This paper discusses the tripartite relationship between the sheikhdoms of al-Zubayr, Kuwait, and the Najd region. These entities shared several characteristics, including common demographics due to the presence of Najdis in Kuwait and al-Zubayr and partially shared identities and cultural norms due to successive waves of migrations from Najd to both Kuwait and al-Zubayr since the seventeenth century. This paper raises the following question: What was the political and cultural impact of the southern Iraq/Northern Peninsula sheikhdom of al-Zubayr on Kuwait and Najd during the period from the 1800s to the first half of the 20th century? To investigate this relationship, I researched and analysed primary materials (both in Arabic and English), such as unpublished manuscripts, private and public archives, public documents (British and Ottomans), and oral history records. This research suggests that despite the collapse of the sheikhdom in the 1920s, historical evidence suggests that al-Zubayr had a significant impact on the political and cultural development of the region. At the intellectual level, sources point to the anti-Wahhabi movement in al-Zubayr, spearheaded by religious scholars such as Mohammed bin Fairuz. In addition, the paper shows that Zubayri intellectuals developed modern educational institutions, which had a significant impact on the development of Kuwait’s education system. The religious scholars of al-Zubaryr seemed to have a significant influence on Kuwait’s clerics, such as Abdullah AlDuhayan and Abdulaziz Alrushed in Kuwait, as well as other scholars from Najdi origins. At the political level, this paper sheds light on the role played by intermarriages, such as the alliances between the al-Sabah and al-Thaqib families. Sources also indicate that al-Zubayr offered safety and protection to Kuwait’s political opponents and vice-versa. Likewise, Najdis and Zubayris played significant roles in political disputes between Kuwait and Najd, such as those involving al-Rasheed and al-Saud. Although the sheikhdom collapsed, al-Zubayr had a lasting mark on the formation of present-day Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. On the one hand, this paper questions the prevailing narratives in the Gulf region, viewing Iraq as somehow disconnected from this seemingly cohesive group, and the Iraqi narrative, on the other hand, merely presenting al-Zubayr as part of al-Basra. On the contrary, historical evidence strongly suggests that al-Zubayr had a significant influence at several levels. Nonetheless, because the sheikhdom has collapsed, its significance may have been somewhat neglected by historians.

In 1899, the government of British India signed a protection agreement with Mubarak al-Sabah, the shaykh of Kuwait. Most historians have taken this as the starting point of modern, independent Kuwaiti history, dismissing continued Ottoman claims to Kuwait as posturing. But were they really so meaningless? This paper contributes to a growing literature which has questioned the universality of modern European sovereignty-concepts, pointing to the Ottoman Empire as a rich repository of alternative understandings of power and rule. The paper reads correspondence between Mubarak, British officials, and Ottoman authorities in Basra and Istanbul to show that the Ottomans and British had very different assumptions about what power and sovereignty meant. Building on early-modern ideas about rule, Ottoman officials saw Mubarak (the individual) as the key. And because the shaykh had substantial interests – namely, date plantations – in Basra, which he used to maintain his authority in Kuwait, Ottoman officials were able to exert influence over Mubarak, and therefore Kuwait, through Basra. The British, on the other hand, discounted Mubarak’s interests outside Kuwait, viewing him primarily as the ruler of a defined territory. They therefore understood their agreement with the shaykh to be about Kuwait, rather than about Mubarak personally. As a result, when Ottoman authorities destroyed portions of Mubarak’s Basra date groves in 1905, the shaykh called upon his British allies for assistance, insisting that his primary goal in signing the British agreement had been the protection of “my honor and my property and my land (…) if your protection is only for the town of Koweit, the protection of Koweit does not benefit me at all.” For their part, the British refused to see the date properties as anything other than a distraction. Their interpretation, that Mubarak was primarily a stand-in for the Kuwaiti nation and territory, has persisted in part because of post-World War I histories of Kuwait, Iraq, and the British Empire. In addition to exploring the complexity and layered nature of sovereignty at the turn of the twentieth century, the paper pushes back against the artificial separation of Kuwaiti and Iraqi histories in the late Ottoman period by demonstrating the social and economic entanglement of Basra and Kuwait, as well as the ways that Sabah power in Kuwait was founded in the Basra date groves. In doing so, the paper aims to move beyond the methodologically-nationalist narratives which dominate both Gulf and international history.

