ABSTRACT
The British takeover of the three islands of Abu Musa, Greater Tunb and Lesser Tunb in the name of their Arab vassals in 1903–04 and 1908 can be considered one of the outcomes of the new British strategy in the Persian Gulf. Devised by Viceroy Curzon and implemented in the early years of the twentieth century, the new strategy aimed to strengthen British control over the Persian Gulf and preserve it as a ‘British lake’ in the commercial as well as the political and military spheres by eliminating the growing threats perceived from Germany, Russia, France, the Ottoman Empire and Persia to Britain’s omnipotence there. The Russian and Iranian domestic predicaments in the years 1903–06 made the British job easier and provided them with wider latitude to pursue and implement the Curzon strategy in the Persian Gulf as far as the three islands were concerned; Russia and Iran were both increasingly submerged in periods of revolutionary uproar.
