Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman, 1965-1976

ISBN-13: 9780199674435 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 368 str.

Abdel Razzaq Takriti

Opis

At a time when Arab revolutionary movements are once again dominating the headlines, Monsoon Revolution offers a fresh reading of the Arab revolutionary tradition, examining one of its foremost illustrations.
The Dhufar revolution in Oman (1965-1976) was the longest running major armed struggle in the history of the Arabian Peninsula - Britain's last classic colonial war in the region - and one of the highlights of the Cold War in the Middle East. Monsoon Revolution retrieves the political, social, and cultural history of that remarkable process. It analyses its causes, course, and outcomes, while uncovering the networks, ideologies, personalities, as well as the regional and global actors that sustained it. Relying upon a wide range of untapped Arab and British archival and oral sources, it revises the modern political history of Oman by revealing the centrality of popular movements in shaping events and outcomes. Monsoon Revolution further examines colonial dynamics, narrating the ways through which Sultanic absolutism was constructed by Britain in order to suppress the persistent local revolutionary challenge. A series of landmark mysteries are also solved, including the details of the 1970 coup bringing the current ruler onto the throne.
Contextualising Omani revolution and absolutism, Abdel Razzaq Takriti illustrates how the events that unfolded in Oman during the years 1965-1976 were embedded in broader Arab and international currents. The Sultanate's dependence on global networks of imperial and monarchical solidarity is examined and the fundamental importance of these networks for its own survival is highlighted. On the other side, the ties that bound transnational anti-colonial movements and revolutionary networks are explored, and Dhufar is revealed to be an ideal vantage point from which to demonstrate the centrality of South-South connections in modern Arab history.

Recenzje

Abdel Razzaq Takriti's excellent book will quickly be established as the definitive account of the revolutionary Arab nationalist and third worldist armed struggle in Dhufar, waged against the absolutist sultan of Oman and the British Empire from 1965 to 1976 ... this work draws with considerable maturity and skill on British colonial documents, Arab personal collections, unpublished papers, and interviews, and as such offers unprecedented empirical depth. Takriti's polished prose illuminates much that was unclear or misunderstood about the revolutionary movement itself, its major organizational changes and strategies, its revolutionary culture, its forms of republicanism and citizenship, and especially its transnational links to the Arab nationalist movement and the third world.

O autorze

Dr. Abdel Razzaq Takriti is a Lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield. He holds a DPhil from St Antony's College, Oxford and was a Junior Research Fellow in Political History at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.