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[...] Many famous London trading houses had offices in Aden, including Cory Brothers, who by the end of the nineteenth century were the most important coal traders in the London docks. The best-known shipping companies of Aden in the early half of the twentieth century were owned by Antonin Besse a…

In the 1950s, as anticolonial movements unravelled the empire and nationalist sentiments roiled the tricontinents, the British began to consider a programme of economic development as a bulwark against the possibility of revolution.

In his commissioned hagiography of Aramco, Wallace Stegner describes the momentary silence of the oil terminals:

It is a mistake to imagine these dhows as remnants or residues of ‘traditional’ trade; their business has flourished alongside, in the interstices of, and because of the more global, large-scale, and mechanised trade of container ships and modern bulk carriers.

Curzon arrived on a viceregal tour of the Persian Gulf so that he could claim the much-contested body of water and its littorals for Britain.