Page 31 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

Introduction 11

War I with the establishment of a British-sponsored municipal govern-
ment which became the first nucleus of the modern administration of
Bahrain.
In dealing with the question of how oil transformed the town until
independence, this study does not treat modernisation as a linear process
of urban change. This is not a tale of transformation from ‘rags to riches’,
the story of an economic miracle which created a more uniform land-
scape, and a ‘rational’, disciplined and affluent society. On the contrary,
the transformative powers of oil enforced new political, social and spatial
divisions, from the creation of new lines of separation between Manama
and its former agricultural hinterland, and between immigrants and the
indigenous population, to the formation of new social classes and political
movements which antagonised the government. To expose further the
fallacies of the ‘exceptionalism’ of oil development, it must be noted that
manifestations of modernity in Manama did not differ substantially from
those across the colonial world. Essentially, as will be highlighted in the
concluding sections of this book, they fostered the creation of new ideas
about race and class, and new spaces of political contestation.
The themes of city, state and modernisation which provide the frame-
work for this study are developed through three specific lines of enquiry.
The first links processes of urbanisation to state formation, with particular
reference to the relationship between the development of Manama and
that of its historic agricultural and tribal hinterlands. The notion that pre-
modern cities cannot be understood without their hinterlands is partic-
ularly true of Manama, bounded as it was by once prosperous agricultural
districts which in the nineteenth century were under the control of the
ruling family. Moreover, the town of Muharraq itself was part of the wider
tribal hinterland surrounding Manama whose political importance
increased dramatically after the arrival of the Al Khalifah in Bahrain. A
focus on urban–rural relations in the oil era seems equally appropriate in
order to understand the nature and directives of state building given the
fast pace of oil modernisation.
The second line of enquiry focuses on transformations in urban spaces
and institutions as indicators of changing relations of power between
urban residents, and between them and the state. Besides recognising
the importance of King’s global ‘language’ of urbanisation, this approach
draws on some of the literature which discusses space both as the recipient

Hadrami Traders, Scholars and Statesmen in the Indian Ocean, 1750s–1960s (Leiden: Brill,
1997); D. Lombard and Jean Aubin (eds.), Asian Merchants and Businessmen in the Indian
Ocean and in the China Sea (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000); C. Markovits, The
Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama
(Cambridge University Press, 2000).