Abstract
Adecade 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.
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Notes
Nelida Fuccaro, “Visions of the City: Urban Studies on the Gulf,” Bulletin of the Middle East Studies Association of North America 35, no. 2 (2001): 175–87.
See, for instance, Yasser Elsheshtawy, Dubai: Behind an Urban Spectacle (New York: Routledge, 2010)
Christopher M. Davidson, Dubai: the Vulnerability of Success (London: Hurst, 2008); idem, Abu Dhabi: Oil and Beyond (London: Hurst, 2009)
Ahmed Kanna, Dubai: the City as Corporation (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011); special section on “Histories of Oil and Urban Modernity in the Middle East,” ed. Nelida Fuccaro, in Comparative Studies of SouthAsia, Africa, and the Middle East vol. 33, no. 1 (2013)
Kaveh Ehsani, “Social Engineering and the Contradictions of Modernization in Khuzestan’s Company Towns: a Look at Abadan and Masjed-Soleyman,” International Review of Social History 48 (2003): 361–99.
For recent studies of Gulf ports in history see Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: a Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities, 1500–1730 (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2006); idem, The Rise and Fall of Bandar-e Lengeh: the Distribution Center for the Arabian Coast, 1750–1930 (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2010)
Nelida Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Farah Al-Nakib, “Kuwait City: Urbanisation, the Built Environment, and the Urban Experience Before and After Oil (1716–1986)” (PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2011)
J. E. Peterson, Historical Muscat: an Illustrated Guide and Gazetteer (Leiden: Brill, 2006).
For the history of trade and port towns in the medieval Gulf, see Dionisius A. Agius, Classic Ships of Islam: From Mesopotamia to the Indian Ocean (Leiden: Brill, 2008), Chapter 3.
Lawrence G. Potter, “Introduction,” in The Persian Gulf in History, ed. Lawrence G. Potter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 12
Nazih M. N. Ayyubi, Over-Stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East (London: IB Tauris, 1995), 133.
Literature on the Indian Ocean is vast. See as seminal contributions Kirti N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: an Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
Michael N. Pearson, The World of the Indian Ocean, 1500–1800, Studies in Economic, Social and Cultural History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005)
Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History of the People and the Sea (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993)
and Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: the Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
For a cogent review of oceanic history see Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 8–9
and Kären Wigen, “AHR Forum: Oceans of History,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 717–21.
Jonathan Miran, Red Sea Citizens: Cosmopolitan Society and Cultural Change in Massawa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).
Kenneth R. Hall, “Introduction,” in Secondary Cities and Urban Networking in the Indian Ocean Realm, c. 1400–1800, ed. Kenneth R. Hall (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2008), 1–7.
For a review of the notion of littoral in the Indian Ocean context see Michael N. Pearson, “Littoral Society: The Case for the Coast,” The Great Circle 7 (1985): 1–8 and idem, Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India, and Portugal in the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 38–44.
Abdul Sheriff, “The Persian Gulf and the Swahili Coast: a History of Acculturation over the Longue Durée,” esp. 179–82 in Potter, The Persian Gulf in History. On conurbation see Mark Horton and John Middleton, The Swahili: the Social Landscape of a Mercantile Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 123–27 and 136–37. For the application of this concept to Massawa see Miran, Red Sea Citizens, particularly 112–65.
For a recent study of some of these hinterlands see Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: Links with the Hinterland-Bushehr, Borazjan, Kazerun, Banu Ka‘b and Bandar Abbas (Washington: Mage Publishers, 2011).
The native agency system in the Gulf has been analyzed by James Onley, The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), see particularly 63, Table 7, “British India’s Native Agency System in South West Asia.”
The pioneering work by Rhoads Murphey and Dilip Basu in particular is key to an understanding of the development of port cities in the colonial context, that is, as gateways to European influence and as lynchpins of regional integration into the world system in the nineteenth century. Rhoads Murphey, “Traditionalism and Colonialism: Changing Urban Roles in Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies 29 (1969): 67–84; idem, Shanghai: The Key to Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953)
Dilip K. Basu, The Rise and Growth of the Colonial Port Cities in Asia (Lanham: University Press of America, 1985).
More recent literature on the colonial port city in South Asia includes Indu Banga, ed., Ports and Their Hinterlands in India (1700–1950) (New Delhi: Manohar, 1992).
Xavier de Planhol, “Bushehr i. The City” in Encyclopedia Iranica, vol. 4 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1990), 570. Fuccaro, Histories of City and State, 73–75.
