University of Cambridge
An Early Modern Islamicate Port: The Politics and Society of al-Zubāra, 1766 – 1842.
Abstract
dc:description.abstractDrastic political change marked the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the heartlands of the Islamic world, with the rapid succession of regimes in Iran, the decentralisation of the Ottoman Empire, and the rise of the Wahhabis of Arabia. Due to this political fragmentation, the Persian Gulf in this era is often described as a region of turbulence, piracy and disorder. However, as this dissertation shows, the Persian Gulf’s mobile and literate mercantile elites built al-Zubāra, a port on the northern Qatari coast, inhabited between 1766 and 1810, as a hub of commercial exchange and literary production connected with the wider region. Primary Arabic sources reveal the remarkable story of how the Persian Gulf’s inhabitants – chief amongst them scattered merchants and ʿulamaʾ –formed such polities and conceived of themselves as part of the broader regional world spanning the Middle East and South Asia. It is of interest then, not merely to see ports such as al-Zubāra as a forerunner to later national histories or as part of a frontier of the British Empire, but to investigate the regional conditions and organisational logics that formed the inception of this maritime community on its own terms. By centring the role of al-Zubāra’s inhabitants, this dissertation renders visible the array of internal dynamics that brought forth the changing political order and the rise of Arab polities in the Persian Gulf. This structure, typified by the history of al-Zubāra, was to have an enduring legacy that established dynasties and polities that remain to the present day.
Degree
thesis:*- Name dc:type.qualificationname
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of Cambridge
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2025
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Alkhulaifi, Saleh
- Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Ashraf, Assef
Subjects
dc:subject × 4Rights
dc:rightsIdentifiers
dc:identifier.*- DOI dc:identifier.doi
- https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.122197
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/390741