The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj is a study of one of the most forbidding frontier zones of Britain's Indian Empire. The Gulf Residency, responsible for Britain's relationship with Eastern Arabia and Southern Persia, was part of an extensive network of political residencies that surrounded and protected British India. Based on extensive archival research in both the Gulf and Britain, this book examines how Britain's Political Resident in the Gulf and his very small cadre of British officers maintained the Pax Britannica on the waters of the Gulf, protected British interests throughout the region, and managed political relations with the dozens of Arab rulers and governors on both shores of the Gulf. James Onley looks at the secret to the Gulf Residency's effectiveness - the extent to which the British worked within the indigenous political systems of the Gulf. He examines the way in which Arab rulers in need of protection collaborated with the Resident to maintain the Pax Britannica, while influential men from affluent Arab, Persian, and Indian merchant families served as the Resident's 'native agents' (compradors) in over half of the political posts within the Gulf Residency.

The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj tells the story behind one of the British Indian Empire's most forbidding frontiers: Eastern Arabia. Taking the shaikhdom of Bahrain as a case study, James Onley reveals how heavily Britain's informal empire in the Gulf, and other regions surrounding British India, depended upon the assistance and support of local elites.

The Great Game refers to the hundred year geostrategic contest between Britain and Russia for control of Eurasia in the 19th century. The arena for the Great Game was all the lands, kingdoms and nations between the two Empires. At the beginning of the Great Game the territories of British India and Tsarist Russia were separated by a distance of almost 1,500 miles. At the end, all that remained between the two was Afghanistan - which at its narrowest, was a sliver of a 15 mile corridor, agreed upon mutually by the two behemoths to keep them apart. Afghanistan emerged as a modern nation, with its current territorial form, during the era of the Great Game. As a frontier state, Afghanistan was the stage on which the most powerful actors in this greatest geopolitical drama in the history of the world played their roles and left lasting legacies which resonate even in our age. The nationalist historiography of Afghanistan traces the origins of modern Afghanistan to 1747, the year in which Ahmad Shah Abdali established the Durrani Empire with its capital at Kabul. The British Colonial State was emerged as a power in South Asia not much later, when the East India Company acquired territorial rights in Bengal, after the Battle of Plassey, in 1757. The first official, diplomatic contact between the two was established in 1809. In the interceding half century or so, the Durrani Empire had expanded up to the borders of Delhi and subsequently shrunk to a much smaller core around the twin capitals of Kabul and Peshawar, after which the British Colonial State itself expanded to incorporate not just Delhi, but also territories beyond. By the middle of the 19th century, the British Colonial State had expanded its borders further north, across the Punjab, defeating and annexing the Sikh Empire. From 1849 onwards, Afghanistan and the British in India were geopolitical neighbours and rivals. The book traces the interactions between Afghanistan and the emerging British power in India, from the first contacts to the construction of the final territorial form of the region which come to be known as British India's northwest frontier.*Excerpt: In 1808, the Governor General of the East India Company despatched three embassies from India to secure a system of alliances with one single purpose: to prevent the march of an overseas army from Europe through the southern quadrant of Middle Asia into India.At the turn of the 19th century, the spectre of Europe cast a shadow of unease over Asia. After the collapse of the French Revolution, Europe had been gripped by war as French armies led Napoleon Bonaparte marched across European frontiers. While the wars in Europe are beyond the scope of this essay, their effect on Asian diplomacy and strategic thought about the defence of India is important. In 1798, France had invaded Egypt. Was there a possibility of an invasion of India? Napoleon Bonaparte had, after all, openly proclaimed his intention of forging a pan-Asian Empire. ("I was full of dreams... I saw myself founding a new religion, marching into Asia riding on an elephant, a turban on my head and in my hands the new Koran I would have written to suit my needs." - Napoleon.) Ultimately, the French fleet in the Mediterranean was destroyed by a British naval fleet even as the threats of continental war in Europe continued to rage. If there ever was to be a French invasion of India from Egypt, the plausible route would have been through the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf. Or, overland, through Persia, possibly across Afghanistan, and further through Punjab or Sind. The three embassies were tasked with building an alliance system to prevent this, and secure India's frontiers for the British Colonial State of the East India Company.(Excerpt from Chapter 2)*ABOUT THE AUTHORG.S. Goraya is Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Geopolitics at the Department of Political Science, Panjab University, India.

Although Britain’s formal imperial role in the smaller, oil-rich sheikdoms of the Arab Gulf – Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates – ended in 1971, Britain continued to have a strong interest and continuing presence in the region. This book explores the nature of Britain’s role after the formal end of empire. It traces the historical events of the post-imperial years, including the 1973 oil shock, the fall of the Shah in Iran and the beginnings of the Iran-Iraq War, considers the changing positions towards the region of other major world powers, including the United States, and engages with debates on the nature of empire and the end of empire. The book is a sequel to the authors’ highly acclaimed previous books Britain's Revival and Fall in the Gulf: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the Trucial States, 1950-71 (Routledge 2004) and Ending Empire in the Middle East: Britain, the United States and Post-war Decolonization, 1945-1973 (Routledge 2012).

