Page 242 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

222 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

British Empire in the Middle East and India, and by the growth of Arab
nationalism. A more organic and cross-regional approach to urban devel-
opment also provides a much needed framework for comparison within
the region and across different historical periods. For instance, Kuwait
and Trucial Oman (since 1971 the United Arab Emirates) did not occupy
as prominent a place as Bahrain in the political geography of the British
Empire. It can be argued that their relatively weak imperial connections
had a strong impact on the formation of national identities. Neither
countries nor their capital cities experienced Arab nationalism as part of
independence movements as was the case in Bahrain and Manama. In the
United Arab Emirates, for instance, only after independence has a self-
conscious effort at emphasising the Arab character of the state and of
urban centres become apparent.
Notwithstanding these differences, the case of Manama calls for a re-
evaluation of the assumption that the oil era constituted a rupture with the
urban past of the region. The distinction between the ‘traditional’ and the
‘modern’ Gulf city which has gained considerable currency in recent years
is clearly rooted in the disproportionate academic attention devoted to the
Oil City as an ideal type of urban development. Moreover, the recon-
struction of idealised ‘traditional’ settings in the heart of the hypermodern
contemporary Gulf capitals – old neighbourhoods, pearl diving villages
and market areas – has undoubtedly reinforced this trend in the minds of
both academics and urban planners. At least until independence, modern
Manama retained the socio-economic life and spatial features of the port
settlement of the pearl boom, characterised by an intimate relationship
between the waterfront, the markets and residential neighbourhoods.
Revenue from the port economy also supported the city’s infrastructural
development until the 1960s. Evidence from Manama also frees the
historical experience of Gulf urban societies from the aura of ‘exception-
alism’ which surrounds them. Petro-urbanism – adefinition first used at
the height of the oil boom of the early 1980s – is often analysed as a
revolutionary way of life which entailed the sudden entry of ‘backward’
indigenous populations into the hectic world dominated by the forces of
global capitalism. Before independence, and in spite of oil, the residents of
Manama experienced modernity as a gradual process of change; their
experience was not that dissimilar to that of other peoples outside
Europe in the age of colonisation and decolonisation. The modern
world became manifest in the transformation of the lifestyle of the new
middle classes and old merchant elites, in the emergence of new notions of
private and public spaces, in improved communications with the outside
world and, last but not least, in the growth of a new nationalist awareness
which reshaped the boundaries of ethnic groups and of communal life.