Page 169 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

Restructuring city and state 149

10 Police vans cordoning off the Municipality (the arched building in
the background) in March 1956. Shopkeepers and market sellers are
protesting in front of the building

tight government control which followed the nationalist agitations of
the 1950s, the political profile of the baladiyyah became increasingly
insignificant. As local government was considerably weakened, the age
of urban reform initiated in 1919 came to a close.

Conclusion
The British rhetoric of reform and ‘rational’ government which supported
the creation of the municipality in 1919 inspired the reorganisation of the
state administration in the following decades. The reforms of the interwar
period left a strong institutional legacy to Bahrain. They supported the
legal and financial reorganisation of the state, the creation of a new judicial
system and of a security apparatus. Moreover, these institutional develop-
ments fostered the separation of the indigenous administration from the
political agency as the new government came effectively under the control
of Charles Belgrave.
Manama’s municipality institutionalised coercion, finance and juris-
diction, functions which before 1919 were exercised by the tribal admin-
istration. Although the arbitrary practices of the Dar al-Hukumah were
ostensibly removed, urban reform proved to be an ambivalent instrument