Page 211 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

6 City and countryside in modern Bahrain

This final chapter examines the making of Manama as an oil town and
capital city. The focus is the impact of state intervention on the built
environment and on urban life, and the contrast between these develop-
ments and those in the agricultural hinterland of Bahrain. The impact
of oil did not trigger a new dialect of urbanisation, in the sense that it
did not radically transform the patterns of settlement which had
become apparent in the nineteenth century. Cultivators, turned into oil
workers, continued to reside in their ancestral towns and villages,
some of which were absorbed into Manama’s metropolitan area after
the oil boom of the 1970s. Awali, the first modern oil town (madinah
al-naft) in the Gulf, built in 1937 by the American-owned BAPCO,
developed as a ‘neocolonial’ settlement, a gated community which
housed a new class of European and American technocrats who run the
industry.
Oil revenue and state centralisation did not efface the traditional polit-
ical and socio-economic differences between Manama and the rural areas
inhabited by the indigenous Shi‘i population. Rather, they enforced a new
set of inequalities. In the oil era, historical legacies and inequalities con-
tinued to be enshrined in built environments and social landscapes, as
they had been in the days of pearling. Manama became the harbinger of
Bahrain’s modernity as well as that of the entire Persian Gulf. The capital
of the region’s first modern state and its first ‘metropolis’ in the making, its
position was consolidated by the transfer of the British Political Residency
from Bushehr to Manama in 1947 after the independence of India. Urban
development and the modernisation of urban life became the centerpieces
of the new national project pursued vigorously by Belgrave and by the
Government. In contrast, the agricultural hinterland of Manama devel-
oped at a different pace. Rural areas fell short of private and public
investment and were penalised by the land regime enforced after 1925,
while traditional rural life was fatally undermined by the decline of
Bahrain’s agriculture.

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