The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf 1745-1900.

• Author: PELLETIERE, STEPHEN C.
• Position: Review

The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf 1745-1900. By HALA FATTAH. SUNY Series in the Social and Economic History of the Middle East. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 1997. Pp. ix + 254.

The Making of iraq, 1900-1961: Capital, Power, and Ideology. By SAMIRA HAJ. SUNY Series in the Social and Economic History of the Middle East. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 1997. Pp. viii + 215. $18.95.

It is amazing that over the course of the last twenty years Western understanding of Iraqi political behavior has proved so inadequate. Partly this seems to be the fault of modernization theory, the paradigm to which most Western scholars who do work in this area subscribe. For example, the theory tells us that Iraq is a creation of the West, a fragile entity, prone to fly apart under the least pressure, And what have we seen since 1980, the year that Iraq went to war with its neighbor Iran? The country has survived repeated ordeals; it is doubtful that any mature, solidly constructed state could have done better. Clearly there is a dynamic operating here, of which the modernization theorists have scant comprehension.

The authors of these two books reject modernization theory. They choose instead the approach of economic history. Dr. Fattah concentrates on regional trade in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf from 1745 to 1900; Dr. Haj, on the agricultural policy of Iraq from 1900 to 1963. Between them, they make a strong case that much of what the modernization theorists leave out or gloss over is important if one is to understand the development of the Gulf lands, and in particular to make sense of Iraq's recent confounding behavior.

According to Dr. Fattah, for centuries the Gulf was joined by a loose network of trade relations carried on by tribal shaykhs who doubled as merchants and protectors. They themselves were traders, but they also, through their minions, protected the tribal suqs and market ports. So secure was commerce in their hands that places as far away as the Indian sub-continent were pulled into the regional trading web. Then in the sixteenth century the system was assaulted by the centralizing empires of the Ottomans and Safavids, each of which, on its own, sought to impose its authority by seizing the principal nodes of commerce. The entrepreneur-shaykhs responded by shifting the trade routes; in effect, they set up alternate trading centers (Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar, all derive from this practice)...