Arang Keshavarzian's "Making Space for the Gulf"

Arang Keshavarzian is is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He is the author of Bazaar and State in Iran: Politics of the Tehran Marketplace (2007) and coeditor of Global 1979: Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution (2021).

Keshavarzian applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East, and reported the following:

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, British colonial officers devised treaty systems to extend their authority in the Indian Ocean world and forge alliances with select ruling families on the Arab coast of the Persian Gulf. While the treaties empowered the British Navy and enhanced commercial rights of British subjects, it helped recognize specific families and shaykhs as rulers of Kuwait, Bahrain, Dubai, and other port cities and coastal regions of the Arabian peninsula. Page 99 discusses protests and movements in the 1930s that critiqued and challenged this political configuration. During these economically volatile times, a combination of merchants, seamen, dissident members of ruling families, and pearl divers called for the creation of councils (or majles) to pass laws to review spending, revenue and invest in public works. Even if these attempts to build political accountability were short-lived and unsuccessful, these movements were also part of the formation of collective national polities and histories that cut across imperial imaginations and geopolitical conceptions of the Gulf as a regional unit.

This page does illustrate the contested nature of imperialism and captures the multiplicity of actors that occupy and travel through the Persian Gulf. These are central themes in Making Space for the Gulf. It also denaturalizes monarchical rule on the Arabian Peninsula and gestures to the book’s emphasis on thinking of geography as shapeshifting and relational, rather than static and existing prior to society.

Where the test falls short is that page 99 does not capture the overall puzzle motivating the book. Making Space for the Gulf seeks to understand what it means for the Persian Gulf to be a region and how the multiple conceptions and social processes of region-making reflect struggles and generate conflicts across the past century and a half. The book presents regionalism as aspirational, representational, and a set of structured practices that taken together help us understand the contradictory ways the Persian Gulf is viewed as a regional whole as well as fractured and variegated. This page does capture some of the tensions generated by one specific regionalization project, the British creation of a set of protected states, but can’t fully articulate the layered histories and multiple vantage points that I try to chart across the book.

Learn more about Making Space for the Gulf at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue