The Persian Gulf is one of the world’s most critical strategic and economic regions. Since the establishment of international trade routes throughout the Indian Ocean region – extending as far south as Madagascar and as far east as Indonesia – control over who, what and how much passes north of the tip of Oman, through the narrow straits of Hormuz has been perpetually contested. Of arguably equal significance are the cities that dot the surrounding littoral regions, including, but not limited to those on the Iranian side, such as Bandar Bushehr. From the mid-18th century to the 1920s, Bushehr was the most important harbour city of Iran. Like other southern Iranian cities (such as Bandar Abbas and Hormuz), it did not come under direct Iranian rule until the mid-19th century. Despite its importance to an increasingly centralized Iranian state and foreign imperial powers, it has received considerably less academic attention. A vast and well-established body of scholarly works exists on modern Iranian history — particularly political and economic history since the Safavid period. However, few works are dedicated to Bushehr and among the few that have been written, many tend to examine it in the broader context of the southern littoral and Gulf economy. Those works also tend to use European archival sources almost exclusively while Persian-language sources housed in archives within Iran figure less prominently. Instead, this paper outlines a political and economic history of Bushehr using Iranian sources, including documents from the National Library and Archives in Tehran. Its central aim is to investigate Bushehr as a site of contestation between the Iranian government’s attempts to extend state power over the region and the British Residency’s efforts to undermine that power in the service of the broader aims of the India Office. The struggle for control over the region extended not only to trade and diplomacy, but also to local activities including to the politics and administration of the city. Thus, my paper includes a discussion of the efforts of the Iranian government to incorporate the region under its control through representatives to the national parliamentary council, through taxes and records and how the local population responded to these efforts. It tells this history from the point-of-view of different Iranian historical figures, including citizens, officials, intellectuals and nationalists. In doing so, it seeks to amplify Iranian voices within the historiography.