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.

A marvellous work so learned, so full of insight and yet often so funny. Jan Morri

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.