This paper re-examines the Iraqi-Kuwaiti crisis of 1961, triggered by Iraqi leader ‘Abd al-Karim Qasim’s claim to Kuwait as part of Iraqi territory, and the events that immediately preceded and followed it. I aim to understand how the clashing concepts of Iraqi and Kuwaiti sovereignty were produced through public historical disputes and, crucially, ideas about environmental changes and resource scarcity caused by imperial intervention and the development of the oil industry. I explore this topic through Iraqi, Kuwaiti, and international media; engineering documents; and British archives. There are numerous extant histories of the 1961 crisis that examine it from the perspective of British foreign and military policy, and these accounts also thoroughly discuss Iraq’s and Kuwait’s respective claims to Kuwait’s rightful status that sparred over conflicting understandings of the Ottoman-era history of the region. Through new research, I am building on our understanding of these events by focusing on how environmental claims were also key to Iraqi and Kuwaiti understandings of their own sovereignties, and how these ideas intertwined with disputes over history. In their initial claims that Kuwait was part of Iraq, Iraqi government sources (including Qasim himself) asserted that Britain had intentionally drawn Kuwait’s borders to leave it barren of fresh water supplies so that it could be exploited for oil. Qasim, for example, framed the “liberation” of Kuwait as an act of care, extending water supplies to a vulnerable population to ensure their survival while their oil would inevitably run out. At the same time, the Kuwaiti press proudly reported that Kuwait was beginning to extract fresh water from its own underground aquifers, ensuring that it would no longer need to import water from Iraq. In the early 1960s, the concept of resource sovereignty was central to anticolonial politics, and pan-Arabism was at the peak of its influence. As a result, the competing Iraqi and Kuwaiti claims were made within pan-Arabist frameworks, though with differing and incompatible concepts of what that meant. Ultimately, I argue that the 1961 crisis is a key moment for understanding how Iraqi and Kuwaiti anticolonial politics had dramatically shifted since the 1930s, as well as for tracing the roots of how competing Iraqi and Kuwaiti sovereignties became entangled with Western imperial politics in contradictory ways thirty years later. This moment was produced in the nexus of oil, water, and—although the concept did not yet exist locally—a warming climate.

This paper explores trends in Iraqi poetry after Iraq’s two late twentieth-century wars in the Gulf, the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) and the Gulf War (1990-1991). In this paper, I argue that the Iraqi cultural scene has been impacted by the Gulf Wars, resulting in a change of Iraqi position in the map of Arabic literature after being a pioneer in the second half of the twentieth century with the rise of the free verse movement in Iraq and its immense influence on Arabic poetry. Like all aspects of life, Iraqi poetry was influenced by the turmoil of the period after the Gulf War and the UN sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s. Moreover, it was a moment in the history of Iraqi poetry that witnessed significant changes of style and form. In the 1990s, young Iraqi poets looked for alternative ways of expression. For example, a poetry festival held in Baghdad in 1992 celebrated prose poetry as a new form of expression, but also indirectly as a new form of subversion and indirect opposition to the rule of tyranny. The UN sanctions broke both the Iraqi economy and Iraq’s links with the regional area which had been a major connection in creative writing and innovation in the previous decades. Iraq’s connections to the Gulf in the 1940s were among the key influences that led to the new free verse movement in Iraqi and Arabic poetry in general. Pioneers such as Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab had found a shelter in the Gulf press. Kuwait, for example, acted as his final nursing destination before his death, after being denied this in Iraq and elsewhere in the world because of his political opinions. However, by the 1990s, Iraqi poets found themselves under an unyielding detachment from their regional surroundings. As a consequence, they articulated an expression of isolation and nihilism that unveiled a subversive, depressed, and destroyed generation whose major subjects were war, violence, cruelty, tyranny, and cultural oppression. This paper uses sources from published poems by Iraqi poets in literary magazines outside Iraq such as Al Ightirab aladabi in London (1998) where the poems were sent; interviews with some of the poets who agreed to talk about their experience; and archived books that were secretly published through the photocopying technique in few circulated copies in the 1990s by the poets themselves to write manifestos of the their new poetry.