Those who have come of age since the 1973 oil embargo should have no great difficulty accepting the outsized importance of the Persian Gulf and the surrounding region. From oil and gas to, more recently, airlines, finance, media and football teams, the countries of the Gulf have influence that far exceeds traditional measurements of power such as population or military capacity. In Center of the World, Allen James Fromherz argues that this importance dates to the dawn of history. 

The Gulf is one of those places, like Southeast Asia, that are commonly discussed as a  “regions”, yet whose coherence (other than geographical convenience) can prove elusive. The Gulf has ships of the desert and ships of the sea, nomads and cosmopolitans, has contained both victims and perpetrators of imperial projects, embodies both tradition and modernity and is where two quite different cultures, languages and religious sects meet, not always mapping cleaning onto one another.

Fromherz focuses on two main characteristics that have framed and formed the Gulf as a region: first, it was open to commerce, people and ideas and, second, that it mostly managed to wriggle out of the grip of larger empires. Both were very much functions of geography. If you want to reach the Levant from South Asia, the Gulf is the way to go. There were deserts, marshes and islands to vanish into when authorities came looking. And because it was a place of contention between empires, it could often escape direct control by one or the other.

 

The first 3400 years, from Bahrain-based Dilmun through to the rise of Islam, are covered in a single chapter. But it’s more with Basra that Fromherz’s case for the centrality of the Gulf takes real shape:

 

Islam became a world religion in the port city of Basra, the main gateway connecting Mesopotamia and the Gulf. Basra’s cosmopolitan mix of merchants, scholars, traders, Persians, Arabs, Africans, and Indians transformed it from a faith primarily imposed by Arab conquerors to one that appealed to converts, merchants, and mystic… It was in Basra where Islam became accessible to peoples far beyond its homeland.

 

Roughly chronological, the next few chapters cover “Siraf: Boom and Bust in the Medieval Gulf (1000–1500)”, “Hormuz: How the Gulf Shaped a European Empire (1500–1793)” and “Muscat: Oman, the British, and the Long Nineteenth Century (1793–1945)”. These are all, to some extent, exceptions that prove the rule. Basra lies inland, north of the Gulf itself, while Muscat lies entirely outside it. Both Basra and Hormuz’s larger significance came from their attachment to outside powers, the Caliphate and Portugal respectively, rather than their autonomy from them.

But above all, the Gulf was characterized by change, as in:

 

Siraf ’s story is one of transience, of boom and bust, symbolizing the fickle nature of the Gulf economy… Siraf came to life almost wholly dependent on a global network of trade and died as that trade declined and relocated… Lasting from around 900 to 1500, this medieval or middle period of Gulf history, best represented by Siraf and its successors, again displays the resilience of the Gulf model of distinctive cosmopolitanism and autonomous ports, even as the metropole, Baghdad, was in decline and much of the Islamic world around it in disarray.

 

Fromherz opens with “The Persian Gulf is the center of world history”. The Chinese, who include the character for “center” in their country’s name, might beg to differ. Peter Frankopan makes a similar claim for, broadly, Central Asia: “for millennia, it was the region lying between east and west, linking Europe with the Pacific Ocean, that was the axis on which the globe spun.” But if “center” is taken in a geographically literal sense (and if one excludes the Americas), the appellation is perhaps apt. But this otherwise engaging and interesting book is unfortunately distorted by an apparent need to also make the region central in world affairs. “The Gulf is where trade first emerged, from Dilmun, on the Gulf Island is Bahrain,” he writes. He qualifies it later with “world trade began on the Gulf”:

 

The sailors and merchants who found their way, some four thousand years ago, from Mesopotamia and the Indus valley to the city of Dilmun, on what is now the island nation of Bahrain, must have felt they were reaching paradise.

 

One imagines (and there is more than a little evidence) that trade of some description, and probably on a large scale, predated this. Other passages read like a government investment brochure:

 

In the second half of the twentieth century, Dubai’s glistening skyscrapers, turquoise waters, supermalls, and relative safety made the city not just a model of successful development but a paragon and byword of the modern, globalized world order.

 

This over-enthusiasm is unfortunate because it is self-evident that the countries of the Gulf, singly and in aggregate, punch well above their weight, something that cannot solely be due to modern exploitation of oil and gas (of which Dubai, for example, has relatively little). In a very readable history, Fromherz provides a millennia-long narrative replete with fascinating details of how this came about and why it may persist.

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Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.