Articles From Our Experts

At the time of Sheikh Jāsim bin Muḥammad Āl Thānī’s death in 1913, his great wealth was revealed to the British in intelligence reports sent by Yūsuf bin Aḥmad Kanoo.

Oman’s lease of a major Persian port was defined by obscure origins, and a relationship that was generally uneasy and often contentious – a situation that British authorities were happy to exploit. This is the first article in a series of two.

The first crossing of the Arabian Peninsula by a European, revealed in glimpses by the early correspondence of the Bushire Residency, was indicative of the East India Company beginning to look beyond the Gulf littoral and into Central Arabia.

Ownership of a medal of the Order of the Lion and Sun becomes the subject of an unseemly quarrel, as related by the British Envoy in Tehran.

The culmination of extensive travel and research, George Curzon’s Persia and the Persian Question was a critical success. Yet was its author happy with it?

A small, unprepossessing file from the India Office Records contains some of the earliest surviving aerial photographs of Qatar, captured as the country was about to enter a new chapter in its history.

Appearing in files from Bahrain in the 1930s, the terms ‘Holi’ (singular) and ‘Hawala’ (plural) are not immediately recognisable to most readers. Gulf History cataloguers take a closer look at the terms to decipher their meanings.

In November 1917, St John Philby was sent from Basra on a mission to cross the desert and meet with Ibn Sa‘ud. It was an expedition that changed his life.