combination of the rise of Wahhabi political movement that arose
out of Central Arabia in the late 18th century and the rivalry
between the Sultanate of Oman in Muscat,
and the invasions of the British in 1809. The Qawāsim had created an alliance with
the new Wahhabi political and religious movement that swept into the Gulf
coastal emirates and regions. In
adopting the principles of the Muwaḥḥidī
19th
century Arab History: Colonial
Invasions, the Ottoman Tanzimat Reforms and Nahda Nationalism and Culture
The
Ottomans and their Arab semi-autonomous provinces initiated a series of reforms
in the 19th century that attempted to modernize the bureaucracy,
education and military needs of a modern state.
Influenced by European trends in developing industries and exports of
finished goods, the Ottomans initiated a series of published reforms between
1839 and 1876 called the Tanzimat (or reordering). The Tanzimat reforms initiated a system of
taxation to raise regular revenue for the state, and a system of assessing
taxes and reforms in the military that included a requirement for military
service for a fixed period of time. A work that places this in the context of the
Gulf is F.C. Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf and the Creation of Kuwait, Saudi
Arabia and Qatar (Anscombe F. C., 1997).
