Colonizing Coastal Oman: The British in the Trucial States, 1951-1971
Contenu
- Titre
- Colonizing Coastal Oman: The British in the Trucial States, 1951-1971
- Créateur
- Hunsinger, Jasper Quinn
- Contributeur
- Jebnoun, Noureddine
- Résumé
- Existing literature on the relationship between Britain and the seven Trucial States of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al-Quwain, Ras al-Khaimah, and Fujairah emphasizes the perceived uniqueness of Britain’s role as an “informal empire.” As a result, scholarship devoted to analyzing the role of Britain in the formation of the United Arab Emirates tends to treat Britain’s involvement in the Gulf as an exception compared to its involvement in the rest of the Middle East. This thesis examines British involvement in the Trucial States after the Second World War as a form of colonial rule built on technologies and ideologies that were built on and resonated with other forms of colonial governance across the British Empire. This thesis examines the technologies and ideologies of British rule in the Trucial States through primary source analysis of archival documents drawn from archives in the United Kingdom and United Arab Emirates, mainly relying on the National Archives of the United Kingdom. Applying the methods of reading along and against the archival grain, this thesis finds that British rule was both productive and repressive, relying on the construction and enumeration of social categories to understand the population, and on the repression of the population according to the assumptions colonial administrators made about certain social categories. The British-controlled Trucial Oman Levies fused the general model of colonial policing with the specific model of John Glubb’s Arab Legion, which assumed the existence of a Bedouin race as a distinct social category. British administrators also faced crises in which actors imagined as apolitical subjects hreatened the rubrics of colonial control, as exemplified in the 1965 and 1966 coup d’etats carried out against the rulers of Sharjah and Abu Dhabi respectively. Examining the UAE in the immediate aftermath of unification, this thesis challenges prior assessments of British withdrawal from the Gulf by showing how the ideologies and technologies of British colonialism persisted in the institutions of the nascent state. Concluding with a brief analysis of the UAE in the 21st century, this thesis speculates on the contemporary relevance of the UAE’s inherited colonial past
- Type
- Master Thesis
- Editeur
- Georgetown University
- Couverture spatiale
- Washington
- Date
- 2026
- Langue
- eng
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