Muscat and Oman
Regular price
€19.99
1966-1968 travels
1970 transformation
A01=Ian Skeet
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Ian Skeet
Autocracy
automatic-update
Bedouin tribes
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=WTL
COP=United Kingdom
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
Desert landscapes
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_travel
Fortified oasis communities
Hermit state
Highlands
Ian Skeet
Isolated cities
Language_English
Medieval kingdom
Muscat
Oil discovery
Oman
PA=Available
Price_€10 to €20
PS=Active
softlaunch
Sultan Said bin Taimur
Sultanate of Muscat and Oman
Travel
Walled cities
Product details
- ISBN 9781780602240
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 23 Mar 2024
- Publisher: Eland Publishing Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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The Sultanate of Muscat and Oman was a hermit state until 1970, preserving in every detail the poverty, personality and picturesque reality of a medieval kingdom. For forty years, Sultan Said bin Taimur personally controlled everything that happened, deliberately cutting the nation off from the headlong development of the rest of the world. Fortunately for Oman this would change, and fortunately for us, we have a first-hand witness to this complex society before that watershed. Ian Skeet travelled across the vast sand deserts and arid highlands of Muscat and Oman in 1966 8, preparing the wary inhabitants for the coming of oil, visiting its isolated walled cities, fortified oasis communities and independent-minded Bedouin tribes. The sultan s motives may have been pure to preserve his people from the sin of usury and the slavery of foreign debt but Ian Skeet s portrait is a devastating study of the dead hand of autocracy.
Ian Skeet worked throughout the Middle East for more than thirty years (1953-85) employed by Shell. This gave him unique access to the interior tribes and communities of Muscat and Oman from 1966 68 when he worked for Sultan Said bin Timur as the liaison officer for Petroleum Development Oman (PDO), explaining the project, the useful future revenues and its vulnerable pipelines to the tribes and sheikhs of the interior. During this period, his wife Elizabeth and their three young children lived in Beit Fransawi, the old French Consulate. Ian Skeet graduated from Merton College, Oxford and after retiring from Shell in 1985 worked as a consultant on the oil politics of the Middle East, leaving room to write Oman: Politics and Development and OPEC: 25 Years of Prices and Politics and to edit a selection of the writings of Paul Frankel.
