Cultures and Contexts: The Persian Gulf and the Modern World

Catalog description

In your lifetimes, places like Dubai, Doha, and Abu Dhabi have become destinations for job-seekers, investors, and vacationers of all kinds. They have become transit stops for international travelers as well as cargo ships. They have hosted everything from the World Cup to branch campuses of leading universities from North America and Europe. This is a dramatic shift from the perception of the region as empty deserts, sand dunes, or “backward” or isolated tribesmen, that at best viewed the lands surrounding the Persian Gulf and abutting the Arabian Sea as a mere gas station for the world economy. We trace this transformation, but in doing so reflect on how various forms of connectivity have prevailed among an array of places and peoples across the world and the region we typically call “the Persian Gulf” (or “the Gulf” or “Arabia”). We ponder the argument that these exchanges and circulations are not incidental, but constitutive of the making of the world as well as these Gulf societies during modern times. Focusing on developments since the start of the 20th century in what is now Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, and Yemen, we seek a relational understanding of capitalism, the oil economy, migration, developmentalism, war-making, urbanism, and political movements, among other topics.