Britain has been engaged in the Middle East for over two centuries. During the Napoleonic Wars it expelled the French from Egypt. During World War I it helped to dismantle the Ottoman empire. During World War II, it defeated the Italians and Germans. In the post-war years, it attempted to reassert its domination of the Middle East but with little success. Today British forces in the region are fighting ISIS. Variously seen as intruders by most of the local populations and nationalists and as protectors by local pliant rulers, the British have been key arbiters in Middle Eastern politics. They created new states, determined who could hold power, resolved disputes and offered security to their clients. In this major new study, Peter Mangold shows how Britain sought to protect its changing interests in the region and assesses the British response to Arab nationalism. He examines the successes and failures of British policy and the reasons it has often proved controversial and accident prone.And he evaluates Britain's complex legacy in the Middle East - its contribution to the stability of Jordan (at least to date) and the Gulf states, set against the instability which has plagued Iraq and the unresolved Palestine conflict. In tracing the history of Britain's relationship with the Middle East, Mangold reveals how Britain's involvement in the Middle East sowed the seeds for today's crises.

The interwar period marked a transition from a Gulf society characterized by symbiosis and interdependency to a sub-region characterized by national divisions, sectarian suspicions, rivalries and political tension. In this study, Chelsi Mueller tells the story of a formative period in the Gulf, examining the triangular relationship between Iran, Britain and the Gulf Arab shaykhdoms. By doing so Mueller reveals how the revival of Iranian national ambitions in the Gulf had a significant effect on the dense web of Arab-Iranian relations during the interwar period. Shedding new light on our current understanding of the present-day Arab-Iranian conflict, this study, which pays particular attention to Bahrain and the Trucial states (United Arab Emirates), fills a significant gap in the literature on the history of Arab-Iranian relations in the Gulf and Iran's Persian Gulf policy during the Reza Shah period.

December 2, 1971 ushered the United Arab Emirates into existence and marked the end of one hundred fifty years of British protection of the Arab states of the Gulf. Today, the UAE projects an image of modernity and prosperity; but before its formation, the emirates endured poverty and political upheaval while the rulers and people navigated the transition from autonomous city-states to modern nation states under informal British rule. This book shows how the Trucial States came to form a sovereign federation, paying particular attention to the role of nationalism and anti-imperialism. Kristi Barnwell demonstrates that the ruling sheikhs of the Gulf Arab rulers in the Gulf strove to create their new state with close ties to Great Britain, which provided technical, military and administrative assistance to the emirates, while also publicly embracing the popular ideologies of anti-imperialism and Arab socialism that were still dominating the political discourse in the Arab world. In the process, she situates the Emirates' modern history in the broader narratives of the history of the Middle East. The research draws on primary source materials from British and American government archives, speeches, and government publications from the Arab Emirates, as well as memoirs and secondary sources.

This book is a major contribution to our understanding of the role played by law(s) in the British Empire. Using a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, the authors provide in-depth analyses which shine new light on the role of law in creating the people and places of the British Empire. Ranging from the United States, through Calcutta, across Australasia to the Gold Coast, these essays seek to investigate law’s central place in the British Empire, and the role of its agents in embedding British rule and culture in colonial territories. One of the first collections to provide a sustained engagement with the legal histories of the British Empire, in particular beyond the settler colonies, this work aims to encourage further scholarship and new approaches to the writing of the histories of that Empire. Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Engagements and Legacies will be of value not only to legal scholars and graduate students, but of interest to all of those who want to know more about the laws in and of the British Empire.

In 1888, there were just four British consulates in the country; by 1921 there were twenty-three. H. Lyman Stebbins investigates the development and consequences of British imperialism in Iran in a time of international rivalry, revolution and world war. While previous narratives of Anglo-Iranian relations have focused on the highest diplomatic circles in Tehran, London, Calcutta and St. Petersburg, this book argues that British consuls and political agents made the vast southern borderlands of Iran the real centre of British power and influence during this period. Based on British consular archives from Bushihr, Shiraz, Sistan and Muhammarah, this book reveals that Britain, India and Iran were linked together by discourses of colonial knowledge and patterns of political, military and economic control. It also contextualizes the emergence of Iranian nationalism as well as the failure and collapse of the Qajar state during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution and the First World War.

The Persian Gulf has long been a contested space—an object of imperial ambitions, national antagonisms, and migratory dreams. The roots of these contestations lie in the different ways the Gulf has been defined as a region, both by those who live there and those beyond its shore. Making Space for the Gulf reveals how capitalism, empire-building, geopolitics, and urbanism have each shaped understandings of the region over the last two centuries. Here, the Gulf comes into view as a created space, encompassing dynamic social relations and competing interests. Arang Keshavarzian writes a new history of the region that places Iran, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula together within global processes. He connects moments more often treated as ruptures—the discovery of oil, the Iranian Revolution, the rise and decline of British empire, the emergence of American power—and crafts a narrative populated by a diverse range of people—migrants and ruling families, pearl-divers and star architects, striking taxi drivers and dethroned rulers, protectors of British India and stewards of globalized American universities. Tacking across geographic scales, Keshavarzian reveals how the Gulf has been globalized through transnational relations, regionalized as a geopolitical category, and cleaved along national divisions and social inequalities. When understood as a process, not an object, the Persian Gulf reveals much about how regions and the world have been made in modern times. Making Space for the Gulf offers a fresh understanding of this globally consequential place.