Pre-oil Gulf history didn't vanish when oil was discovered. It survived in places few people thought to look. Fahad Bishara, associate professor at the University of Virginia and the Doha Institute, discusses his books A Sea of Debt and Monsoon Voyages. He explains how 19th-century merchants kept long-distance trade going through extended credit, how Kuwaiti dhow captains read literature and used celestial navigation, and how he came across his grandfather's dhow logbooks in a friend's family trunk.
00:00 Introduction
01:36 A Family Link to the Sea
07:21 Memories of Indian Ocean Trade
13:58 Port Cities and Merchants
20:23 Credit, Debt, and Law
25:54 Routes and Commodities
32:03 The Voyage of “the Crooked”
40:45 Navigation and Life at Sea
43:23 Gulf History Beyond Oil
49:43 Further Reading
Fahad Ahmad Bishara specializes in the economic and legal history of the Gulf, the Indian Ocean and the Islamic world. He is Associate Professor of History and Rouhollah Ramazani Professor of Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies at the University of Virginia, currently on leave and teaching at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. He is the author of A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which received the J. Willard Hurst Prize (Law and Society Association), the Jerry Bentley Prize (World History Association), and the Peter Gonville Stein Award (American Society for Legal History), and Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History (University of California Press, 2025), which follows a single Kuwaiti dhow on a 1924 trading journey around the Persian Gulf and Western Indian Ocean, drawing on the private archives of Kuwaiti merchant and dhow captain families. He holds a BA from the University of Southern California (2004), an MA in Arab Gulf Studies from the University of Exeter (2006), and a PhD in History from Duke University (2012).
Connect with Fahad Bishara 👉 https://history.virginia.edu/people/fahad-ahmad-bishara
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