The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf by Dr. Sultan bin Mohammad Al Qasimi

The British became the dominant power in the Arabian Gulf in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The conventional view has justified British imperial expansion in the Gulf region because of the need to suppress Arab piracy. This books challenges the myth of piracy and argues that the threat of piracy was created by the East India Company for strictly commercial reasons. The Company was determined to increase its share of Gulf trade with India at the expense of the native Arab traders, especially the Qawasim in the lower Gulf. However, the company's government in bombay did not possess the necessary warships to defeat the Qawasim fleet, and it had to convince the British government to commit the British Navy to acheive this dominance. Accordingly the East India Company orchestrated a campaign to misrepresent the Qawasim as pirates who threatened all maritime activity in the northern Indian Ocean and adjacent waters. Any misfortune that happened to any ship in the area was capriciously attributed to the 'Joasmee pirates". This campaign was to lead eventually to the storming of Ras al-Khaimah and the destruction of the Qawasim. The research for this book has been done extensively from the Bombay Archives.

English