The consolidation of Iran’s frontier on the Persian Gulf in the nineteenth century

Iran’s rightful predominance in the Persian Gulf looms large in the historical memory of Iranians, although control over the past two millennia was in fact episodic and not continuous. The Sasanian influence in the Gulf, which reached its height in the sixth century ad, for example, is often recalled, as is the glittering succession of ports – Siraf, Kish, and Hormuz –which dominated the Gulf from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries. The most recent period of Persian hegemony came under Nader Shah in the 1730s, a time when Iran briefly controlled Bahrain and Oman.1