Introduction

The Msheireb Downtown Doha project, located on a 35-hectare site in the centre of Doha near the corniche, will eventually encompass commercial, residential, cultural and government buildings, and has an agenda, according to the project website, to ‘unite the Doha of yesterday with the vision of Doha tomorrow, restoring old ways of life, the traditional sense of community, and a strong sense of culture and heritage’. Incorporated into the redevelopment project are four museums housed in reconstructed or renovated houses dating to the first half of the twentieth century which opened to the public in September 2015. These museums are: Bin Jelmood House: The International Slavery Museum, focusing on Indian Ocean World slavery and contemporary human trafficking; Mohammed Bin Jassim (MBJ) House, presenting the urban history of the Msheireb area; Company House, which addresses the early oil industry in Qatar; and Radwani House, displaying the development of the house through archaeology, and traditional lifestyles in dioramic rooms. These museums have opened in advance of the new National Museum of Qatar (due to open in spring 2019), and other planned national museums such as the Oman National Museum (opened in 2016) and Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi (the project is currently paused), giving a foretaste of the contemporary construction of national histories in the region, and an introduction to the nature of the different Gulf states’ conceptualisations of their relationship to the outside world, in particular their shifting relationship with the Indian Ocean World (Plate 19).

In this discussion, the Msheireb Heritage House Museums are used as a case study to examine the contemporary (re)construction of these relationships, considering the exclusions from the historical narratives of large elements of the Arabian Peninsula states’ diverse populations and historical foreign interactions.