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Restructuring city and state 121

informal empire and acted as its most influential agent in Bahrain. In
1957, following his removal by the Foreign Office, he also became its most
illustrious victim. In this respect, Belgrave’s departure from the islands
brought to a close the very personal relationship which the British Empire
had entertained with Bahrain since the early nineteenth century.

Imperial intervention and state building before oil:
the baladiyyah and the law

The evolution of municipal government in Manama in the 1920s and
early 1930s marked a new stage in the relationship between the town and
Bahrain’s state administration, exemplifying the institutional tensions
which characterised the early period of reform. As the official application
of British extraterritorial jurisdiction after 1919 sanctioned the beginning
of both reform and municipal government, these tensions became most
apparent in the legal sphere. The newly established baladiyyah, the polit-
ical agency and the nucleus of the modern state administration (which
after 1926 was headed by Charles Belgrave) faced complex issues of
jurisdictional authority inside Manama. The application of the law in
force in British India and the parallel development of municipal and
modern state law blurred the boundaries between municipal, imperial
and state authority. By the early 1930s, however, the progressive relin-
quishment of direct British interference in municipal affairs and of extra-
territorial jurisdiction transformed the municipality into a forum of
indigenous legal contestation. In this period the attempts on the part of
the municipal council to obtain independent judicial powers from the
government are evidence of the important role played by the baladiyyah in
the initial stages of state building, as well as of the consolidation of the new
municipal regime.
Municipal government was the brainchild of informal empire and con-
stituted the vanguard of British expansion in Bahrain in the aftermath of
World War I. The baladiyyah was the centrepiece of the new regime
ushered in by the enforcement of the Bahrain Order-in-Council in
1919. Established under the first legislation issued under the authority
of the Order, municipal government transformed Manama into an over-
seas imperial territory with a view to maintaining and expanding the
influence of the Government of India. 20 The consolidation of British
extraterritorial jurisdiction in Bahrain’s leading port was central to the
new municipal regime. The enforcement of capitulary rights upon foreign

20
‘King’s Regulations under Article 70 of the Bahrain Order in Council, 1913, N.1 of
1921’, R/15/2/1218 IOR.