Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East

Displaying unusual command of the recent flowering of scholarly research on the Persian Gulf, Keshavarzian provides a thought-provoking reinterpretation of the region’s modern history and political development. Through a series of roughly chronological essays, he examines the multiple ways the Gulf has been understood: “as a unified whole, a contested frontier, a global seam, and an urban laboratory.” Arguing that the geopolitical imperative of stability and the typical analyst’s unfounded assumption of predictability can obscure important changes, he explores the transformations of the Gulf. This region has allowed for both social and physical mobility for pastoralists and pearl divers in the recent past, sailors and stevedores at the ports, the oil field roustabouts and drilling engineers of the petroleum industry, and the architects and construction workers behind today’s dazzling skylines. The Gulf has been a central node in the vast trading networks of the Arabian Peninsula, the Indian Ocean, and, over the last century, the rest of the world. Its elusive, shape-shifting reflection of the technologies of trade and political power reveals the world’s new and changing capabilities and aspirations.