Next RAS Lecture - Thursday 14th February

"In the British-Omani Agreement of 1800, the parties agreed “that the friendship of the two States may remain unshook till the end of time”. The aim of this lecture is to trace the British-Omani relationship through just over 300 years, and to analyse how each partner used - and was used by - the other, until under the present Sultan, Qaboos bin Saʿid, Oman emerged into mature statehood, left behind a connection which had been almost exclusive for many years, and developed its present wide cross-section of international relations.

The British relationship with Oman goes back further than that with any other Gulf country; the first agreement was signed with the people of Sohar in 1646. A connection based on commercial interests and on a shared wish to keep the Gulf open to trade, became more intense in the late 18^th and early 19^th century, when British-French competition for control of the Indian Ocean led to rivalry for primacy in Muscat. The British gained ascendancy through a qawlnamah (commitment) made by the Ruler in Muscat in 1798, and the 1800 agreement mentioned above, and for the first half of the 19^th century the British and the renowned Saʿid bin Sultan had enough shared interests to build a relationship which served both sides well. In the late 1800s, as Muscat’s economy declined, British policy increasingly saw the Gulf as a protective buffer on the western flank of the Indian Empire. The British felt it necessary to support the al-Busaʿidi leadership through crises of weak administration and then the revival of the Imamate which led to virtual autonomy of the Omani interior from the signature of the Treaty of Seeb in 1920. Active British military involvement in Oman came with the action on Jebel Akhdar in 1959, and the Dhofar war from 1968 until 1975. These were the last exemplars of a British conduct of affairs which had become exclusive and possessive, though not actually colonial, in the first half of the 20^th century and which disappeared after 1970."