Lecture Access

This lecture will be available to view until 4 January 2027

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OVERVIEW

Watch on Demand | Online Lecture


For more than a thousand years, Oman was bound together not by a single ruler but by faith and tribe.

 Its distinctive Ibadi Islam–found almost nowhere else–united a patchwork of rival clans through elected imams, creating one of the longest-lasting theocracies in the Muslim world. Yet beneath that unity ran deep tribal fault lines that repeatedly fractured the land and invited outside powers in.

When the Portuguese seized Muscat and the coast in the sixteenth century, it was internal division that let them. And it was a charismatic new dynasty, the Yaruba, that expelled them and turned Oman outward, building a maritime empire that reached from the Swahili coast of East Africa to the ports of India. Castles, dhows, and bustling souks tell the story of a nation whose history was written in trade.

In the second of two lectures, Dr Eireann Marshall traces Oman's path from tribal confederations to empire, and on to the cosmopolitan, modernising sultanate it is today.

LECTURER

Biography

Eireann is an Honorary Research Associate and Associate Lecturer with The Open University. Raised in the Veneto and educated at Barnard College, Columbia University, and the Universities of Birmingham and Exeter, she brings a rich international perspective to classical civilisation. With extensive experience as a lecturer and tour leader across Italy, Tunisia, Sicily and beyond including Venice, Pompeii and Ravenna – Eireann is bilingual in English and Italian, and combines scholarly rigour with engaging storytelling. Her lectures for Academy Travel invite listeners to explore the ancient world not just as history but as a living dialogue between past and present – bringing monuments, art and ideas vividly to life.

Dr Eireann Marshall

Classicist & Historian