James Onley's maiden venture homes in on Bahrain to show us how critically the famed Pax Britannica on the Persian Gulf depended on the collaboration of local elites and their extensive family, business, and political networks. His is at once a universal story of informal empire and the first history of a particular native agency.

This is, all told, a very nice book making a very nice point. With enviable resourcefulness, Onley plumbs a range of official and private, metropolitan and colonial archives and a precious set of oral histories to reconstruct the lives and work of his “invisible agents of empire” (223), generously illuminating the fascinating workings of the Indian empire-within-the-empire along the way. From his island foothold, he also wrestles bravely with the very edifice of imperial historiography, helping to bridge the regional preoccupations of Middle East historiography with the often footloose theories of informal empire. Smartly plumping for strategic over economic explanations of expansion in the region, he also argues that changing regional circumstances, rather than any breakdown in indigenous collaboration, led to the demise of the Bahrain native agency at the end of the century, contrary to what Ronald Robinson has told us about when informal control becomes formal.

Onley's target is ambitious and his aim sharp, and yet this argument falls somewhat short of the mark. One might reasonably object that replacement of the native agent by a British one made the British presence more directly palpable but hardly made Bahrain a formal colony. Moreover, the changing regional circumstances—Ottoman, French, Russian, and German rivalry—were not gods out of a machine but partly produced by the erosion, if not breakdown, of the ever-tense political arrangements between the British and their local agents.

These analytical blemishes signal this otherwise shrewd book's problematic general premise: Onley's faith in the Pax Britannica on the Persian Gulf, despite his own evidence of Britain's ample role in producing the very instability he credits it for containing. This sympathetic view of the British presence stifles full consideration of the native agents’ position. Sensitively offering “collaboration” as a morally neutral paradigm for understanding their pragmatic decisions to work for the British, Onley sweeps from the table the formidable historical-ethical dilemmas automatically raised in cases of collaboration with imperial rulers of less-pleasing countenance—think Vichy France or interwar Korea—and this despite the book's frequent reference to local rulers’ resentment of native agents; contemporaries, at least, did not suspend judgment. As we have learned from historians of the Indian army, a subtle reading of political and social context can elucidate the purchase of “loyalty” in the lives of indigenous collaborators. The question is, is there a point at which the wealthy Persian Gulf cosmopolitan exploiting his British connection ceases to be a forgotten dupe of history and becomes one of its more embarrassing villains? Onley might have found an answer by integrating the book's tale of regional cosmopolitanism with the wider literature on the Indian Ocean world that it so naturally touches on.

The ethical dilemmas skirted by this book are historiographical as much as historical. As with all well-meaning efforts to restore historical agency to colonial subjects (here, by literally configuring them as “agents”), moral neutrality risks inadvertently shifting the blame for empire onto their unassuming shoulders. Onley's view of collaboration as a system of “interdependence and mutual interests” (74) is wishful at best, for, as many of his own anecdotes illustrate, an unequal power relationship coercively and often cruelly structured that system. That so many of the agents were summarily dismissed in circumstances of disgrace suggests that their seemingly congenial collaboration was often shot through with creative forms of subversion. After all, working “within the indigenous political systems of the Gulf ” (3) meant something very different in 1770 and 1870: at some point, the British had lived on that block long enough to count as part of that political system, if not its major structuring force.

Indeed, Onley remains oddly impervious to the politics of colonial employment, despite his alertness to racism. Why, for instance, did the British regularly employ Shias to work with Sunni rulers? British representations of local political culture (and the “unhealthy” climate [70]) are accepted without exploration of how British perceptions, and the British presence itself, might have structured it. Thus, for all its regard for indigenous experience, the book offers a fairly static and insular view of Arab culture in which protection, hospitality, and generosity figure as peculiar hallmarks of Arabian diplomacy and espionage. Most perplexingly, Onley relies on British assessments of native competence to explain why some agents were entrusted with greater or less responsibility. Citing inaccurate native reporting as one of the system's disadvantages (and implying that Europeans might have done better), he tacitly endorses the British view of men “accustomed to falsehood” (98) instead of considering the way racism, on the one hand, and the native agent's willful obstruction and genuinely compromised position, on the other, might have conspired to produce shoddy reports.

In the end, the tales of disgrace, civil war, and determined rivalry cast considerable doubt on Onley's placid view of the native agency as “a highly effective mechanism of influence and control” (221). Despite its economies and flexibility, we remain unsure how much the British Resident actually “wished to work within indigenous political systems” (127) and how much he was resigned to it as a practical expedient—partly because such views would have shifted over time. But Onley does not explain how British views evolved in the context of the political history of the Raj—did midcentury skepticism about native agents have anything to do with post-Mutiny malaise, for instance?

The book's very organization prevents him from taking up, much less answering, such questions. The numerous section breaks and pointers to the multipart bibliography, glossary, countless figures, tables, charts, and appendixes of this lavishly, almost fussily produced book repeatedly disrupt its relatively short and straightforward tale. The very features that make it a handsome and handy reference make it a frustratingly repetitive and fragmented narrative. The Bahrain story is launched, after several false starts, only in chapter 4. Instead of history, the institution's functions—intelligence gathering, socializing, finances, personnel matters—dictate the book's organization. Thus, a meticulously culled list of intelligence topics from across the century falls mute without context, and a section on “challenges to the agents” abstracts cause from the story of the succession of agents, tediously concatenating a series of anecdotes stripped of their specific historical significance.

The writing of any imperial-institutional history is bedeviled by the organizational and ethical drift of the archive itself. It is testimony to Onley's research abilities that his book nevertheless tacitly exposes the extent to which the British Empire systematically cultivated the very corruption and intrigue it constantly bemoaned in the “Orient.” Moreover, Onley deserves immense credit for the many useful and convincing findings he has unearthed with his island tale. His most signal achievement remains his painstaking restoration of the full cast and crew behind the illusionary solitary British officer in the Persian Gulf.