Table of Contents for Making Space for the Gulf
Acknowledgments
Maps
Introduction: Region-Making across Scale and Time
Regions are outcomes of contested processes, rather than ready-made objects. Adopting this approach allows us to both decipher the multiple relations between the Persian Gulf and the world and discern the contradictory notions of it being both a place of flows and an enclosed space. Thinking in terms of continual region-making forces us to move beyond naturalized and ahistorical understandings of the Gulf as inherently unstable or a fixed international boundary and instead draws us closer to an understanding of time as sedimented and layered, rather than progressive or full of ruptures. The Gulf region is articulated in relation to other places, scales, and political projects. Persian Gulf history can be many things; it can be a mirror reflecting the histories of empires, capitalism, states, urbanism, commodities, and more. And herein lies the centrality of approaching regionalism relationally and the Gulf as a world of a region.
1.Boundless Regionalism
This chapter demonstrates that until the end of the nineteenth century the Persian Gulf was a social conduit, rather than a boundary. The environmental, socioeconomic, and political conditions of the Indian Ocean world prior to industrial capitalism and the nature of the Qajar and Ottoman empires ensured this. Maritime life and labor conditions fashioned a densely knotted littoral society enveloping the southern reaches to the Iranian Plateau, the Arabian Peninsula, Eastern Africa, and the Subcontinent. These sea-facing peoples recognized the Gulf's waters as having a multitude of functions with people bound together through necessity and obligation, but also coercion and exploitation. Ports, wind-powered vessels, caravan routes, kinship ties, and credit lines fashioned intimate and long-distance relations, often across multiple generations. Despite waterways being central to these societies, from the vantage point of competing land-based empires the Gulf was a frontier where authorities overlapped and fluctuated.
2.Imperial Enclosure
Focusing on two eras of geopolitical region-making, this chapter explores how and why the geopolitical imaginary of the Persian Gulf as an enclosed space gained traction and generated opposition. In the quarter century before World War I, British geopolitical thinkers and colonial officials championed British imperial retrenchment in the face of resistance and competition in the colonies and criticism at home. Classical geopolitical ideas combined with growing business investments in fixed assets and new cartographic technologies to demarcate and represent the Gulf as a defined territorial space between the Raj and London. Nearly a century later, U.S. officials depicted the Gulf as a central pivot of global power, which was crystallized in the Carter Doctrine. Despite differences between these two imperial moments, policymakers convinced themselves and others that the Gulf was an abstract geometric zone, demanding intervention and incorporation to counteract its inherent instability and address crises of capitalism.
3.Divided Sovereignties
Aspiring state-builders made the Persian Gulf their own by parsing it into national spaces and articulating specific conceptions of sovereignty. In doing so extractive capitalism and empire—and resistance to both—were catalysts for state formation. By juxtaposing histories of state-formation in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and British protected sheikhdoms in the first half of the twentieth century, we see how nation-states are co-constituted along with regional and imperial praxis. During the early twentieth century, imperialism was reinvented as internationalism. Despite continuing hierarchies of power, internationalists envisioned a world based on juridically equal, nominally independent states represented in treaties and the League of Nations. Within this framework colonial officers, oil firms, local business interests, and monarchs forged a Persian Gulf region of sovereign territorial states even if this did not translate into governance by citizens and authority was divided between British colonial officers and Gulf rulers.
4.Globalization's Seams
Sovereignty was reworked in seemingly paradoxical ways on the shores of the Gulf. Based on archival research, Chapter 4 illuminates why juridical-spatial enclaves were adopted to transfigure the Gulf for global circulation of commodities and capital. Iran's Shah and the Maktoum ruling family of Dubai used free trade zones to project sovereignty as the British withdrew from the Gulf, the state system was solidifying, and oppositional politics was swelling. Despite their differences between them, the free trade zones of Kish and Jebel Ali thickened national boundaries as markers of territorial difference and to project sovereignty. As deregulated places they also became conduits for transnational coalitions of capitalists to accumulate wealth. This chapter corrects the widespread assumption that global capitalism erodes national boundaries and weakens central authorities, showing how national governing elites turned the Persian Gulf into a site for the making of global capitalism. (144 words)
5.Urbanism Rebounded
By tracing and juxtaposing the shift from port cities in the first quarter of the twentieth century to the nationalizing cities in the middle of the twentieth century to globalizing cities in the past three decades, urbanization becomes a powerful vantage point to historicize regionalism. Across these three phases, both the social processes necessary to construct the urban fabric and models for these cities extend well beyond the borders of cities. Chapter 5 shows the constant importance of migration, transnational circulations of urban design, and capital accumulated by global markets for pearls, oil, and finance. These movements of people, ideas, and revenue were not flows, but structured channels that brought peoples and places together. Regional spatial politics have been imagined and enacted through the building of cities and organization of urban societies, including forms of exclusion. (136 words)
Conclusion: Spatial Frictions
Instead of the bird's eye view privileged by most discussions of regionalism, the book concludes with the human scale and through personal memories and ethnographic descriptions of border crossings, both successful and abortive. Foregrounding a multiplex optic exposes the constellation of ways many different and differently positioned peoples relate to the same place. By focusing on social fault lines we transcend simple binaries projected onto the Gulf and see region-making as practiced and enacted in addition to being planned and imagined. While aspiring to turn the Gulf region into well-ordered imperial, nationalist, or globalized space, these political projects inevitably simplify, exclude, and generate stylized histories. Treating regionalism as unbounded, multiple, and always under construction expands the horizons of possibilities of spatial politics to regions as means for building empathy. (122 words)