Week 7: Pax Britannica: the Persian Gulf and experiments of indirect rule

Mini Lecture

Core Seminar Readings:

Primary sources:

1-A selection of aquatint engravings from Sixteen views of places in the Persian Gulph taken in the years 1809–10: illustrative of the proceedings of the forces employ’d on the expedition sent from Bombay […] against the Arabian pirates (London, 1813). (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.)

2-“Address of Lord Curzon to the British Residents at Bushire, 2 December 1903,” qtd in Paul J. Rich, Creating the Arabian Gulf: The British Raj and the Invasions of the Gulf (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), 274–7.

Secondary Readings:

Guillemette Crouzet, Chap 2 ‘“Pax Britannica” in the Gulf? Strategies for Indirect Rule,1810–1853,’ in Inventing the Middle East: Britain and the Persian Gulf in the Age of Global Imperialism (Montreal: Mcgill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).

Sujit Sivasundaram, Chap. 4 ‘In the Persian Gulf: Tangled Empires, States and Mariners,’ in Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (London: London : William Collins, 2020).

Jonathan Parry, ‘Striving for Leverage in Baghdad,’ in Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022).

Further Readings:

Edward Ingram, In Defence of British India: Great Britain in the Middle East, 1775-1842 (London: Cass, 1984).

Edward Ingram, Britain’s Persian Connection, 1798–1828: Prelude to the Great Game (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)

John B. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795-1880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968).

Edward Ingram, ‘A Preview to the Great Game in Asia, I: The British Occupation of Perim and Aden in 1799,” Middle Eastern Studies 9, no. 1 (1973): 3-18

Denis Wright, ‘Samuel Manesty and his Unauthorised Embassy to the Court of Fath’ li Shah,’ Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies 24 (1986): 153–60

Malcolm E. Yapp, ‘The Establishment of the East India Company Residency at Baghdad, 1798–1806,’ Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 30, no. 2 (1967): 323–36.

Alexander Mikaberidze, Chapter 17 ‘The Qajar Connection: Iran and the European Powers, 1804-1814,’ in The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

Beatrice Niccolini, Makran, Oman, and Zanzibar: Three-Terminal Cultural Corridor in the Western Indian Ocean (1799–1856), translated by Penelope-Jane Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2004).

Iradj Amini, Napoleon and Persia: Franco-Persian Relations under the First Empire (Richmond: Curzon, 1999).

Roger M. Savory, ‘British and French Diplomacy in Persia, 1800–1810,’ Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies 10 (1972): 31–44.

Stephanie Cronin, ‘Importing Modernity: European Military Missions to Qajar Iran,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 1 (2008): 197–226.

Malcolm E. Yapp, Strategies of British India: Britain, Iran and Afghanistan, 1798–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1980).

James Onley, The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers and the British
in the Nineteenth- Century Gulf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

James Onley, ‘The Politics of Protection in the Gulf: The Arab Rulers and the British Resident inthe Nineteenth Century,’ New Arabian Studies 6 (2004): 30–92.