By the time of his death in 2010, the Irish writer Fred Halliday had long since established himself as one of the world’s leading authorities on the politics of the Middle East. Halliday began a prolific career with his seminal work Arabia without Sultans, published in 1974. It was later translated into multiple languages, including those of the Global South.

The analysis put forward by Halliday was not merely a case study of the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf in the 1960s and ’70s, as the British Empire lost its political grip in the region and the Gulf monarchies gained formal independence. As Halliday argued when revisiting his book a quarter of a century later, it was also “a document of its time,” adopting the perspective, tone, and language of the revolutionary left during this period.

This was a time of sociopolitical conflicts and struggles resulting from combined and uneven development in the Global South, with revolutionary social forces rising, one after another, to envisage an alternative world, and a pressing need for activists like Halliday to raise awareness of these struggles in the heartlands of counterrevolution like Britain. Halliday wrote as an avowed Marxist who was involved in solidarity work with the revolutionary movements of Arabia.