You're listening to the Politics Theory Other Podcast.

My name is Alex Doherty and my guest today is David Wearing.

We spoke about David's article, The Myth of the Reforming Monarch, Orientalism, racial capitalism, and UK support for the Arab Gulf monarchies.

We talked about the nature of Britain's relationship with the Gulf states,

why it's a mistake to see Western support for brutal absolutist authority in the region as self-consciously cynical rail politic.

And we also talked about the nature of the so-called sportswashing debate

and what's missing from mainstream discussion of the purchase of football clubs such as Manchester City,

Newcastle United, and Paris Saint-German by the Gulf States.

David Waring is a specialist on UK foreign relations in the Middle East.

His monograph, Anglo-Arabia, Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain,

is the only book-length study of the modern political economy of Britain's ties with the

states of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

Our conversation was prompted by his recent article, The Myth of the Reforming Monarch, Orientalism,

racial capitalism, and UK support for the Arab Gulf monarchies, which appeared in the journal

Politics.

So we're talking at a moment when there's an unusually large amount of discussion in the British media about the Gulf states, often focusing on workers and women's rights and the oppression of LGBTIQI people.

But that's to a very large extent occurring in the sports sections of our national media because of the ownership of football clubs such as Manchester City,

Newcastle and Paris-San-German by the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The latter country was, of course,

the venue last year for the rather controversial World Cup. We'll come on to the question of so-called

sports washing later on, but first could you talk a bit about the economic significance

of Britain's relationship to the Gulf states, which you detail in your article, where you describe

Britain's links with the Gulf Cooperation Council, comprising Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi

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