This paper builds on research we have carried out in the context of the pre-oil Gulf region with the 2000-page “geographic and statistical” section of the Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia, a compendium of British imperial intelligence compiled by John Gordon Lorimer in the early twentieth century. Our paper explores the possibility of combining toponymic information from Lorimer’s Gazetteer with that of other historical sources covering overlapping geographical areas, including Ottoman material on southern Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula, British gazetteers of India, and material produced by other imperial interests in the region (Omani, Saudi, Qajar, French, German, etc.) Lorimer’s geographical and statistical dictionary, which represents two-fifths of the entire Gazetteer, exhibits a tension between geographical description and statistical catalog of elements of agriculture, animals and human built space. The text’s toponyms operate on a number of levels of specificity that do not necessarily correspond to the British administrative vision of the region, ranging from salt flats to tracts of desert to human settlements. Likewise, the over 800 entries in the geographical dictionary contain sharply varying levels of specificity that nevertheless follow certain identifiable patterns: human settlements designated as towns, for example, largely include descriptions of built environment, human geography, animals, agriculture, markets, and defences, some of which are organized tabularly. That the level of detail also varies by region within the Gazetteer points to regions where the British had a long historical presence or a strong network of local agents. We will discuss how the structure of place in Lorimer’s Gazetteer does not reflect a hierarchical vision of the region, but rather an expansive and intrusive imperial desire for granular information about spaces in which British sovereignty was always highly contested and legibility was assumed to be inadequate. It considers the implications of choosing any one of these sources, particularly Lorimer, as a “spine” gazetteer, against a comparison of the structural assumptions of various sources. Instead, the paper discusses the first stages of data creation in the Open Gulf Project where a diversity of sources reflect overlapping imperial interests and geographies and divergent levels and scales of imperial legibility.