ABSTRACT
The Persian Gulf constitutes a main highway between East and West and has been on the periphery of empires through the ages. As such, it acquired increasing importance for the British Empire in the eighteenth century and beyond, as Britain endeavoured to secure the approaches to its Indian colonial dominion, which was of paramount importance for the status of Britain in the world. Under Pax Britannica, there were no foreign representatives, apart from British agents and two American consulates at Dhahran and Kuwait, until 1961. Journalists were unwelcome, as the British tried to keep the Persian Gulf out of the news. The British, competing with the Portuguese and the Dutch throughout the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, finally rose to prominence and superseded their rivals as hegemon in the Persian Gulf in the early nineteenth century.
