Page 35 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

Introduction 15

development of Manama as a modern capital city against its rural districts.
The land policies enforced by the administration after 1925 are singled
out as a crucial instrument through which the state exerted control over
urban and rural development favouring the continuation of old social and
political divisions between city and countryside, and the survival of
Shi‘ism as an ideology of resistance against state power.
The concluding sections develop further some of the general themes
discussed in the introduction in the light of the evidence from Manama,
outlining some social and political developments which consolidated the
position of the city as the ‘progressive’ and turbulent frontier of modern
Gulf politics in the 1960s and early 1970s. It also underlines some key
features of urban and rural development in the 1970s and 1980s which
underscored the transformation of Bahrain into a metropolitan state,
pointing at the crucial political legacy of Bahrain’s urban and rural
histories.