Contested Space: Anglo-American relations in the Persian Gulf, 1939-1947

Contested Space fills a gap on the Persian Gulf in accounts of global Anglo-American rivalries during the Second World War. It goes beyond existing country, oil and cold war strategic studies to trace a broad ideological as well as material contest between two variants of overseas capitalism: neo-corporatist British 'guided development' and American 'new deal internationalism'. Frictions over how, respectively, to order or liberate the region and its peoples continued into the cold war era, with the 'special relationship' contingent on one power's sublimation to the other. With the USSR an intermittent factor, intra-Western frictions were more influential in postwar Persian Gulf politics, when expanding American interaction with new indigenous client-allies accelerated the unravelling of British imperialism.