Muscat and Oman

The End of an Era

Ian Skeet

$34.99

Paperback

Forthcoming
Pre-Order now

QTY:

English

Eland Publishing Ltd
01 May 2025

Travel writing

Series: Eland Classic

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 its vast sand deserts and arid highlands in 19668, 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.

With a new biographical afterword from Ian's son, Mark Skeet.

'A marvellous work

so learned, so full of insight and yet often so funny.'

Jan Morris 'a totally fabulous portrait of a land on the brink, drawn with intelligenceand sardonic good humour.'

Sara Wheeler

By: Ian Skeet
Imprint: Eland Publishing Ltd
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm,
ISBN: 9781780602240
ISBN 10: 1780602243
Series: Eland Classic
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 01 May 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

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 196668 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.