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Conclusion 221

associations which played so large a part in the popular mobilisation of the
1940s and 1950s. On the other hand, old-style tribal authority survived in
the local markets, where the Al Khalifah family continued to own real
estate until and after independence. In some important respects, it was
overseas immigrants who represented the crucial force in the development
of Manama. Before and after the discovery of oil, migrant workers
provided a reservoir of subaltern groups which sustained Manama’s eco-
nomic and demographic expansion. The discontinuities in the geopol-
itics of migration apparent since the late 1930s can be readily explained
by the emergence of Bahrain’s oil industry and by the centralisation of
Manama’s port economy, as well as by the new international conjunc-
tures which characterised the interwar period. This book has argued that
it was the changing social, legal and political position of Manama’s
migrant workers which measured the pace of state and nation building
in Bahrain.
Turning to the imperial context, the dynamics of British expansion into
the Persian Gulf explain the precocious development of Manama in
comparison with the capitals of the other Arab Gulf states. The partial
integration of Bahrain’s leading port into the world economy in the late
nineteenth century paved the way for its transformation into the centre of
a modernising state in the 1920s and early 1930s. In the following two
decades, Manama rose to prominence as the ‘central place’ of oil mod-
ernity in the Gulf, the hub of a modern service economy which satisfied
the needs of oil industries and societies in the making across the region. It
was only in the 1960s that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait started to import
modern goods and services for their populations directly from Europe,
Japan and the United States. As oil modernisation came to fruition in
other Gulf countries, Bahrain relinquished its role as the beacon of
regional development. As early as 1958 the gap between the wealth of
Kuwait and the ‘relative’ poverty of Bahrain was already growing wide as a
result of the decreasing oil reserves of the islands.
Alongside the early discovery and exploitation of oil, the influence of
the British Empire brings into sharper focus the importance of a historical
approach in the study of Gulf urban milieus. In this respect, this history of
Manama challenges standard portrayals of urbanisation based upon ideal
types of urban development as epitomised by recent studies on the Oil
1
City. As suggested in this book, oil alone cannot explain the emergence of
Manama as a modern city. Its spatial and socio-political organisation was
also profoundly influenced by the pearl economy, the rise and fall of the

1
See for instance S. Khalaf, ‘The Evolution of the Gulf City Type, Oil, and Globalization’ in
Fox, Mourtada-Sabbah and al-Mutawa (eds.), Globalization and the Gulf, pp. 244–65.