The Rise and Fall of Bandar-e Lengeh, the Distribution Center for the Arabian Coast, 1750‒1930 is the third in the Mage Publishers series entitled The Persian Gulf. The book is a detailed chronology of the political and economic changes in and around Bandar-e Lengeh from the mid-eighteenth century to the beginning of Reza Shah’s rule. It provides a thorough account of how local, state and imperial powers competed for control and influence in this small Persian Gulf port. Floor’s primary aim is to demonstrate that the history of the city in the modern period was fundamentally tied to the rule of the al-Qawāsim tribe that lived and moved freely between both sides of the Persian Gulf.
Floor is a prolific scholar of Iran and the south of Iran in particular. This book, like his many others, is incredibly well-researched and descriptive in nature. For the period for which he has the most information (roughly the 1870s to early 1900s) he provides an almost yearly chronological account of the individual personalities who struggled for power in the area. He narrates this history of Lengeh by weaving together primary sources from the British government (both in India and the Foreign Office) with the travelogues and diaries of Sadid al-Saltaneh, an Iranian government official whose father was a deputy-governor of Bushehr in the late nineteenth century.
While the content is rich, it does not follow academic publishing standards. Although incredibly well-researched, similar to Floor’s other works The Rise and Fall of Bandar-e Lengeh is not directly in conversation with other secondary literature. It does cite a couple of works in the fields of Iranian studies and Gulf studies, but this is mostly for factual references rather than to engage in theoretical debates. The vast majority of his sources are English-language primary sources, and Persian secondary sources—many of which rely on Iranian government documents.
Floor’s periodization and meaning of the “rise” of Bandar Lengeh is not entirely clear. While the story begins in the eighteenth century, the reader is left questioning the terms upon which the “rise” is determined, given that the chapters on political and commercial development begin at significantly different periods.
It appears that Floor is primarily concerned with the rise of Lengeh as connected to the Qawāsim Arabs who were dominant there in the late eighteenth century. While there is no clear date for when the Qawāsim takeover of power in Lengeh, by 1760 it had become one of their strongholds, along with Raʾs al-Khaima and Sharjah on the southern side of the Gulf. Their rise comes when they seize power from other Ḥoula Arabs there, and their fall occurs slowly in the late nineteenth century as the Iranian state begins to make headway there and appoints outside authorities to administer the area.
Lengeh also has an economic rise, which Floor situates in the 1830s as the town gradually gains more mention in the British records, and due to its large share in the pearl trade. Although the argument is not explicitly made, it is inferred that the rise of the Qawāsim in Lengeh was an impetus for the growth of that town as an entrepôt, given that the tribe was also located in towns on the other side of the Gulf. Disconnected from the Iranian interior and thus regulated taxes, they were able to make money through the tax-free importation goods flowing between India and Mesopotamia and the redistribution of those goods to small towns across the Gulf.
The “fall” of Bandar Lengeh is more clearly defined. Once the central state gains power in the area the tax regimes diminish the economic viability of the relationship between the coasts, thereby stripping Lengeh of its economic importance. Both the trade and the inhabitants of the town migrate to the southern side of the Gulf.
Aside from the chronological narrative, one very useful element of the book is the tables that Floor has made to represent various lists of data: taxes and expenditures, guilds, terms of governors and deputy governors, etc. There are thirty-one tables and five appendixes related to commercial, jurisdictional and fiscal data. This makes for solid reference material.
Professional academics may be frustrated with the transliteration style used, as it does not always comply with standard IJMES transliteration used by most academic publishers of works in Middle Eastern Studies. However, the system used is internally consistent, and a brief guide to the transliteration of vowels is provided in the introduction. There are also several incomplete citations.
Despite these problems, the book has great merit. It begins the work of bridging two fields that are not currently in conversation with one another, although it does so factually rather than analytically. The vast majority of students and scholars working on the modern Gulf focus on the southern/western side, and use only English and Arabic sources. Floor’s work will help them to access a new historical perspective and chronology as experienced from the Iranian side. As such it fills an important void in knowledge and literature of the role of Iran-related people and the Iranian government in modern Gulf history.
Similarly for Iranian studies, the book provides a perspective from the southeast, which is too often lacking in the field. The history of Bandar Lengeh (and the south more generally) provides an excellent lens through which to analyze the expansion of the state to the peripheries in the Pahlavi period. Floor’s work highlights the various tactics taken to connect the central state to its border through administration, infrastructure and military force.
Still, the thoroughness of Floor’s history is limited by three main factors. First, his Persian primary sources are overwhelmingly government ones, which although they provide useful information about Bandar Lengeh, are still written from an outside perspective. Second, the secondary Persian literature, while more local, does not make use of individual local historical materials or cite individual oral histories. While he does cite conflicting accounts between the Persian and English sources, discussing and analyzing conflicting narratives amongst the Persian sources would have helped to better argue for the disconnect between the central government and local inhabitants. Future research can build on the work that Floor has done here by incorporating these local primary sources.
Finally, the lack of clarity about whether or not this is the story of the Qawāsim in Lengeh or the history of the town of Lengeh itself presents us with one of two problems. If it is about the Qawāsim, Floor might have used a concluding chapter to follow them to the opposite shores once they emigrated from Lengeh, comparing their life and trade before and after their migration. However, if the book is in fact about Lengeh, a chapter on the town after the emigration of the Qawāsim that specifically discussed the impact of that migration would have assisted his underlying argument that the prosperity of the town was ultimately tied to free Qawāsimi trade networks across the Gulf.
