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“Oil, Onions, and Education: A Social History of Development in Oman from the 1950s to the 1980s” investigates Oman’s great social and economic transformation in the 20th century driven by oil exploration and exploitation. The Omani government refers to this period as al-Nahḍa [The Renaissance] and presents it as an incessant march of Sulṭān-led “progress.” By contrast, this dissertation uses the approaches of social history and critical political history to reveal that Oman’s developmentalist epoch is best understood as a massive project of state building divided into two phases: a conquest phase and a consolidation phase. The conquest phase and the beginning of the consolidation phase took place during the reign of Sulṭān Saʿīd bin Taymūr (r. 1932–1970). The conquest phase ended, and consolidation accelerated under Qābūs bin Saʿīd (r. 1970–2020). The work opens with a study of how the British-backed oil company Petroleum Development (Oman) worked with Saʿīd bin Taymūr to invade and conquer the Omani Imamate, forcibly unifying the coast and the interior of the country into one polity. It also focuses on Omanis outside the country during this period, and their support of revolutionary struggles inside the country. To foreground the history of ordinary people in Oman, the dissertation then examines three case studies of groups in Oman from the 1950s to the 1980s: oil workers of the Durūʿ tribe, farmers in the interior oasis of Nizwā, and teachers and educationalists spread out across the country. Their engagements with the social transformation fell along a spectrum. Oil workers used strikes to resist corporate exploitation and to force the government to respond to their needs, farmers in Nizwā faced a new state-imposed institution, the experimental farm, whose experts sought to transform the area’s agricultural production into part of a modern commercial economy. Within this coercive context, Nizwānī farmers organized and worked as best they could to create profitable businesses, but without interest in national development. On the opposite end of the spectrum, educators—including a large expatriate contingent—participated zealously in building a government education system, with Omani teachers and administrators viewing their work as a patriotic endeavor. For expatriate Arab teachers, mostly Egyptians, working in Oman brought remuneration and adventure. The Omani and foreign teachers and educationalists worked to fuse the Sultanate together ideologically by teaching Omanis that they were part of an Omani nation and part of the broader Arab world. The final chapter investigates the role of the Royal Oman Police in physically consolidating government power over the Sultanate as the first national police force in the country. Their ability to be everywhere, and to reach areas of the country like mountaintops and islands hitherto largely inaccessible to the state, made the people of Oman legible to the government. At the same time, this new presence also made the violent potential of the state legible to the people. Nonetheless, while Oman’s developmentalist period may have, in fact, been a coercive process, ordinary people in Oman contested and influenced its historical trajectory. At critical moments they resisted its force, repurposed its programs, or engaged with its agents and, in the process, helped form the Sultanate of Oman.

Existing literature on the relationship between Britain and the seven Trucial States of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al-Quwain, Ras al-Khaimah, and Fujairah emphasizes the perceived uniqueness of Britain’s role as an “informal empire.” As a result, scholarship devoted to analyzing the role of Britain in the formation of the United Arab Emirates tends to treat Britain’s involvement in the Gulf as an exception compared to its involvement in the rest of the Middle East. This thesis examines British involvement in the Trucial States after the Second World War as a form of colonial rule built on technologies and ideologies that were built on and resonated with other forms of colonial governance across the British Empire. This thesis examines the technologies and ideologies of British rule in the Trucial States through primary source analysis of archival documents drawn from archives in the United Kingdom and United Arab Emirates, mainly relying on the National Archives of the United Kingdom. Applying the methods of reading along and against the archival grain, this thesis finds that British rule was both productive and repressive, relying on the construction and enumeration of social categories to understand the population, and on the repression of the population according to the assumptions colonial administrators made about certain social categories. The British-controlled Trucial Oman Levies fused the general model of colonial policing with the specific model of John Glubb’s Arab Legion, which assumed the existence of a Bedouin race as a distinct social category. British administrators also faced crises in which actors imagined as apolitical subjects hreatened the rubrics of colonial control, as exemplified in the 1965 and 1966 coup d’etats carried out against the rulers of Sharjah and Abu Dhabi respectively. Examining the UAE in the immediate aftermath of unification, this thesis challenges prior assessments of British withdrawal from the Gulf by showing how the ideologies and technologies of British colonialism persisted in the institutions of the nascent state. Concluding with a brief analysis of the UAE in the 21st century, this thesis speculates on the contemporary relevance of the UAE’s inherited colonial past

This study aims to reveal how the factionalization of Ibāḍiyya and Nukkarīyya sects took shape within the historical process. In this regard, the emergence and development of the Ibāḍiyya madhhab in North Africa, as well as its relations with the Nukkarīyya madhhab, have been examined in detail. The position of Nukkarīyya within Ibāḍiyya has been studied with a comparative approach, taking into account the political, social, and religious structure of Ibāḍiyya in North Africa. In the first chapter, the emergence and historical development of Ibāḍiyya in North Africa were examined. Within this framework, the foundation, rise, and decline of the Rustamids State, along with the establishment of the Ibāḍī imamate system and the origins of intra-sectarian divisions, were analyzed. In addition to the socio-political structure and cultural environment of the Rustamids, fundamental issues such as Ibāḍiyya’s relationship with local tribes, its opposition discourse based on justice, and its religious organization were examined with reference to primary sources. In the second chapter, through the use of qualitative methods, the process of division within Ibāḍiyya and its sub-branches were discussed. Accordingly, the definitions and views of these factions in Ibāḍī sources and heresiographical literature were compared. Special emphasis was placed on the emergence of the Nukkarīyya, its nomenclature, leaders, doctrinal foundations, and the geographical regions in which it spread. In the third chapter, by employing textual analysis and the method of comparison, the position of the Nukkarīyya within Ibāḍiyya was analyzed, and the doctrinal and political principles of these two factions were comparatively studied. Fundamental theological issues such as tawḥīd, the names and attributes of God, khalq al-Qurʾān, and ruʾyat Allāh were examined, along with political issues such as the imamate, the qualifications required of an imam, types of imamate and the principles of the ʿAzzāba Organization (walāya, barāʾa, wuquf). As a result, the place of both factions in the history of Islamic thought and their relations with one another were re-evaluated within the methodological framework of this study, leading to several findings. Firstly, it was underlined how Ibāḍiyya, with its inclusive and institutional approach, succeeded in establishing a lasting religious-political structure in the region during the Rustamids period, whereas the Nukkarīyya, due to its doctrinal rigidity, gradually became marginalized throughout history. On the other hand, the strict doctrines developed by the Nukkarīyya concerning the theory of imamate and theological issues led to its separation from Ibāḍiyya. Nevertheless, the role undertaken by the Nukkarīyya during political crises significantly influenced regional balances. Finally, the study demonstrates that the fundamental differences between the two groups become particularly evident in their conceptions of religious authority and political legitimacy.