The past fifteen years or so have witnessed an explosion of interest and scholarship in the field of Indian Ocean history. Thanks to what is now more than thirty years of work, we have a much more textured understanding of the histories that bound East Africa, Arabia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia to one another, written from a range of perspectives and at multiple levels of analysis. Within this literature, the scholarship on the Arab world is beginning to have its oceanic moment. There are a growing number of works that take on the Indian Ocean histories of the Gulf, South Arabia, and the Red Sea, acknowledging the centrality of the sea to the ways in which these communities fashioned themselves and their histories. The Gulf States in particular spare no opportunity to foreground the dhow trade, the pearl dive, and fishing as part of their heritage, and the archives of their past are rich with references to the sea; their manuscripts, memoirs, oral histories, and the material culture on display in their museums practically drip with salt water.

Among these materials are nautical lexicons, of which the volume under review is one. Eric Staples and Abdulrahman Al-Salimi (who have worked together on a number of publications on Gulf maritime history, all from the same publisher) gather into one volume material from lexicons produced at several different moments in history – some hundreds of years ago, others in the wake of the dhow trade, when life in the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula was beginning to transform with the advent of oil, and others much later, as the last remaining dhow captains began to pass away. Aside from small lists of nautical vocabulary produced in the 1960s, there has been no effort to make them available in English – certainly nothing of this scale. What the editors have put together is far beyond a simple translation, as useful as that would have been in itself; they have scraped information from dozens of sources – lexicons, yes, but also travel narratives, letters, poetry, and more – spanning hundreds of years, presenting Arabic and English definitions side by side. This is an authoritative compendium of the nautical terminology of the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula, taking on virtually every aspect of maritime life in the region.

Staples and Al-Salimi have done researchers a tremendous favour in producing this volume. Although a nautical lexicon might seem like a niche offering, the reality is that it opens up an entire world of materials to researchers. With the aid of the lexicon, researchers can now begin to make their way through the dense archives of material on the maritime history of the Gulf, which had hitherto been difficult to digest in large part because of the impenetrable nature of the nautical Arabic its writers employed. Without a reference guide, the researcher is lost; and now, with one in English, one hopes that historians with an interest in this subject matter might feel more emboldened to pursue it.

But a nautical lexicon is not just a reference text; it is a source in its own right. As a store of history, it is invaluable: it bears the sediment of the long histories of oceanic encounter between Arabs and Europeans – a history that left its imprint in the classificatory systems that inhabitants of the Gulf developed over the course of centuries. The nautical Arabic of the Arabian coasts includes loanwords from Persian, Portuguese, English, and more, all in a distinctly vernacularized form. What this lexicon immediately makes clear is that any notion of a contained Arabic nautical tradition is deeply flawed. The world of the coastal Arabs was one that was inextricably entangled in the technologies, institutions, practices, and cosmologies of other maritime communities and empires.

A couple of mild critiques might be offered here. One would have liked more of an introduction to the text from Staples, who has established himself as one of the foremost authorities on the maritime heritage of the Gulf. He is uniquely positioned to guide the reader through the text a little more, and to frame it more for us. The core of the book spans just over 600 pages; space was clearly not a constraint. For those of us who are invested in the subject matter, hearing more of his editorial voice would have been welcome.

One might also take issue with the size of the volume; it is a very large book. To be sure, it is a beautifully produced volume, replete with pictures, drawings, and a handy translation table. However, for a book that someone might hope to use as a reference, it is an awkward size and weight; this is not a book that one can carry far beyond the office, and it is difficult to balance in one's hands. These are, of course, small quibbles with what is otherwise an eminently useful text. Al-Salimi and Staples are to be commended for their efforts; I look forward to the excellent work it will generate in the future.