| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Middle East and Northern Africa

Reidar Visser. Basra, the Failed Gulf State: Separatism and Nationalism in Southern Iraq. (Politik: Forschung und Wissenschaft.) Münster: Lit., 2005. Pp. x, 238. $39.95.

As the threat of a fractured Iraqi state looms, Reidar Visser's timely exercise in counterfactual micro-history reminds us that what is southern Iraq today did not have to be part of the modern state. The question posed in this well-researched, instructive case study is not only whether or not Basra was merely a failed Persian Gulf state, but whether it could ever have become a maritime republic? In short, we learn that the possibility for independence was there, but that the Basra separatist movement of 1921 failed to exploit the opportunity. How so?

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