The Strait of Hormuz has carried commerce and conflict for over two thousand years. Under the Achaemenid Empire, Persian Gulf shipping linked the Persian heartland to the Indus Valley, though overland routes still dominated. The Parthians also depended more on overland trade routes whereas the Sassanids expanded maritime trade through the Gulf in the centuries that followed, moving silk, spices, and pearls between Mesopotamia, Persia, and India. No single power fully controlled the strait in that period. It functioned as an open corridor, its narrowness made it a natural funnel for east-west trade rather than a contested chokepoint, since no navy at that time yet had the reach to blockade it.
That however, changed with the rise of Islamic trade networks. Under the Abbasid Caliphate, Basra and the Persian erstwhile port of Siraf; now a small fishing village of Bushehr province in Iran, became major hubs, and Arab and Persian merchants sailed as far as China’s southern coast. The Kingdom of Hormuz, originally on the mainland near Minab – Old Hormuz (Hormuz e Kohneh), relocated to Jarun Island (modern-day Hormuz Island) sometime around the turn of the 14th century renaming the island, after repeated mainland raids. By the late medieval period, local rulers of Hormuz under the suzerainty of larger regional powers, taxed and controlled shipping between India, East Africa, and China, becoming one of the richest trading islands on earth by contemporary accounts.
Portugal successfully intervened in this economic independence when Gen Afonso de Albuquerque captured Hormuz in the early 1500s, and Portugal held it as a tribute-paying vassal state within the Estado da India; Portugal’s official system of colonies, forts, and trading posts across the Indian Ocean, guarding the sea approach to Goa for roughly a century. The rule ended in 1622, when Shah Abbas I of Safavid Persia, allied with English East India Company ships, besieged and captured the island. The Dutch and English then competed for Gulf trade through the 17th and 18th centuries, with the English gradually outpacing both the Dutch and a declining Safavid state.
British dominance followed, which was formalised through 19th-century treaties with the Trucial Sheikhdoms a group of small Arab emirates on the Gulf coast; roughly the United Arab Emirates of today, acceding control over Gulf external affairs to Britain for protecting the sea route to India. Oil was discovered in Persia in the early 20th century, more discoveries followed across Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait in the 1930s. The strait’s role shifted with these discoveries. It ceased to be primarily a spice and pearl route to become an exit channel for a resource ,the industrial world was to later depend heavily on.
Britain withdrew from its Gulf role in 1971, and Iran, under the Shah, moved to fill the vacuum, seizing the islands of Abu Musa and the Tunbs as British withdrawal took effect. Through the 1970s the strait became central to global oil pricing, especially after the 1973 OPEC embargo demonstrated Gulf supply’s leverage over Western economies.
The Iran-Iraq War turned that leverage into open warfare. Through the mid-to-late 1980s, both sides attacked neutral tankers in what became known as the “Tanker War,” and Iran mined Gulf waters. The United States responded with Operation Earnest Will in 1987, reflagging Kuwaiti tankers under American escort and later Iranian mines nearly sank the USS Samuel B. Roberts in April 1988, prompting Operation Praying Mantis, the US Navy’s largest surface engagement since WWII. The same year, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing 290 civilians, a disaster that still underlines the Iranian distrust of American naval intentions in the strait.
After 1991, the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain, became the strait’s permanent guarantor, a role reinforced during both the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War. Gulf states simultaneously built up their own naval and missile capabilities, wary of both Iran and of depending entirely on American protection.
Iran had traditionally threatened to close the strait each time sanctions were threatened or were put into effect. It rattled the sabre in 2008 and did that again in 2011-2012, when Europe moved to embargo Iranian oil. It rattled it once more in 2018-2019, after Washington suspended waivers on sanctions, but this time the threat came with damaged tankers, limpet mines, and the seizure of the British-flagged oil tanker. This time around despite the ceasefire, the US naval blockade on Iranian ports stayed in place, which warranted an Iranian response.
In 2025, roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne crude and petroleum trade, and about a fifth of its liquefied natural gas, passed through the strait, at its narrowest point only about 34 kilometres wide. Gulf states have spent two decades building bypass routes precisely because of this vulnerability. Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline can move several million barrels a day from its Eastern Province fields to the Red Sea, and the UAE’s pipeline from Habshan, the starting point of the pipeline, through which the crude moves overland to Fujairah, on the UAE’s east coast facing the Gulf of Oman, skirting the strait entirely. On the other hand, Kuwait and Qatar has nocomparable overland alternative. China, as the largest buyer of Gulf crude, has pushed Belt and Road port investment in Gwadar and Duqm partly to hedge against the chokepoint of Hormuz, which has never been just a waterway, but a taxable trade monopoly, a colonial tribute post, an oil artery, and as of now a live battlefield.
Its 2026 closure proved something analysts had debated for decades: that even a partial, week-long disruption cascades through global energy markets faster than alternative routes can absorb. Until Gulf states build redundancy that doesn’t depend on tolerance from Tehran, or Iran and its adversaries reach a settlement that survives the next provocation, the strait will stay what it has been since the Safavids: whoever controls it, leverages at will. It is simple and it is that strait.
