James ONLEY, the Arabian Frontier of the British Raj. Merchants, Rulers, and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf. Oxford

604 Book Reviews / JESHO 52 (2009) 579-618

James ONLEY, Th e Arabian Frontier of the British Raj. Merchants, Rulers, and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xxxv + 352 pp., maps, tables, hardbound. ISBN: 978-0-19- 922810-2.

Th ese days, scholars of the British Empire seem less interested in the metropolis or even the empire’s overseas core than in its edge and periph- ery. Th ey also appear to have shifted their focus from the subjects to the objects, from the colonizers to the colonized. Th is shift entails addressing a topic that sits awkwardly with modern non-Western nationalism: the widespread collaboration of indigenous elites with the colonizers, a pattern of behavior fi rst cast in a theoretical framework by Ronald E. Robinson. James Onley’s well researched study maps in great detail and with exem- plary clarity how this collaboration came into being in the early modern Persian Gulf—or the Gulf, as the author calls this body of water in an obvious attempt to sound neutral—how it operated and how it evolved over time. To this end, he argues for the necessity of viewing India and the Persian Gulf as one geopolitical and commercial arena. Th is may be the book’s single most important message for the larger community of histori- ans. Th e entwinement between the Persian Gulf and India did not begin with European involvement in the region. Th e Persian Gulf in some ways had always been an extension of India and would remain so into modern times—into the 1960s the Indian rupee was the current coin in some of its ports. In colonial times it thus naturally became the westernmost exten- sion of British India. As the author rightly observes in this context, the main reason why the Gulf has never been treated as integral to the periph- ery of the British Empire is that the scholarly discourse on the region has always been conducted in isolation from the wider discussion about Brit- ain and its empire—refl ecting the more general isolation of Middle East- ern studies within academia. Onley’s analysis of the actual working of the residency system rests on the fundamental recognition that a “top down” approach, one that just looks at British offi cials and how they organized their colonies, fails to explain the working of empires. Britain’s informal empire in particular was mostly run by “native agents, people who today would enjoy the status of honorary consuls.” Not the lone British offi cer, suff ering the region’s heat and boredom, but his local agents, Iranians, Arabs, and Indians, did all the hard work, serving as cultural brokers who shuttled back and forth between

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/156852009X458278 Book Reviews / JESHO 52 (2009) 579-618 605 their employers and their own countrymen. As Onley reminds us, the Brit- ish employed these agents mostly for lack of alternatives. Th ey did not have the manpower—few offi cials were keen to work in the Persian Gulf, an area known as a white man’s grave. Th eir linguistic skills and cultural sensibilities also allowed local agents to perform tasks that the British themselves were not able to handle. As importantly, staffi ng positions with locals was cost- eff ective—an indigenous agent cost a fraction of a British offi cer. Onley attributes the success and staying power of the British in the Gulf to a strategy of negotiation and compromise, the outcome of which was a system of representation that served the interests of the British as well as those of local rulers. Th is was indeed a win-win situation for all the stake- holders: it off ered local ruling houses protection in exchange for a modi- cum of British control, and local agents plenty of opportunity to amass wealth and power. In a region as yet unburdened by modern notions of national pride and loyalty, the British Resident became just another Gulf ruler. Following a brief introduction, chapter one is devoted to the discussion of the nature of Britain’s informal empire, tracing it to the habit of the East India Company to hire and employ local Armenian and Banian, Hindu Indian, brokers, who mediated between them and the indigenous rulers. Th e use of mediators turned more administrative and political as the Brit- ish became more involved in Indian politics in the course of the eighteenth century. Later on, the system became one of control over external aff airs and defense in exchange for protection. Crucial to the author’s discussion about the nature of the British pres- ence in the region is the question of whether “trade followed the fl ag,” whether strategy and political interests came before profi t—the position taken by Robinson and Gallagher—or whether the “fl ag followed trade,” as Cain and Hopkins contend, arguing that economic factors were para- mount in British dealings with the region (p. 34). Onley is right in opting for a “sequential” scenario. He proposes that, initially, the “fl ag followed trade,” that the Persian Gulf was only interesting to Britain because of its limited commercial potential. Indeed, until the nineteenth century, the English in the form of the English East India Company only focused on the Iranian side of the Gulf, opening trading posts, factories as they were called, in places like Bandar `Abbas and Basra. Conducting a profi table trade and keeping shipping lanes safe remained the real concern through- out the eighteenth century.