‘Non-Interference, Square Deals and Genuine Protection’: British Intervention and the Trucial System, c. 1798-1876

Between 1820-1892, Britain’s interest in the Persian Gulf gradually expanded through a series of bilateral and multilateral treaties with the rulers of Oman, Bahrain and the emirates of the modern- day United Arab Emirates. These agreements identified the dual maritime irregularities of ‘piracy’ and slave trafficking as targets for eradication. This allowed officials in Bushire and Bombay to imagine themselves as the head of a humanitarian naval confederacy, whose justification was constructed around a new normative order, which measured itself against these inimical illegalities. To accomplish this, British officials constructed a ‘legal space’ to regulate the waters of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman through a gradual process of Trucialisation. The Trucial system was the result of a complex series of interrelations which shaped the construction of this legal space. These interrelations were expressed through a vast imperial network which included multiple trajectories, including London, India, Trucial Arabia and East Africa. This was a space informed not only by the forces of British imperialism but also by the survival strategies and networks of resistance that indigenous actors developed to navigate imperial structures. Through a study of British interventions against maritime violence and slave trafficking, it is possible to explore how the Trucial system was the result of a series of compromises between multiple stakeholders with varying priorities. By utilising a spatial framework, this thesis will resist binary analyses of British imperialism to examine the various factors which informed the structure of the Trucial system and the character of British imperialism in Trucial Arabia.