"The people of Muscat seemed to me to be the cleanest, neatest, best-dressed, and most gentlemanly of all the Arabs that I had ever yet seen," recalled J. S. Buckingham, a British traveler, after a visit in 1816.
Buckingham's observations are pre- served in historian J. B. Kelly's Britain and the Persian Gulf (Oxford, 1968), a survey of British involvement in the region from 1795 to 1880. As Kelly makes clear, Britain's ever-growing commercial and political interests in the Gulf ensured t...