‘Pirates’, ports, politics: The Gulf (khalīj) & international society’s expansion
Ali Al Youha discusses the key points from their new Review of International Studies (RIS) article. If you'd like to know more you can read the full article at - ‘Pirates’, ports, politics: The Gulf (khalīj) & international society’s expansion.
‘Pirates’, Ports, Politics examines how Britain, through ‘gunboat diplomacy’ against Arab ‘pirates’, overran the Gulf’s pre-exiting suzerain system and became its predominant maritime power. By filling a gap in the classical English School ‘international society’ expansion thesis, the article offers an empirically rich account to how and when political and ideational shifts gave way to modern Gulf state sovereignty as territorialised and dynastic. This intervention argues against a long-established Gulf anglophone historiography that embeds monarchism within a nation-state framework as a traditional manifestation of Gulf socio-political tribal character. What are often considered primordial top-down hierarchies are rather outcomes of longue durée processes reified by an often-overlooked nineteenth-century primary institution of international society, colonialism, and its role in fitting the Gulf into a European self-image of sovereignty. Authority that was traditionally overlapping, diffuse, and shared among sheikhs/tribes was territorialised and centralised into monarchies as a pre-requisite to entry into the international system.
The article addresses inaccuracies classifying the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Gulf as a region of low-intensity indirect rule. This assumes a form of governance where British policies had little effect on domestic politics. Events unfolding over 150 years (1820-1971) of British rule reflect imperial policy that gradually turned direct. To substantiate this, the article adapts to IR a turn proposed by historians to re-examine the Gulf through an Indian Ocean lens. It moves the Gulf away from a terrestrial Middle East into an oceanic one, which opens five centuries of Gulf rivalries and interconnectedness within an Indian Ocean world Andrew Phillips and Jason Sharman call a ‘heterogenous’ international order under political diversity. This offers new insights on the Gulf’s transregional maritime past and challenges the over-used essentialist desert-centred paradigm of pre-oil tribal/regional isolationism, thereby, probing an essential question: how indirect was British indirect rule on people whose livelihoods were interlaced with the sea? As the paper shows, it reconfigured inter-polity relations.
Central in the tension between ‘civility’ and ‘barbarism’ in the construction of British colonial Gulf historiography was the concept of ‘piracy’. As ‘the dialectical twin to the “standard of civilisation”’ ‘piracy’ as a category served British indirect rule to legitimate force under the pretext of free, open seas. Eric Hobsbawm writes groups ‘only became outlaws, and punishable as such, when they are judged by a criterion of public law and order which is not theirs’. For British colonial administrators, civility entailed ‘pacification’ of ‘piratical’ maritime tribes to reform their piratical habits, and cultivate them into productive semi-civilised agents under Pax Britannica. Descriptions of ‘uncivilised’ Gulf ‘pirates’ do not explain who these maritime tribes were, nor their role in the regional system.
Suppressing nineteenth-century Gulf ‘piracy’ under the pretext of progress and civilisation produced a binary legacy in the evolution of sovereignty along two axes: some ‘pirates’ were accepted by treaty as lawful sheikhs, while other sheikhs remained ‘pirates’. This binary in construction of the political narrowed sovereignty to create the beginnings of interstate relations. To mould the Gulf into a ‘civilised’ co-existence, the article identifies what I call mechanisms of ‘pacification’ Britain deployed to restrict agency of ‘unruly’ maritime tribes to manage the gradual transition from divisible anarchy to indivisible hierarchy. However, what gave way to suspending the traditional socio-political structures of divisibility in authority in the coastal Gulf were British policies that began not over land, as often assumed, but through its sea. Imposing rules at sea to suppress ‘pirates’ and control their movements weakened the traditional role maritime tribes played as vital agents in Gulf coastal politics, a weakness compounded when oil was discovered, breaking maritime tribal alliances. Gradual weakening of maritime tribes, coupled with the collapse of the Gulf’s pearling industry and oil’s discovery in the 1930s, turned the politics of protection of British-backed sheikhly agents in the Gulf inwards towards the desert, the new centre of power.
Finally, the paper analyses what the classical English School international society thesis ignores: tribes and tribal confederacies. Rather than treat Gulf maritime tribes as ‘illegitimate’ non-state ‘piratical’ actors, the article approaches them as legitimate actors on their own terms. Approaching nineteenth-century British colonial/imperial Gulf expansion through a binary between a legitimate European state or state-backed East India Company and illegitimate non-state ‘pirates’, ignores the complex relationship between the private violence of treasure-seeking ‘plunder/robbery’ versus legitimate ‘self-help’. By considering all non-state violence illegitimate and ‘piratical’, scholars have not properly interrogated implications of British anti-piracy intervention and its role in the socio-political engineering of indivisible authority. British-Gulf encounters produced a struggle between the old and new orders: A pre-colonial ‘self-help’ system, which Britain delegitimised as ‘piracy’, and a new rules-governed British system in which European rules of ‘civility’ regulated force. This heightened tensions between rights Britain bestowed on signatory sheikhs as representatives of their polities and enforcers of British anti-piracy rules versus rights of their people. This weakened tribes and reinforced British-backed sheikhs as loci of authority. For colonial administrators, maritime security trumped justice on land, an emphasis that still holds for Western powers concerned with the Gulf today.
Want to know more? You can read the full article at DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000536
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Image from Richard Temple, Views in the Persian Gulph: https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/orbis:3577647
