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The Ottoman Gulf: the creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar
What caused the decline of the Ottoman empire in the Persian Gulf? Why has history credited only London, not Istanbul, with bringing about the birth of the modern Gulf States? Using the Ottoman imperial archives, as well as European and Arab sources, Anscombe explains how the combination of poor communication, scarce resources, and misplaced security concerns undermined Istanbul’s control and ultimately drove the Gulf shaikhs to seek independence with ties to the British.
The nineteenth-century Persian Gulf has been much studied but, Anscombe stresses, always relying primarily on the British archives and therefore seen predominantly from the British point of view. He instead bases his work on the Ottoman documents and sees the Gulf from the perspective of Istanbul. Perhaps his most dramatic insight concerns the ineptitude of the Ottomans and their inability to provide the sort of decent administration that would keep the allegiance of the Gulf Arabs. Oddly, the British challenge in the region stimulated the Ottomans to govern even worse than before because, driven by what the author calls “overblown suspicion,” the Turks “often diverted scarce resources to meet unlikely outside threats” instead of fixing problems. This created opportunities that London took advantage of so regularly that by 1913—on the eve of World War I—it had won paramount authority in the region and Ottoman rule had come to an end.
The most immediately relevant conclusion of Anscombe’s excellent though dense study concerns the historical origins of Kuwait, about which he is quite definite: “the Iraqi claim to historical rights over Kuwait is very week.” While Kuwait did indeed come under Ottoman rule, it “was neither integrated into, nor dependent upon, Iraq.” Indeed, its links to Iraq did not exceed those to other regions, such as the Arabian Peninsula, Iran, and India.
The Ottoman Gulf: the creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar
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