The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present (2024), by Allen James Fromherz, is an ambitious volume that attempts to tell a regional history focused upon the sea, viewing the gulf as more of a connector than a divider. Each chapter following the introduction is named for a major trade port for the period in question.
Regarding “From the Stone Age” of the book’s title, in the first chapter “Dilmun”, the opening period is covered in a rapid-fire fashion – over a century per page is covered in thirty-seven pages, including a jump from Ea-Nasir to Cyrus with semi-trivial sidelines on Strabo, Julian, and Hammurabi.
I would also like to respect the effort to include antiquity in some way instead of beginning in the medieval period. But if the reader has come to this book hoping for major insights on the Gulf pre-Islam, they will leave disappointed. Relatively little is said about the chapter’s namesake or on modern scholars’ estimates of the carrying trade in the Gulf with the Indus Valley.
That being said, if one views the first chapter as a second, historical introduction to the following five, it serves better. The second chapter, “Basra” covers a tenth as much chronology and is better focused, aiming at the intersection of trade in the Gulf, and the spread of Islamic thought. It seems something of a trend in scholarship to suggest reorienting our understanding of the world through the lens of one particular city.
I believe this approach works well for this chapter, but the approach also fights against the holistic understanding of the Gulf that the introduction argues in favor of. The city of Basra, astride the Tigris/Euphrates delta, exhibited a remarkable diversity of ethnicities and religions, yet one draws the inference that it is chosen as example because of this.
Again, the story of the Zanj rebellion, the establishment of different branches of Islamic scholarship, the rise of Sufism, all read as intended to surprise the reader. Analysis of the events and trade of the Gulf is actually rather lacking in this section.
Chapters 3 (Siraf) and 4 (Hormuz), which cover the later medieval and early modern period are stronger. The topography of the mountains loom large here for Siraf: a protected cove in a jagged coastline. Siraf was a bustling medieval port in Persia, afforded a certain amount of independence due to its topography, and thus Fromherz makes the point it was more connected to the other Gulf ports than to the Iranian plateau.
This is, I think, the closest the author gets to making the point of a fundamental Gulf connectivity, born of a mixture of inaccessibility (by land) and accessibility (by sea), which also made these cities havens for those of not-quite-orthodox outlooks. There is a bit of a chronological gap between the destruction of Siraf (by earthquake) and its demotion as major port and switching to the island of Hormuz in either 1250 or 1500.
Indian traders appear in abundance, but in passing. Hormuz is even more cosmopolitan than Basra; though our written sources are perhaps more judgmental, Hormuz apparently has minimal levels of forced conversion or religious persecution for the time.
There are quite a few interesting assertions about the importance of the Gulf as part of international trade, even after the discovery of the route around Africa, perhaps attesting to the health of Indian Ocean trade for the locals, but evidence and analysis of it remain sparse on the ground. I would like to see more specifics as to what that trade looked like and while Fromherz makes a great point about the agency of local individuals – not simply being acted upon by the Portuguese, he moves on rather than elaborate.
The shift to the pearl economy, then to the oil economy, to speculation about a post-oil future in the Gulf take place in chapters 5 (Muscat) and 6 (Dubai), accompanied by a switch from Portugal to Britain as main European trader, a strong tonal shift, and assertions of global relevance. Here, I am decidedly not a specialist, yet this section is also prone to generalization and what appears to be extrapolations from relatively few data points, which I found surprising considering how much more information we have available for the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries compared to earlier periods.
Here too, the ancient historian sees the long hand of Herodotus, as the author regales the reader with interesting anecdotes that genuinely do tell us useful information about the topic, but also leaving many questions unanswered. Our author makes a strong case of a forward-thinking policy in Oman, including duplicating the colonial tactics of the Portuguese with their possession of Zanzibar on the Swahili Coast (itself an extremely interesting port city, but not part of the Gulf).
At the same time, the British East India Company turned a blind eye other actions to actors who kept their shipping un-harassed. A key difference for these two chapters is that rather that being a middle ground for trade between east and west, the gulf had become home to a precious commodity for export. While nineteenth century pearl-fishers sold their pearls through European and Indian middlemen, twentieth-century Arabs sought to cut out the middlemen
In the end, the author has argued that the cities of the gulf are at once unique from each other, but also have more in common with each other than with their terrestrial neighbors because this has made them more diverse and worldly.
This stems partly from history but also, I believe, partly from a belief that the Gulf States, whatever their other flaws, are today best positioned to try to broker a more peaceful Gulf. Our author closes with a very close analysis of 2020s geopolitics which I do find compelling, if a bit slanted.
For my purposes, I find the book too introductory and generalizing, and while it tends to wax specific on the city of the chapter, I consider it often lacks sufficient context for the period. And for all the emphasis on connectivity, the narrative is really driven by discussion of one city’s relationship with one outside power at a time.
As an entertaining read that provides some insight to places and periods for historians of other topics, it succeeds, the short vignettes are genuinely interesting, and it is possible to see the patterns Fromherz wishes to draw.
I would like to note that history books covering the near east often have blurbs describing them as truly covering premodern history at a level that rarely comes to pass. This book has the same flaw, but in some ways less so than some of its peers.