Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 19

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

The Gulf States: A Modern History
By: David Commins
The Gulf States: A Modern History. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012. 318Pp. $69.50. ISBN: 9781848852785.
Volume: 1 Issue: 1
April 2013
Review by
Mary Ann Tétreault, PhD
Trinity University, Dept. of Political Science
San Antonio, Texas
The first image of the Gulf that flashes into the minds of non-specialists is one of conflict. From the unanticipated (by the West) assertion of
sovereignty by members of OPEC to the equally unanticipated Iranian revolution, and then the bloody destruction wreaked by three Gulf wars,
conflict is an important dimension of the story of this region. Even so, it is far from the only one. Absent from the mental maps of most scholars of
the “third wave” of democratization, liberalization of the economies and societies of the Gulf monarchies is still a virtually untold story (Tétreault,
2006). This is too bad, too, because the lack of interest in and appreciation of the distance traveled along that dimension is a key factor in the ease
with which Gulf monarchs have been able for the past several years to reverse significant elements of the progress made since the early 1990s. We
are by no means back to the future yet but, as the harrowing situation in Bahrain reflects, such an eventuality is far from imaginary.
Ignorance of the Gulf is surprising in light of the region’s critical importance as a nexus of trade, investment, and involvement in global policy.
Indeed, when we think “globalization,” the Gulf should be at or near the top of the list of actors. From the hydrocarbon exporters that fuel the
economies of much of the developed world, to the owners of huge piles of ready cash, much of which has flowed into a wide range of investment
vehicles across the world, to their expanding activity in foreign policy, Gulf governments are major global players. Gulf citizens loom large as
participants in the globalization of entrepreneurial violence, both as actors and, along with their governments, as financiers. While that aspect of the
Gulf is more widely known, how it fits into globalization writ large is rarely asked.
This is why the current upsurge in publications on the Gulf is so welcome. As one of several general histories of the region, David Commins’s book
on the Gulf States has much to recommend it. It is wonderfully written, able to engage the reader from its first pages. It is broad in scope, beginning
with a short summary of “ancient” history that touches on such fabled places as Dilmun and exotic peoples like the Carpathians. Despite its brevity,
this quick overview manages to site the inhabitants of the region as agents firmly anchored in world historical time. They are by no means pictured
as what anthropologist Eric Wolf has called “people without history,” peoples and cultures envisioned as primitives suspended in timelessness until
the Europeans came along (Wolf, 1982).
Among the substantive virtues of Commins’s book is its detailed picture of the Gulf as a “globalized” region as far back as history goes. This
approach foreshadows the emphasis on migration in the chapters devoted to the post-1500 Gulf. Consequently, it projects what I believe is a more
accurate and useful picture of the movement of money, people, ideas, and goods than we generally find in the literature on globalization, and
locates it appropriately in a cross-roads of sea and land migration.
The bulk of the volume concentrates on describing how the Gulf fitted into succeeding global and regional regimes. The early chapters focus on
“eras” defined by local and extra-regional empires whose influence penetrated its political and social formations. Both God and Mammon are
represented as engines of empire. Competition among imperial powers such as the Portuguese, the Dutch — and the Safavids — is integrated into
discussions of the fortunes of local rulers. Even pirates get their due, their status and character reflected in a quote from Augustine’s City of God
that has a pirate challenging Alexander the Great’s castigation of him for taking hostile possession of the sea. To this the pirate retorted, “What thou
meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled
emperor” (Commins, p. 71). Similar mental images of the Gulf shaped the attitudes of Europeans, who saw exploitation of the region’s trade and
then its hydrocarbon resources by their powerful navies as in the natural order of things while local resistance by sea was called piracy and
condemned (al-Qasimi,1986).
In partial contrast, relationships on land in the smaller Gulf settlements were mediated by what I think of as the romance of tribalism, which
charmed British agents like Gertrude Bell and Percy Cox who [