Belonging on Both Shores: Mobility, Migration, and the Bordering of the Persian Gulf represents a meaningful contribution to the growing chorus of historians invested in “connecting” the history of Iran with that of its neighbors (consider, for instance, the book series edited by Afshin Marashi and Houri Berberian, Connected Histories of the Middle East and the Global South). Lindsey Stephenson adds to these conversations by theorizing the Persian Gulf as “clusters and circuits” (p. 51). She emphasizes “short-range daily movements” (p. 25) as the basis of her analysis for “the evolution of new spatial meanings in the early twentieth century” (p. 27). Stephenson’s interest in the effects of identification documents on borders and territoriality also has animated many historians, including Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet (1999) and Stephanie Cronin (2014). Like Arang Keshavarzian’s Making Space for the Gulf (2024), Afshin Marashi’s Exile and the Nation (2020), and Madawi al-Rasheed’s Transnational Connections and the Arab Gulf (2005), Stephenson examines populations in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean—a “view from the edge,” to take Richard Bulliet’s famous phrasing. Furthermore, she participates in the reenvisioning of nationalist studies, adding to Cyrus Schayegh’s interrogations of the local and global (2017; 2025).

Belonging problematizes homeland and loyalty. The author’s assertion that movement across boundaries “required a pledge of loyalty” coheres with my own arguments in Bordering on War (2024). Declarations of loyalty shifted depending on the audience—proof that peripheral communities could exert leverage on powerful states. Although she repeatedly returns to this theme, a deeper theoretical framing engaging works like Tara Zahra’s on education, Matthew Ellis’s on the “lived experience of territoriality” (Ellis, Desert Borderland, 2018, p. 30), or Peter Sahlins and Tamar Herzog’s analyses of frontier-making might have been useful. The author gestures toward a solidification of borders by the midcentury, but she hedges by writing “new states created and enforced their new boundaries” and “water patrols were famously ineffective for actually enforcing the law” (p. 149)—echoing an expression in Southeast Asia, that “water unites and the land divides” (Lockard, “The Sea Common to All,” 2010, p. 219).

Stephenson takes up the tricky task of defining a community that is in transit and chronically mischaracterized. “Scholarship on the Gulf,” Stephenson writes, “almost unanimously refers to those who migrated from Iran as ‘Persian’” (p. 40)—which has caused the author of this review to utilize clunky terms like “Iraqis of Iranian descent” or “Arabized Iranians.” Stephenson explains this conflation by linking the Pahlavi monarchy’s partiality for Persians with the (perceived) affinity Iranians abroad shared for the monarchy; Pahlavists became synonymous with Persian-ness.

The examination of institutions, especially schools, represents a strong contribution to the wider literature, reframing education not only as a nationalist project (Cyrus Schayegh; Farzin Vejdani) and a missionary endeavor (Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet; Matthew Shannon; Michael Zirinsky), but also as a community enterprise influenced by regional stakeholders. One of the limitations of my own work, which I felt acutely when writing my book, was the absence of schools founded and funded by Iranians in the Gulf, although the Iranian archives were replete with information about these schools. The administrators of these institutions (particularly those in Bahrain and Kuwait) leveraged the permeability of borders to garner support from locals and benefactors. I hope scholars take note of this line of inquiry; Stephenson makes fruitful connections between individuals and institutions that operated outside the immediate purview of states, although there is more to parse theoretically about the implications of these schools. For instance, Stephenson teases us with a story of an administrator’s letter to Iran’s Ministry of Education from Kuwait, insisting that his school communicates the importance of learning Persian (as opposed to Arabic). “What is surprising,” Stephenson writes, “is that [Mulla Mirza’s letters …] have no resonance in [the] Kuwaiti historiography or historical memory of his school” (p. 213). Further interrogating this and other anecdotes would have been fruitful for researchers grappling with new paradigms to study subjects like education. A wider overview of the extant literature on this topic also would have further highlighted her contribution, which certainly adds a new layer to the study of education as a transnational endeavor.

More broadly, readers might have benefited from a deeper analysis of the region’s historiography (that of the Persian Gulf) in this period of nation-building. In the midcentury, did historians of different metropoles within these interlocking “clusters” analyze political events or cultural norms differently? By answering this, Stephenson might have painted a more detailed portrait of these webs—that is, how they related to each other as well as different national metropoles.

Nevertheless, the point stands that social histories of this region are few and far between. In an effort to fill the historiographic gaps resulting from a focus on nationalism (just as the historical actors under review filled an economic and social need left by the pressures of nations), Stephenson engages with a wide array of archival materials, including those from Iran. This is a treat, as the situation in Iran continues to deteriorate and the likelihood of studies engaging Iranian archives becomes increasingly rare in English-language publications. For social historians of immigration and borders, this manuscript represents a valuable study of the diverse groups straddling the edges of empires and nascent nations, complicating our vision of nationality and asserting the dominance of local (“webs” of) belonging.