Around the turn of the 20th century, sultans of Oman liked to sentence the most heinous criminals of their state to the fate of being eaten by a lion. A special cage was installed for the purpose in the royal palace; alongside it was another intended for lesser offenders, in the hope that close observation of the lordly executioner at work might reduce reoffending. The whole Persian Gulf by this point was virtually a British possession and Oman’s thirty-something sultan, Feisal bin Turki (reigned 1888–1913), served largely at the pleasure of Her Majesty’s Consul at Muscat and a British gunboat anchored in the bay. The Victorians were far too experienced imperialists to go around willy-nilly trying to impose their values or systems of government onto the Middle East – and so the horrors of the lion’s cafe in the Muscat royal palace went on. But when, several years later, the old lion died, the British finally intervened and told the sultan that he would not be permitted to purchase another.

Besides offering a portrait of a fabulous sultanate in a moment of crisis, Ian Skeet’s Muscat and Oman – first published in 1974 and now reprinted by Eland – is a reminder of what a diverse and, in places, peculiar empire Britain’s was during its apogee. Oman’s British connection originated early in the 18th century, when Muscat’s mystique as a maritime power made it a valuable ally in the struggle with France for control of India. During Oman’s heyday under Sultan Said bin Sultan (reigned 1806–56), the British bolstered the realm as it built up an East African trading empire from a sultanic outpost at Zanzibar; then, in the second half of the 19th century, they proceeded to destroy it in their crusade against the slave trade, which was Oman’s greatest industry. In the early 1900s, preoccupied by competition with Russia, unblushing British imperialists decided it was time for the sultanate to be finished off entirely and for the Union Jack to ‘be seen flying from the coastlines of Muscat’. The insatiable proconsul Lord Curzon even erected some flagpoles for the purpose during his 1903 Persian Gulf tour. But Britain was so bound up in treaties with the sultan, so wary of its lawyers and so alert to unnecessary expenditure that Oman’s shaky independence survived. Curzon was rebuked and a company of British marines was dispatched to remove the flagpoles.

Even so, the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman remained a peculiar state. The Al Bu Said dynasty, who rule Oman to this day, had been wealthy merchants before they won power in 1749 after expelling some Persian invaders and settling a long-running civil war. They set about making Oman great again by establishing settlements down the east coast of Africa. A century later, a British-brokered succession agreement created separate sultanates in Zanzibar and Muscat. Even then, the rump sultanate in southeastern Arabia remained a notoriously composite state, as signified by its double-barrelled name. Muscat’s domains comprised just the 200-mile stretch of coastal plain sweeping north from the capital to the mouth of the Persian Gulf at Musandam. Oman, on the other hand, comprised the mountainous interior, inhabited by the Islamic Ibadi sect, who elected their own imams and tended to regard themselves as the occasional allies rather than the subjects of the Muscat sultans. Complicating this picture still more, 20th-century sultans chose increasingly to live in a third, entirely separate southerly province called Dhofar, a lush ‘Garden of Arabia’ lapped by the Indian Ocean, which they governed as a private hereditary estate from an Arabian Balmoral. 

When Skeet travelled there at the end of the 1960s, Oman was renowned as the Middle East’s hermit kingdom, doing battle against the advance of the modern world, refusing even to have anything to do with the United Nations. At a time when neighbouring Dubai was already a booming, go-ahead place, Muscat was a dusty, somnolent town that still locked its gates after sunset and lacked either a newspaper or a radio station. A notice board affixed to one of the gates constituted the only direct means of communication between the government and the people, announcing unsuspected new laws, such as – Skeet observed one day – a measure banning the carrying of dolls in public. Internal customs barriers made the conduct of business almost incomprehensible and the country used twelve different currencies. True, Skeet occasionally stumbled upon tokens of the jet age, from the Japanese refrigerators on sale at Muscat’s ancient souk to the oil tankers subsiding on the horizon. But the absence of modern infrastructure, economic development or education left one ‘wholly insensible’ that Oman was an oil state.

Who was responsible for this? The last quarter of Muscat and Oman is given over to a polemic against the country’s then sultan, Said bin Taimur. Taking power in 1932, when Oman was impoverished, in debt and beholden to the British, the sultan developed an almost Victorian attitude to public finances, elevating the principle of fiscal rectitude to the status of categorical imperative. His proudest achievement was having only once run a budget deficit – in 1933. He was also an indefatigable micromanager who liked to control everything that went on in his state, personally approving the entrance of every tourist, immigrant and automobile. He met inevitable British and international criticism with the unruffled equanimity and, at times, glorious effrontery of an Oriental magnate. Today, of course, some of these sultanly proclivities sound eminently attractive, but his principled opposition to education and insistence that Oman’s storybook castles be used as prisons instead of tourist attractions stored up problems for the future. If the book is not quite, as the blurb suggests, a ‘devastating study of the dead hand of autocracy’, it well illustrates the circumstances in which Said’s son Qaboos was able to seize power in a British-backed palace coup in 1970.

Skeet was posted to Oman while working for Royal Dutch Shell, but he is about as far from the stereotypical modern oil executive as one could possibly imagine. Combining travelogue and potted histories, his account largely consists of us following the author as he clambers over the ruins of some Portuguese fortress, an open copy of The Travels of Marco Polo in one hand, trying to trace the course of an ancient waterway or identify the specific tamarind tree that once gave shelter to an eminent Victorian traveller. Touring Muscat’s Christian cemetery, he recounts for us the deeds of the intrepid English dead who lie there, from East India Company sailors to Second World War servicemen – the kinds of people whom today there are entire academic disciplines dedicated to smearing. One, for example, was the first bishop of Lahore, Thomas French, who, after leaving his post aged sixty-five, could not resign himself to some comfortable English retirement and went as a missionary to Muscat, where he lived in a squalid room and frequented local coffeehouses to read the gospels to anyone who wanted to listen. Just three months after arriving, his health collapsed. He died at the British consulate on 14 May 1891 as he was preparing to take the word into the uncharted Omani interior.

Although at his back Skeet always seems to hear the rifles of left-wing Arab revolutionaries threatening to overthrow the sultan, one cannot help but feel that Skeet is the real anachronism here. He may be the last in that long line of independent-­minded, adventurous and slightly eccentric English Arabists produced in the far-off days before Britain became a nation of egalitarians. The sultans of Oman, meanwhile, still reign contentedly in Muscat.