Review of Allen James Fromherz, The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024).
Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– Historically known as the Persian Gulf, the body of water stretching from Iraq on the northwest to Oman on the southeast has increasingly been called the “Arab Gulf” since the rise of Arab nationalism in the 1960s. In the 1980s, the Gulf was the scene of military attacks by Iran and Iraq against merchant vessels in what was known as the “Tanker War.” More recently, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has occasionally seized ships transiting the Gulf’s waters. In April 2024, for instance, the IRGC took hold of a container ship with alleged ties to Israel as a response to the Israeli attack against the Iranian consulate in Damascus.
The Gulf might have a contested terminology and a recent past of significant military tensions. And yet, focusing too much on these conflictual dynamics would obscure the broad contours of the Gulf’s history. This history, explains Allen James Fromherz in his book “The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present”, has been largely dominated by personal and commercial interactions across the Gulf’s shores and beyond. The Gulf has historically been more of a channel between lands than an unbridgeable rift, argues Fromherz, a historian and Director of the Middle East Studies Center at Georgia State University.
Many authors would be daunted by the task of synthetizing over four millennia of history in a geographical area that encompasses eight different modern states. But Fromherz rises to the challenge. The way he structures the book certainly helps. Fromherz does not present a comprehensive historical account—this would have been an impossibility in less than 300 pages. Instead, he chronologically presents the stories of six different port cities in the Gulf that, in turn, open the door to exploring different historical eras in the region.
“The Center of the World” starts in Dilmun, an ancient kingdom centered in today’s Bahrain, and moves to Basra or Hormuz before concluding with the modern metropolis of Dubai. The centrality of the Gulf for world history, notes Fromherz, is related to the region being a link between the Mediterranean and India via the Fertile Crescent. It was in the Gulf that trade first emerged and later, in the second half of the eighth century, Basra became “Islam’s economic and cultural powerhouse.”[1]
“Geography is destiny” is a sentence attributed to Ibn Khaldun, the Arab scholar born in the fourteenth century. It is perhaps no coincidence that Fromherz is also a biographer of the North African historian and philosopher. In “The Center of the World”, Fromherz greatly relies on geography to explain the Gulf’s history. The Seleucids, the Parthians, the Romans, the Sasanians, and the Ottomans, all failed to dominate the Gulf. This, explains Fromherz, is connected to the Gulf’s three natural barriers. On the Arabian side, vast deserts. On the Persian side, high mountains. And north of Basra, extensive marshes. When the Iranian Sasanian Empire tried to collect taxes from the people living in the Gulf, they would often disappear into the mountains or find temporary refuge in desert oases.
Meanwhile, before the advent of modern topography, the Gulf’s coasts offered small boats too many places to hide for powerful fleets to dominate the waters. The British Empire, the first to accurately chart the geography of the Gulf in the second half of the nineteenth century, was not interested in territorial domination there. To British eyes, the Gulf was a trade area and a vital link between Britain and territories where London wanted to exert direct control, such as India.
Lacking fertile lands to grow agricultural surpluses and develop large urban centers, long before oil could be exploited economically, the people of the Gulf prospered on trade. That was the case of Siraf, in what is currently southern Iran. Even though it had to import freshwater on ships, Siraf grew in the tenth and eleven centuries as it became an important transit point for Basra and Shiraz. Siraf lived and died by trade, as it collapsed when commercial routes changed in the twelfth century.
Fromherz credits the importance of trade with fostering a climate of tolerance and co-habitation among different religious and ethnic groups in the Gulf. While on the sea, people of diverse creeds and origins coincided as passengers on the same ship. On the dry land, communities that would have been separated in other contexts had to share quarters in small port cities such as medieval Siraf or Hormuz under Portuguese rule.
Tolerance also made economic sense for the Gulf’s rulers. An open-minded attitude allowed a port city to attract all kinds of traders (and the customs revenue that came with them) if they knew their traditions would be respected there. As Fromherz explains, “because a port city would quickly shrivel and die without trade and comparatively advantageous taxation, different levels of society had a vested interest in openness and toleration of diverse groups from throughout the Indian ocean.”[2]
King Sebastian of Portugal, who reigned during the second half of the sixteenth century, is believed to have died during a crusading mission against a Moroccan sultan. Leaving behind this crusading zeal, the same king intervened to stop the planned destruction of a mosque in Hormuz. Highly indebted, Portugal could not afford to antagonize the Hormuzi Muslim traders, who might have moved elsewhere leading to a loss of customs revenue. Hindu temples and synagogues were also spared, and the Catholic priests in Hormuz were relatively restrained in their conversion efforts.
Portugal would ultimately be humbled in 1650 when it lost Muscat to an alliance of Muslim Omanis and Hindu Banians. The conquest of Muscat shocked Europe because “a major imperial Western power had been bested not by another Western navy but by an emerging Gulf coalition.”[3] Similar to the naval battle of Tsushima in 1905, when the Japanese vanquished the Russian navy at the end of the Russo-Japanese War, Portugal’s defeat in Muscat questioned beliefs in Western superiority.
Tsushima was the parting shot in “The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia”, as Pankaj Mishra puts it in his book about the rise of the Asian continent. In contrast, three centuries passed between the Portuguese defeat in Muscat and the emergence of the Gulf as an independent center of power. If the nineteenth century in the Gulf was dominated by the pearling industry, the twentieth century would bring with it the much more lucrative oil industry, changing the region forever.
Oil was first exploited in commercial quantities in Bahrain, but the largest oil reserves in the Gulf are found in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq. Oil exploitation not only catapulted the region’s economy but dramatically altered the lives of its citizens. In 1960, life expectancy in the United States was 70 years. In Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the figures were 59 and 46 years, respectively. By 2022, both Qatar and Saudi Arabia had overtaken the United States, with Qatari citizens living 82 years on average, five more than US citizens. A similar dynamic had taken place in terms of infant mortality.
In a book that is highly original and full of meaningful anecdotes, the last chapter, which covers the recent history of the Gulf, feels comparatively dull. Even so, Fromherz concludes with some observations about the future of the Gulf worth taking into consideration. He notes that the Gulf’s rulers should avoid rising nationalism, war threats, and isolation from their subjects. Instead, he reminds the readers that “commerce, consensus, and cosmopolitanism… exist deep in the veins of Gulf history, often originating there long before they were practised in the West.”[4]
Although often incomplete, the end of the Qatar blockade in 2021, the truce in Yemen in 2022, and the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran in early 2023 were positive steps. Since late 2023, though, the war on Gaza and its regional implications have thrown the Gulf into new uncertainty. The future of the US presence in the Gulf is also difficult to predict, especially when we are only days away from the inauguration of US President Donald Trump, who has been sending mixed signals on the matter. If the US were to withdraw progressively from the area, Fromherz believes the Gulf would focus on south Asia, its natural partner. This would, in a way, strengthen the notion of history being circular.
[1] Allen James Fromherz, “The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024), p. 77.
[2] Ibid., p. 25.
[3] Ibid., p. 161.
[4] Ibid., p. 258.
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