Arang Keshavarzian has written a thought-provoking book. In the first instance, Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East is about how the Gulf came to be made and remade as a historical arena, its broader historical contours, and its emergence as a region of its own amid interimperial jockeying and Cold War politics. At the same time, it is a nuanced account of how actors within and outside the region seized on opportunities to reshape the region, connect their own dots, engage in political contests, fashion jurisdictions, and forge a variegated landscape of sovereignty. Although the subject matter is dense, the writing is clear, concise, and easy to follow. There are five substantive chapters, not counting the introduction and conclusion. The chapters are arranged in a rough chronology, guiding readers from the pre-oil period to the late 20th century, and Keshavarzian adds gradual layers of texture to the portrait of the Gulf throughout.
The book’s first two chapters map out the long history of the Gulf as a region of world history. Chapter 1 places the Gulf within the fabric of the Indian Ocean world, or what Keshavarzian artfully calls a “boundless regionalism” (the chapter’s title). In it, he highlights how Gulf merchants, mariners, scholars, and statesmen forged transregional connections with India, Africa, and beyond. In Chapter 2, we see how this boundless world comes to be “enclosed,” a concept that evokes the enclosure, private property–making, and accumulation of the history of global capitalism. Keshavarzian invokes enclosure to describe narrowing of the arena of decision-making. Here, the region-making shaped by so many actors in Chapter 1 becomes the limited purview of statesmen. In the early 20th century, British imperial officials who were caught up in the Great Game with Russia sought to shape and reinforce political boundaries in the region at the expense of local actors. Later, administrators and policymakers across the Cold War geopolitical spectrum took the reins. Decision-making became concentrated in the hands of a limited number of policymakers, wrested from the broader cast of characters that populated Chapter 1. This process did not play out smoothly.
Over the course of the next few chapters, the author retells the story of state-making in the 20th century from different vantage points. In Chapter 3, Keshavarzian explores state sovereignty in the Gulf emerging at the interstices of a range of public and private entities: rulers, oil companies, imperial officials, and international organizations. In this telling, Gulf states are still forged by treaty-making, but the process unfolds along multiple scales simultaneously, each with its own impulses and trajectories. The terrain of sovereignty that emerges is much messier than that described in prior scholarship. There are more parties and interests and multiple and competing jurisdictions, with contestation present at every level. By moving away from the national-historical frameworks that have structured much of the literature, Keshavarzian is able to paint a more complex, contingent, and textured picture of state-making.
Chapter 4 explores this process in much greater detail through the case studies of the free trade zones of Jebel Ali and Kish Island, which sit across the Gulf from one another. By exploring their emergence in the growing landscape of sovereignty in the Gulf, Keshavarzian demonstrates how political and economic elites seized on the state apparatus to fashion new jurisdictions aimed at facilitating the flow of global capital through the Gulf. The chapter portrays the variegated jurisdictional landscape of the Gulf, and how it took shape at particular historical junctures through the initiatives of a range of actors. In this telling, the legal geography of the Gulf appears more complex than generally believed. Indeed, Jebel Ali and Kish Island are just two examples of a much broader phenomenon; there are many similarly anomalous legal zones in Gulf history.
In Chapter 5, Keshavarzian returns to the large scale, describing the history of urbanization in the region. Drawing on the wealth of research that has been published in the last decade or so, he recounts the process of urbanization in the Gulf as guided as much by merchants, laborers, and port workers as it was by rulers, oil companies, architects, and consultants. Keshavarzian situates these processes within a global context. He tracks the flows of labor and financial capital that pulsed through Gulf cities at different historical moments, within the broader fabric of global capitalism. Shifting lenses and writing about these processes along different scales, the author decenters the usual suspects in the story of Gulf urbanism.
The book closes with the thoughtfulness that Keshavarzian displays throughout the text. The author, an NYU professor, draws on his own experience of being denied a visa to visit the NYU campus in Abu Dhabi to reflect on the tensions that exist between different scales, including the national scale of security concerns and apparatus and the transnational “global network university” (p. 191). Although this is overall a critique of the NYUAD project, Keshavarzian approaches the moment at the microlevel, elucidating the human dimensions of the multiscalar processes he has charted throughout the book. Space-making in the Gulf is as much about disconnection between scales as alignment. The global and the local may fit together, but not without discomfort.
All told, Making Space for the Gulf is not simply an account of the creation of the region. The author moves past that narrative rather quickly. Instead, Keshavarzian gives us a rich analysis of the region’s sovereignty and jurisdiction, told along multiple scales and in all of its contradictory and anomalous richness. It is a refreshing take in a field fraught with easy answers and simplistic takes, many stemming from the hegemony of inherited analytical frameworks. Through his engagement with other literatures, Keshavarzian is able to ask different kinds of questions and initiate new conversations.
At the same time, there are areas in which this book might have been further bolstered. Keshavarzian relies primarily on published scholarship, overwhelmingly in English. His is a work of synthesis that asks new kinds of questions. However, a little bit of archival research, including materials available online through the Qatar Digital Library, would have grounded the author’s thinking in primary sources and added further texture to this rich account of the Gulf’s past. A deeper grounding in the archival material may have helped him smooth the transition between the pre-oil era and what follows. As is, the book takes a large leap forward in time in the first two chapters. Did the Gulf’s oceanic connections disappear so suddenly? Was the transition to an era of borders and boundaries as frictionless as we might imagine? Keshavarzian is so compelling on what comes after the discovery of oil that I wanted to read more on the transition to the oil economy and the processes of state- and region-making that accompanied it.
Nevertheless, Keshavarzian gives the reader much to contemplate. Making Space for the Gulf invites readers to consider a region always in the making, of untidy, overlapping, and competing regimes of sovereignty that have settled atop one another at various global conjunctures. In this story, the Gulf emerges as a space in which we can interrogate the layered histories of states and regions, and the local, national, transnational, and global actors who shaped its landscape of sovereignty. With this book, Keshavarzian marks new territory in the scholarly landscape of the Gulf.
