Page 63 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

2 The making of Gulf port towns before oil

In the Al Khalifah era, Manama developed as part of a network of
port settlements which connected the Persian Gulf to the world of
trade, merchants and trans-continental routes extending from the
Mediterranean and the Red Sea to South East Asia. Viewed from the
perspective of this maritime world, these commercial emporia were essen-
tially ‘brides of the sea’. Yet, as clearly suggested by the case of Manama,
they also constituted the microcosm of the complex political and eco-
nomic dynamics which bound coastal societies to their agricultural and
tribal hinterlands. That this dual relationship with hinterlands and fore-
lands underpinned the urbanisation of the Gulf coast is evident from the
vicissitudes of the tribal and imperial histories of the region before the
discovery of oil.
Developments in Bahrain reflected wider processes of political and
urban change which were triggered by the resurgence of tribal power
throughout the Persian Gulf in the eighteenth century. Alongside the Al
Khalifah, a powerful cohort of tribal rulers came to control the Arab coast,
favouring the consolidation of a new constellation of maritime outposts.
From Kuwait in the west to Ras al-Khaymah in the east, these port
settlements under tribal regimes started to compete for the control of
regional and long-distance trade with the leading commercial emporia
of Basra, Bushehr and Muscat in Oman. As was the case of Manama and
Muharraq in Bahrain, fully fledged port towns with complex socio-
political organisations only began to take shape in the second half of the
nineteenth century under the combined forces of the pearl boom and of
British informal empire. If on the one hand the increasing demand of Gulf
pearls in the world market accelerated urban development, on the other
the establishment of a new port regime under the aegis of the Government
of India provided the necessary political conditions for urban economies
to prosper. The Pax Britannica championed by the British Crown after
1820 sheltered the main commercial emporia of the Gulf in a variety of
ways. The Government of India provided military protection to the coast
against novel tribal threats and consolidated the precarious position of

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