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206 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

19 Mustafa ‘Abd al-Latif, the Persian entrepreneur and landowner,
early 1960s

such as the Kanus and al-‘Urayyads built their mansions in their garden
properties, which they had bought some decades earlier from members of the
ruling family. Further west, the al-Salmaniyyah Hospital and the residences
of its medical staff formed the first nucleus of al-Salmaniyyah, a quarter
which developed after 1968. In the same period the new port of Mina
Salman and the British Naval Base at al-Jufayr on the southern coast became
the new poles of urban expansion which gathered momentum after inde-
pendence with the creation of the new residential area of Umm al-Hasam.
By 1971 the landscape of the outskirts of Manama and the geography of
its coastline had started to change irreversibly. The green agricultural belt
which once surrounded the town shrunk visibly as date gardens disap-
peared and old agricultural settlements became part of developing com-
mercial and residential areas. Land speculation also altered patterns of
land use along the coast. While until the 1950s the Land Department had
utilised reclaimed land in order to settle Manama’s informal commun-
ities, in the following decades land reclamation became a lucrative source
of income, particularly for members of the ruling family, a process which
continues today (see Figure 20).

Immigrants, nationality and land

Policies on immigration, nationality and land were instrumental in the
‘nationalisation’ and ‘Arabisation’ of Manama, processes which in the