U.S. interest in what’s here called the Persian Gulf can be generally traced to the discovery of oil in the Middle East, a development that has rewritten geopolitics in the last century.
But what the Saudis and GCC countries call the Arabian Gulf and what others know simply in Arabic as al-khalij has long been a “global gulf” that could be construed as being the focal point of world history for thousands of years.
Georgia State University Professor Allan Fromherz outlines his argument in “The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present,” published in September 2024.
“If you just look at a map of Eurasia, which is where the majority of the human population has lived over human history, you see that the Persian Gulf is really this hypotenuse,” Dr. Fromherz told Global Atlanta in an interview.
While “gulf” connotes separation in English, Dr. Fromherz, a geographer and historian, argues that the waterway is more of a connecting point, a crossroads for cultures and commerce from reaching from the East Indies to East Africa and points beyond.
During an Authors Amplified conversation with Global Atlanta in October 2024, Iran had just lobbed missiles at Israel, which had been confronting Iran’s regional proxies for their role in the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023. In June 2025, the countries would fight a 12-day war in which Israel achieved air supremacy, with American B2 bombers coming in to strike Iranian nuclear facilities.
President Trump’s decision to join Israel in a new bombardment aimed at killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and degrading its defenses, has put the region at the forefront of Americans’ minds yet again.
Beyond the human cost, oil prices have risen as Iran has blocked shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow point through which an estimated 20 percent of the world’s supply passes. Some analysts fear a protracted conflict could touch off a global recession.
“If the Gulf were somehow cut off from the rest of the world, which happens when there’s conflict, then that would immediately raise oil prices and have a direct impact on things like, I don’t know, presidential campaigns,” Dr. Fromherz said presciently more than a year ago.
More broadly, however, his work helps provide a zoomed-out perspective on how this region has long been essential to global trade, with some unlikely (and largely positive) effects in a brutal world of clashing empires.
In contrast to Iran’s theocratic regime and the strict Saudi Islam of today, the Gulf, he argues, was always a place of tolerance — by necessity. Religious and cultural accommodation were competitive advantages for small city-states that relied on customs revenues as their only lifeblood.
“They didn’t even have access to a hinterland with rich agricultural resources, so they were, all in all, dependent on a global system of exchange thousands of years before that economic system has come to dominate our world,” he said, comparing these port cities to rich Italian city-states of the Renaissance.
In perhaps a cautionary note on the way today’s war has been prosecuted, he noted that empires were also traditionally hampered in their ability to dominate the Gulf, given its various chokepoints and the complex landforms that allowed bands of guerrillas to slip away into secluded marshes and desert hills.
In the book, Dr. Fromherz offers historical profiles of six port cities who saw their fortunes ebb and flow with the monsoons and floods of the region over millennia. This crossroads affected not only the rise and fall of some of the earliest human cultures, but also the spread of the three Abrahamic religions.
Dubai, the U.A.E. emirate whose image as an expat haven has been tarnished by Iranian drone and missile attacks, may be rightly seen as the futuristic heir of these entrepôts, prepared for today’s global economy by a long history of understanding the mechanics of trade — even though the mode of conveyance has changed.
“People think, ‘Oh, this is just a mirage, (Dubai and Abu Dhabi) just came out of nothing.’ But there’s other parts of the world that have enormous oil wealth but aren’t successful to the same extent and haven’t invested in it in this way. These Gulf states have a long and storied history of global commerce, and knowing how that works,” he said. “Princes would spend years away, sometimes in Zanzibar or in India. They would leave behind their wives, sometimes to rule, or even servants to rule, in their place while they were gone. And this sort of commercial this freedom of movement, this tapping into the monsoon, especially, allowed for this Persian Gulf, to be a globalized space long before we had airplanes, long before we had steamships.”
And before there was oil, there were pearls, the commodity that defined places like Bahrain and led to the first infusions of modern-day wealth and exposure to global markets.
Dr. Fromherz added that while top-down monarchies or emirates dominate the landscape today, at least on the Arab side, this more recent appellation belies a more consultative approach to conflict resolution that hearkens back to their earlier tribal identities.
Now, these regional players have something to teach the world about the overlap between local identity and global citizenship, he said.
“It’s a long experience, over 5,000 years of this type of negotiation, and that I think one of the reasons why the Gulf has been successful as the center of the world, because it allows for people to feel like they are in the world, but also to have their own distinctive identity and background.”
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