The Persian Gulf in Modern Times

People, Ports, and History

L. Potter

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137485762
• eBook ISBN: 9781137485779
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

This book explores the historiography, ports, and peoples of the Persian Gulf over the past two centuries, offering a more inclusive history of the region than previously available. Restoring the history of minority communities which until now have been silenced, the book provides a corrective to the 'official story' put forward by modern states.

PART I

The Historiography of the Persian Gulf

CHAPTER 1

Rethinking the History of Port Cities in the Gulf

Nelida Fuccaro

A decade or so ago while literature on the history of pre-oil port towns was very scanty, the interest in modern and contemporary Arab Gulf cities was sufficiently advanced to attract the attention of regional and urban studies specialists.¹ In reviewing the field today one notes that cities on the Arab side of the Gulf are increasingly monopolizing the research agendas of urban planners, architects, and social scientists.² Yet, and in spite of the recent publication of a number of studies, the historiography of Gulf ports on both the Iranian and Arab side is still lagging behind.³ In the absence of a substantive body of academic work that can illustrate historical trends across the region, this chapter is suggestive rather than definitive–suggestive in the sense that it is not meant to provide either the last word on Gulf ports or a historical excursus of their development. Many of their histories as towns have yet to be written. Instead, this chapter wishes to draw attention to trends, approaches, comparative contexts, and problems as a contribution to a future research agenda.

The Limits of Port Historiography

The little attention devoted to port towns in the historiography of the Persian Gulf dealing with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is partly the result of the predominance of particular themes and approaches to the writing of regional history. Until fairly recently, the vicissitudes of ruling families, tribes, British imperial policy, and the “Indian connection” have been the most popular subjects of investigation. The theme of the port city has an obvious historical resonance for the region. For much of the nineteenth century, Gulf ports such as Kuwait, Lingeh, Bandar Abbas, and Dubai functioned as independent or semiautonomous political units, which exercised commercial functions and different degrees of control over their hinterlands. Particularly on the Arab side, urban development, political culture, and trade were essential to indigenous processes of state building.⁴ And it is this particular perspective that is often missing from the literature. For instance, the development of ports as commercial emporia has been generally relegated to a mere background for British economic expansion, rather than being studied from the viewpoint of regional trade, littoral societies, and urban development.

The predominantly ethno- and empire-centric nature of historical writing on the region is also to blame. Not only have Arab and Iranian specialists rarely crossed paths in the Gulf but they have also tended to stigmatize it as a periphery of the Safavid, Qajar, and Ottoman Empires. In other words the Gulf (and by association its ports) has been construed as a somewhat “primitive” universe, a counterpoint to the centers of imperial civilization located in central and northern Iran and in the heartlands of the Ottoman Empire. In this respect academic biases seem to have replicated popular preconceptions, which continue to resonate in public discourse. As suggested by the work of the author Ghulam Husain Sa‘idi, the Gulf coast has occupied a particular place in the Iranian literary imagination as a remote, superstition-ridden, and distant region. Along similar lines, the image of the Gulf Arab as a Bedouin suddenly (and somewhat undeservedly) blessed with oil wealth resonates in the trope of “the oil-well state,” which dominated Arab discourse in the 1980s.⁵

With some notable exceptions the ethnic and political fault lines that demarcate the region today have also contributed to limit constructive academic debate.⁶ The fluid urban tradition of the Gulf stands in contrast with the rigid national politics and cultures imposed by the development of modern states after World War I. As a result of the dichotomy between the Arab and Iranian worlds historical debates have often attempted to impose “border fictions”⁷ over a past that was undoubtedly more fluid and culturally diverse than the present would lead us to believe. For instance, the historiography of southern Iran in the interwar period was subservient to the project of centralization and nation-building pursued by the Pahlavi dynasty. In the case of the Arab side of the Gulf, governments have tended to nationalize and Arabize their capital cities, thus effacing traces and memories of their cosmopolitan past.⁸ Conceptually, the imposition of these “border fictions” has limited our understanding of the Gulf as an interconnected regional world. Politically, it has created contention over particular places, spaces, and urban actors, particularly when it comes to the influence of commercial elites and ruling families and to the importance of particular settlements over others.

