Abstract
The Sultanate of Oman, once thought to be peripheral to the interests of scholars of the Middle East, is enjoying something of an academic renaissance these days, and for a few reasons. Changing political circumstances have pushed researchers towards countries that are thought to be more stable, and Oman is very near the top of that list. Likewise, the surge in interest in Indian Ocean studies, which has become something of a boom industry over the past two decades, has attracted scholars to the Sultanate, which has long celebrated its overseas connections to East Africa, India, and beyond. And finally, a series of astute decisions on the part of the Omani government to sponsor academic research, public history projects, and Arabic language programs has allowed it to capture much of the momentum. Oman: A Maritime History is the product of the confluence of all of these forces, particularly the last: one of the volume’s editors, Al-Salimi, is a minister in Oman, and has sponsored a number of conferences on Oman’s history; the other, Staples, is the director of a maritime heritage project sponsored by the Omani government. The publisher has put out a number of edited volumes that have come out of these meetings; this volume is the ninth in the series. Normally, government sponsorship of an ostensibly academic publication would immediately cast doubt on its reliability. In this case, however, these doubts would be largely unwarranted: the editors have put forward an enjoyable set of essays that guide lay readers and specialists alike through the thickets of Oman’s maritime past.
The volume begins with a valuable thought piece by Edward Alpers, a renowned historian of East Africa and the Indian Ocean world, in which he maps out historiographical debates at the intersection of maritime history and world history, focusing on the degree to which maritime historians have struggled to make their work relevant to a changing discipline. The chapter is highly useful for anyone unacquainted with the field of maritime history, and though Alpers sometimes mires himself in the weeds of scholarly debates, he does establish a broad framework for thinking about the rest of the volume and the degree to which it anchors itself in either field – an issue that I’ll return to later in this review.
The bulk of the chapters in the volume hem close to the political timelines that historians of Oman know well by now. The first in this series is a chapter on the bronze age, followed by one on the Iron Age, before moving into the Islamic period (until 1500 or so). Readers are then given a chapter on the Portuguese period, another on the Ya’rubi dynasty and early Busa’idi sultans (ending with the iconic Sa’id bin Sultan Al-Busa’idi, who established the place of the Omani Empire on the world stage), and then a chapter on Oman since his death, focusing largely on the post-1970 period (the reign of the current sultan, Qaboos bin Sa’id). All of the chapters highlight the degree to which Oman’s history and economy was bound up with its neighbors, and the increasing intensity of those connections over time. Though the conclusions themselves are often general and unsurprising, the level of detail readers are treated to, particularly in the first three chapters, is remarkable. The final two chapters – a thoughtful survey of shipbuilding techniques by Tom Vosmer, and a delightfully textured discussion of the history of Arab navigation by Eric Staples – cut across time and space, and instead make claims about a shared Indian Ocean maritime culture, though one with important regional and temporal distinctions.
The tendency in Oman: A Maritime History as a whole to hem to periodizations set by the world of high politics might be disappointing for maritime historians, who would want to see more work along the lines of the last two chapters. Indeed, what becomes clear from reading the volume is that rather than being a maritime history, this is a survey of Oman’s maritime connections with the rest of the Gulf and the wider Indian Ocean, from East Africa to Southeast Asia. This is useful in itself, since there has not yet been a book that charts out Oman’s maritime past like this one does, and works on Omani history have tended to focus on the period from the eighteenth century onward. And yet, in its focus on different political intervals, the volume ends up narrating a history that overemphasizes political actors. We learn very little about merchants, virtually nothing about the history of Oman’s dhow trade, and important dhow ports like Sur are all but written out of the story – and this in a volume that purports to be a maritime history. This is all the more disappointing when considering the poor state of our knowledge on the history of the dhow trade, despite there being an Arabic-language literature on the subject (noted in the book’s preface).
The book also stops short being of the sort of ‘world history’ that Alpers pointed to. Though the substance of each chapter could well fit into a world-historical framework (particularly the chapters by Floor and Niccolini, which together cover the well-trodden period from roughly 1500 to 1850) most appear to be non-academic in their aspirations, preferring instead to take more of a survey approach to their subject. Readers are given useful details, broad periodizations, and orientations to the source material available, but rarely get a sense of the significance of the findings for debates in, or narratives of, world history more broadly. The main exceptions in this regard are the two chapters by co-editor Eric Staples, both of which strike a balance between detail and originality while appealing to a broader world history framework, and Alpers’s introduction.
What emerges clearly over the course of one’s reading is that this is a volume aimed at a more general audience – evident from the survey-oriented nature of the individual chapters, but even in the book’s high-quality production, which feels more appropriate for a coffee table than an academic library. Seen as a general survey, it excels: there is no better edited volume of the history of Oman and the Indian Ocean. Though there is some unevenness in the quality of chapters and it is sometimes difficult to see the forest for the trees, the editors have done a wonderful job of putting together a useful volume that is sure to attract lay readers (some of whom might be put off by the hefty price tag) but in which even specialists will find fascinating material.