Monsoon Revolution

The Dhufar revolution in Oman (1965-1976) was the longest running major armed struggle in the history of the Arabian Peninsula - Britain's last classic colonial war in the region - and one of the highlights of the Cold War in the Middle East. Monsoon Revolution retrieves the political, social, and cultural history of that remarkable process. It analyses its causes, course, and outcomes, while uncovering the networks, ideologies, personalities, as well as the regional and global actors that sustained it. Relying upon a wide range of untapped Arab and British archival and oral sources, it revises the modern political history of Oman by revealing the centrality of popular movements in shaping events and outcomes. Monsoon Revolution further examines colonial dynamics, narrating the ways through which Sultanic absolutism was constructed by Britain in order to suppress the persistent local revolutionary challenge. A series of landmark mysteries are also solved, including the details of the 1970 coup bringing the current ruler onto the throne.