Page 132 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

4 Restructuring city and state: the municipality
and local government

With the establishment of a municipality in 1919, Manama entered a new
era of modernisation and local government. The reorganisation of the
town became an integral part of the process of reform which throughout
the 1920s supported the creation of a modern state administration under
the aegis of the Government of India. As Manama consolidated its posi-
tion as the lynchpin of British informal empire in the Persian Gulf, it
acquired a dual administrative and political personality as the centre of the
modern state of Bahrain (Hukumah al-Bahrayn) and of a municipal
administration (Idarah al-Baladiyyah). The merchant elite of the pearl
boom effectively took control of local government as members of the
town’s municipal council (majlis al-baladiyyah). While municipal elec-
tions and the enforcement of legislation and taxation became the pillars of
baladiyyah rule and the symbol of a new era of modernisation, the council
provided the forum for the continuation of patronage politics cementing
the traditional alliance between merchants and rulers.
After 1927 the municipal government survived the collapse of the
pearling industry, which caused widespread economic dislocation
throughout the Gulf and jeopardised the continuation of the reforms in
Bahrain. The baladiyyah assisted the development of the town after the
discovery of oil in 1932 but its political legitimacy was short-lived. After
World War II, in particular, the new social and political forces which had
emerged in the first two decades of the oil boom started to challenge
municipal government and the old notable class as an integral part of a
‘reactionary’ ancien régime. Between 1951 and 1957, popular mobilisa-
tion, sectarian conflict and the rise and consolidation of nationalist
politics transformed the baladiyyah into one of the symbols of the con-
servative alliance between the old merchant elite, the rulers of Bahrain
and the British imperial order. The collapse of the municipal order in
1957 somewhat ironically coincided with the suppression on the part of
the government of the nationalist movement which had antagonised the
baladiyyah so bitterly during the protests staged throughout Bahrain
in the 1950s.

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