Desert kingdoms to global powers: the rise of the Arab Gulf

Abstract

Rory Miller of Georgetown University's Qatar campus tells readers on page one of this informative work that it is ‘not intended for the specialist reader’. Those who follow the Gulf region will be familiar with the themes and issues he raises: the oil-fuelled ambitions of the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman; their remarkable political stability and the serious domestic and regional challenges that they face; and the problems they have in actually cooperating within the GCC framework. For those unfamiliar with the region, the book can be a deep dive. The wealth of detail may at times overwhelm readers, obscuring the larger points the author hopes to make. But Miller gets those larger points right. The book is organized chronologically, beginning with the oil revolution of the early 1970s that made these countries rich. The early chapters focus on the international and regional politics of their emergence—oil policy within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), relations with the United States and other powers, the upheavals created by the Iranian Revolution, the Iran–Iraq War and the Gulf War of 1990–91. Miller does a good job of relating the ups and downs of world oil prices from the 1970s to the 1990s to the challenges the Gulf states faced in building and sustaining the modern welfare states that oil made possible. He concentrates more on the domestic and intra-GCC stories in the periods of the dramatic oil price increases of the 2000s and the collapse of oil prices in 2014.