Lewis Pelly, “Visit to Lingah, Kishm, and Bunder Abbass,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 34 (1864): 252
F. Broeze, “Kuwait before Oil: The Dynamics and Morphology of an Arab Port City,” in Gateways of Asia: Port Cities of Asia in the 13th–20th Centuries, ed. F. Broeze (London: Kegan Paul, 1997), 150.
Valeska Huber, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
For this approach see Bose, A Hundred Horizons and Christopher A. Bayly and Leila Tarazi Fawaz, ed., Modernity and Culture: from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
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), 128 and 132–41.
“al-Basra” in The Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd edition, www.brillonline.nl; Hala Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf 1745–1900 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 96–113 and 139–57.
Thomas M. Ricks, “Slaves and Slave Traders in the Persian Gulf, 18th and 19th Centuries: An Assessment,” in The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century, ed. William G. Clarence-Smith (London: Cass, 1989), 63.
Frank Broeze ed., Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the 16th–20th Centuries (Kensington: New South Wales University Press, 1989) and idem, Gateways of Asia: Port Cities of Asia in the 13th–20th Centuries (London: Kegan Paul, 1997). See also endnote no. 22.
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)
Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989)
Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1995).
On barasti urbanization in Manama see Fuccaro, Histories of City and State, 9, 35–36. See also Sandra Piesik, Arish: Palm-Leaf Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson. 2012).
For eighteenth-century Basra see Thabit Abdullah, Merchants, Mamluks, and Murder: The Political Economy of Trade in Eighteenth-Century Basra (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 20–37.
See J. E. Peterson, “Muscat as a Port City,” chapter 6, this volume, and Fred Scholz, Muscat, Sultanat Oman: Geographische Skizze einer Einmaligen Arabischen Stadt (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1990), 48–96.
Tobias Richter, Paul Wordsworth and Alan Walmsley, “Pearlfishers, Townsfolk, Bedouin and Shaykhs: Economic and Social Relations in Islamic Al-Zubarah,” in Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 41 (2011): 371–72. The “Origins of Doha” project coordinated by Dr. Robert Carter at University College London in Qatar is a notable exception and combines archaeology, history, and ethnography. See http://originsofdoha.wordpress.com//
The use of records from the Islamic courts for early modern and modern Middle Eastern cities is discussed in Peter Sluglett, ed., The Urban Social History of the Middle East, 1750–1950 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 25–28.
Reidar Visser, Basra, the Failed Gulf State: Separatism and Nationalism in Southern Iraq (Münster: Lit, 2005), 14–15; articles “Maskat” and “Linga” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (www.brillonline.nl); “Bandar-e ‘Abbas(i)” in Encyclopedia Iranica, vol. 3 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1989), 686–87
George N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, vol. 2 (London: Longmans Green & Co., 1892), 231, 338, 409, and 425.
“Bushehr” in Encyclopaedia Iranica, 571. On migrations to Bahrain in the nine-teenth century see Nelida Fuccaro, “Mapping the Transnational Community: Persians and the Space of the City in Bahrain, c.1869–1937,” in Transnational Connections in the Arab Gulf, ed. Madawi al-Rasheed (London: Routledge, 2005), 39–58.
Michael N. Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India, and Portugal in the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 66.
On Swahili ports see Michael N. Pearson, “The East African Coast in 1498: a Synchronic Study” in The World of the Indian Ocean, 1500–1800, Studies in Economic, Social and Cultural History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 116–30.
For Surat see the classic by Ashin Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, c. 1700–1750 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1994)and Shireen Mosvi, “The Gujarat Ports and Their Hinterland: The Economic Relationship,” in Banga, Ports and Their Hinterlands in India, 121–29.
Lauren A. Benton, Law and Colonial Culture: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Husain M. Al Baharna, British Extra-Territorial Jurisdiction in the Gulf, 1913–1971 (Slough: Archive Editions, 1998), 10–12, 19–20; Potter, “The Consolidation of Iran’s Frontier on the Persian Gulf,” 133.
On the Utbi states see Ahmad M. Abu-Hakima, History of Eastern Arabia, 1750–1800: The Rise and Development of Bahrain, Kuwait and Wahhabi Saudi Arabia (Beirut: Khayats, 1965), 45–90; 165–80.
Violet Dickson, Forty Years in Kuwait (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971), p. 89.
Fuccaro, Histories of City and State, 55–60. Jill Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), particularly 36–61, 112–18.
Michael N. Pearson, “Brokers in Western Indian Port Cities: their Role in Servicing Foreign Merchants,” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 3 (1988): 457.
On Indian merchants in the Indian Ocean see Claude Markovitz, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947: Traders from Sind from Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
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Fuccaro, N. (2014). Rethinking the History of Port Cities in the Gulf. In: Potter, L.G. (eds) The Persian Gulf in Modern Times. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137485779_2
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