Past Read: Creating the Arabian Gulf: The British Raj and the Invasions of the Gulf

 Rich, Paul. Creating the Arabian Gulf: The British Raj and the Invasions of the Gulf. (Lexington, 2009)



First, the peremptory word about poetics:

There is something about diving into imperial histories, especially after a particularly long spate of economics and political readings. The tone is suddenly jaunty, snobbish, and slightly daring, as though the author is gazing at you with eyebrows raised over his glass of brandy. After the spare, even terse descriptions of so many journal articles, no doubt pruned repeatedly by editors assiduously aiming for the 6000- or 10,000-word mark, suddenly I encounter a meandering book with tiny font and entirely too many pages. A surfeit of adjectives and adverbs is typically absent from Middle East-subject tomes written by non-native speakers. (Why is that exactly? Is it lack of vocabulary? A different feel for usage?) But turn to imperial history and immediately an entirely unnecessary multi-syllabic descriptor dots nearly every sentence. On one page: fecklessly (the author’s characterization of his own approach, in which he also carefully alludes to himself in the staid third person); “the redoubtable Gertrude Himmelfarb” (admittedly, such a name really does deserve its own adjective); “a contumacious reviewer” who “deflatingly remarked” something; the “anodyne possibilities”; a “fugacious challenge” – all of this, and I am only halfway through the page! (It's page 8, incidentally.)