“A welcome reassessment that not only shows how Britain’s empire in the Middle East began and ended in the Persian Gulf but reminds us of the violence and contestation of that colonial relationship. Meticulously researched and rigorously argued – an outstanding book.” Eugene Rogan, University of Oxford and author of The Arabs: A History
“Working with beaches and water, rather than deserts and oil, Crouzet recasts the origins of the idea of the Middle East. A masterful narration of a complex history of British imperial violence, treaty-making, trade, and indirect rule. This book makes an empirically rich contribution to recent efforts to centre the Gulf in world and British imperial history.” Sujit Sivasundaram, University of Cambridge
“Deeply researched and elegantly written, Crouzet’s Inventing the Middle East offers a major intervention in historical analysis of Britain’s conception of the nineteenth-century Persian Gulf. Taking archaeologists, cartographers, colonial bureaucrats, pearl fishers, slave traders, steam technologists, and Wahhabis into her capacious purview, Crouzet expertly anatomizes the emergence of the Gulf.” Margot Finn, University College London
“Crouzet re-centres the Gulf in early globalizing flows and provides a welcome antidote to more conventional accounts that treat the region as peripheral to world history prior to the discovery and extraction of oil.” International Affairs
“Crouzet provides an “aquatic and amphibious history” of the region, primarily through the prism of British records [and] delivers a highly readable and methodologically sound account of how the British envisioned and shaped the Gulf from the 1780s to the early 20th century. The book carefully deconstructs the hybrid political and legal architecture that resulted from the interactions between the most powerful empire of the late 19th century and local stakeholders.” *International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies *
