Struggle Over Hormuz And Bab El‐Mandeb Straits Is Centuries Old

Back in the 16th century, however, the rise in global shipping traffic and the arrival of Europe's colonial powers would soon mark a shift towards more violent, aggressive efforts to control the straits.

The Portuguese were naval innovators, introducing a more coercive form of maritime power employing heavy cannons on ocean-going ships. In 1513, Afonso de Albuquerque attacked Aden in an attempt to control access to the Red Sea. He failed to capture the fortified mainland city, which was surrounded by steep mountainous terrain.

As the US has learned centuries later, naval superiority did not translate into immediate victory on land. Portuguese warships could destroy vessels and bombard a harbor, but commanding the waters outside a port was not the same as controlling the land behind it.

However, in 1515, Albuquerque managed to seize the town of Hormuz, where he imposed the cartaz, a paid permit for merchants to sail through the gulf and the Indian Ocean. This regulation of trade is, in essence, what Iran's toll is attempting to do in the present.

This“Pax Lusitana” was more violent than its Chinese predecessor, and in 1622, forces from the Iranian Safavid dynasty and English East India Company vessels joined forces to expel the Portuguese from Hormuz and open up trade.

With Portugal ousted, Ottoman, Safavid, Omani, Dutch and English forces vied for control. The system was dominated by powerful European ships, and by local rulers who controlled both the ports and the goods that flowed through them.

The Dutch East India Company entered these waters in 1614. Supported by heavily armed ships, it established itself at the port of Mokha, in Yemen.

Following Portugal's expulsion, the Dutch obtained commercial privileges in 1623 and competed with British traders in Bandar Abbas, the principal Gulf trading station across from Hormuz.

While the British were famous for the tea trade, the Dutch came to dominate coffee, previously the domain of traders based in Mokha. The Dutch broke Yemen's monopoly over the coffee trade by smuggling Arabica coffee plants to the Indonesian island of Java, where they were cultivated on a massive scale.

The Dutch thus demonstrated that the balance of maritime power could shift through control of production and trade, rather than through cannons and coercion.

However, once the British captured Aden in 1839 they gained the upper hand. They signed agreements with neighboring rulers and tribes in South Yemen that gave them de facto control over Bal al-Mandab at the dawn of the industrial era.

Aden soon became a naval coaling station and communications center, connected to India by telegraph cables. When the Suez Canal opened in 1869, the British also dominated this chokepoint, as the Red Sea offered the shortest maritime route to its crown colony in India.

British hegemony soon came to rely on steam-powered warships and ports, as well as loans and treaties. Much of this was sustained by local proxies along the coast, stretching from Aden to Kuwait.