Littorals, Margins, and Peripheries: A New Perspective

Gulf ports have been virtually absent from the thriving comparative literature dealing with port cities in the context of littoral societies and continental and world “peripheries.” The advantages of these approaches for the Gulf context are obvious. In critiquing states and rigid civilizational divisions as units of analysis, this literature has addressed the inadequacies of area studies and state-centered paradigms of historical development, which are implicit in the biases discussed above. In fact, the integration of Gulf ports into the ebb and flow of cross-regional and maritime history is a project that deserves attention in its own right in order to broaden the geographical and intellectual horizons of regional historiography. Studies on the Indian Ocean are an obvious starting point.⁹ With the premise that waters are connective spaces or “continents,” some of this literature has already started to tackle the issue of the unity between the Gulf littoral and the Indian Ocean rim throughout the centuries. This has resulted in interesting reflections on trade, hinterlands, family networks, and material culture, all of which are closely connected to coastal urbanization.¹⁰ The Red Sea is a peripheral region offering plenty of comparative vistas. In the nineteenth century some of its ports were similar in size, geographical proximity, and economic functions to their Gulf counterparts as suggested by a study of the Eritrean port of Massawa by Jonathan Miran.¹¹

The size and importance of Gulf ports in the nineteenth century has undoubtedly contributed to their relative academic obscurity. If compared with leading Indian Ocean and Mediterranean ports, they were relatively small and remained largely peripheral to global trade, particularly after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Political and economic power was concentrated far away from the Gulf littoral: in Bombay, the powerhouse of British Raj and the main emporium of Gulf trade, and in Tehran and Istanbul, the capitals of the Qajar and Ottoman Empires, which vied for control of portions of the Gulf littoral. Yet a new historiography of the margins and borderlands is very useful to challenge normative economies of scale. This historiography has convincingly shown how the “edges” can bridge local and global histories, providing vital methodological and epistemological connections across space and time.¹² What is crucial in this context is not to measure hierarchies of settlement but to capture the relational aspects of historical processes. In an urban context this is illustrated by recent literature on nonmetropolitan urban centers in the Indian Ocean in the premodern and early modern periods. The emphasis here is on the interactive nature of urban networks and on the importance of small cities as windows into regional dynamics and larger urban systems.¹³

In this relational setting, size and importance become relative concepts challenging the preeminence accorded to central places in traditional historiography. Further, sheer numbers do not make up the essence of “citiness.” As microsystems of social and political organization towns are characterized by a diversity of services, activities, and institutions and by asymmetrical relations with their hinterlands. Along the Gulf littoral, port functions were a determinant in the evolution of towns as social and political entities. In the first instance, it was their establishment as trade and entrepôt centers that molded their political, institutional, and legal infrastructure. Urban elites were often recruited from the merchant class, and rulers and local governors were dependent on merchant capital and mixed legal regimes that included customary, Islamic, and British Indian law, which regulated socioeconomic and political life.

To put it differently, the histories of ports as commercial emporia, urban societies, and administrative centers were representative of the Gulf coast as a littoral society, a concept that has had considerable currency in Indian Ocean studies. Michael Pearson’s work, for instance, over 40 years has straddled East Africa, the western Indian Ocean, and the shores of the Indian subcontinent. Pearson’s is a hinterland-centered vision of the coast that approaches cities as “hinges” between land and sea with an emphasis on regional settings. The abundant evidence available on the Indian Ocean rim can offer Gulf scholars new terms of comparison and analytical tools. The case of the conurbations of East Africa, a region linked to the Gulf by close historical ties, prompts key questions on forms of urbanization, socioeconomic stratification, and the influence of regional production and trade.¹⁴

Along the Swahili coast, the predominant urban system was not that of the seaport alone but included a conglomeration of settlements around the main coastal centers that were organized along strict social, ethnic, and productive lines.¹⁵ Such closely knit conurbations were unknown to the Gulf coast in the pre-oil era in spite of many Iranian ports havin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I The Historiography of the Persian Gulf
• Part II Port Cities and Littoral Society
• Part III Peoples of the Gulf
• Notes on Contributors
• Index