The relationship between South Asia and the Gulf today is sometimes reduced to an image of exploited migrant labourers. Whether it is construction work under the scorching Khaliji sun or sleeping in filthy and overcrowded dormitories, we imagine the South Asian experience in the Gulf as one of oppression and immiseration. However, if you had presented this image to a resident of the Gulf a hundred years ago he or she may have doubled over with laughter. Such a future would have seemed unimaginable. Indeed, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Indian residents in the Khalij would have been far wealthier than the average Arab (or Iranian or African). Those from the subcontinent also enjoyed special privileges and protections provided by the British Raj that were not necessarily extended to the Gulf. In this period, India similarly stood in relationship to the Gulf not as a supplier of cheap labour but as an imperial metropole and beacon of modernity.

The Gulf has long been a neglected corner of the Arab world, and historians in particular often saw the region as an unrewarding site of inquiry. In recent years, however, historians have increasingly turned to the Gulf as a space worthy of historical study. These scholars have uncovered rich histories of urban life, piracy, empire and, of course, oil production in the region. With good reason, these scholars have focused on events occurring between the Shatt al-Arab and the Straits of Hormuz. There is no escaping the numerous groups that enter and leave the Gulf, from Ottoman and British administrators to Indian merchants to African slaves. Yet Khalijis themselves appear to be somehow circumscribed by the Straits of Hormuz. The standard image of Khalijis before the era of oil remains that of the bedu, or Bedouin, who at most shepherded his flocks to Mecca or Basra. In this conventional wisdom, the Indian Ocean world came to the Gulf but not vice versa.

However powerful this image appears, it is false. Omanis ruled a vast empire down the Swahili coast, and Kuwaiti and Bahraini sailors and merchants were regular visitors as far south as Madagascar and as far east as Calicut.