Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)
Although not advertised as a series, this volume is one of several biographies of 20th-century rulers of Kuwait published by Arabian Publishing. It should be noted, however, that it is far less a biography of Mubarak al-Sabah Al Sabah--sometimes known as Mubarak the Great--than it is a diplomatic history of a pivotal period in the emergence of Kuwait as a distinct political entity. The portrait sketched by B. J. Slot is that of a small shaykhdom at the mercy of complex international machinations involving the British, the Ottomans, the Germans, the Russians, the French, the Al Sa[MODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RING]ud, and the Al Rashid. The author repeatedly ascribes Kuwait's success in steering a viable course between these powers to the astuteness and canniness of Mubarak.
Mubarak Al-Sabah is a very detailed diplomatic history and a largely European one at that. Slot, a Dutch historian and archivist who edited an earlier book on Kuwaiti history and penned a number of studies of early Dutch and other European activities in the Gulf, has scoured the available archives in the United Kingdom, France, Germany,...