Page 231 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

City and countryside in modern Bahrain 211

Between 1942 and 1945 prices increased six-fold and in 1954, Belgrave
noted, the prices of building sites per square foot were comparable to
those in London. While land and houses became popular investments for
any resident who was able to capitalise on the black market, many proper-
ties were acquired by rich non-nationals who were willing to pay very high
prices to establish their business in the city. By the mid 1950s Persian and
Saudi entrepreneurs owned extensive properties along the seafront and in
41
the inner city, and had also made inroads into the agricultural belt.
Provisions concerning immigration, nationality and land transformed
Manama into a new national and trans-national space. The open port
town of the pearl boom became the exclusive domain of passport- and
property-holding nationals. Immigrants, who had been the building
blocks of pre-oil Manama, turned into possessors of visas and travel
documents, a disciplined labour force subservient to the new economy.
Inevitably, with the imposition of new legal and political identities on the
urban population, the historical ‘town of foreigners’ became the theatre of
novel trans-national conflicts, most notably involving the Persian com-
munity. Moreover, urban real estate (and land in particular) acted as a
new source of political identity in tune with processes of urban modern-
isation and state centralisation. Before oil, the control of land defined the
material and symbolic relationship between Bahrain’s rulers and the
merchant classes of Manama. By the 1950s, the control of urban real
estate had become the centrepiece of a new nationalist rhetoric promoted
by a government which was becoming increasingly intertwined with the
national and Arab character of the oil state.

‘Rationalising’ the rural world: the politics of land

The new legislation on immigration and nationality did not have major
repercussions on the agricultural districts of Bahrain, as no foreigners
resided there. In contrast, land policies represented the main instrument
of government intervention in the countryside until the administrative
reorganisation of village communities under the newly established
Department of Rural Affairs (Idarah al-Shu’un al-Qaryawiyyah) in 1957.
After 1925, the Land Department essentially upheld the status quo ante
by granting the Al Khalifah family permanent rights of ownership over
large portions of their agricultural estates. In some areas, the confusion of

41
Political Agent Bahrain to Political Resident Bahrain, 8 February 1958, FO 371/132893
PRO; Belgrave, Personal Column, p. 204. The Bahrain Government Annual Reports, 1924–
1970: ‘Annual Report for the Year 1362’, vol. III, p. 25; ‘Annual Report for the Year
1365’, vol. III, pp. 56–7; ‘Annual Report for the Year 1372’, vol. V, p. 35.