Page 64 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

44 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

local ruling dynasties. At the same time, it granted privileges of extraterri-
torial jurisdiction to segments of the urban populations.
In spite of the importance of the new ‘Indian connection’, the making of
Gulf coastal towns as part of tribal fiefdoms continued to reflect the
fragmentary nature of patterns of state building across the region and to
depend on the close relationship between merchants, rulers and urban
residents. In this respect, the demography and socio-political organisation
of these towns offers excellent vistas on the evolution of pre-oil coastal
societies and political cultures from an indigenous perspective. They also
illustrate the different character of Gulf ports as towns in the making in
order to situate the development of Manama in the larger narrative of pre-
oil urbanisation.

Gulf ports as ‘native’ towns
Until the eighteenth century there is not much information on the port
settlements of the Arab coast, as the area did not rise to commercial and
political prominence. Even the history of Basra, one of the most important
ports of the Gulf under Ottoman control since 1546, is largely unex-
plored. Few studies focussing on the eighteenth century have convinc-
ingly shown that the town grew in importance as a regional emporium
after the establishment of a factory of the English East India Company in
1723 and the transfer of the Company’s headquarters from Bandar ‘Abbas
1
on the Persian coast in 1763. Literature on the Arab coast outside
Ottoman control is particularly instructive on regional and tribal politics
but does not focus on port settlements. Besides portraying the region as a
theatre of relentless tribal confrontation, these studies emphasise the
influence of the English, Dutch and French East India Companies, of
the Ottoman administration of Iraq and, in the nineteenth century, of the
2
Government of India.

1
R. Matthee, ‘Boom and Bust: the Port of Basra in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries’, paper presented at the Conference ‘The Persian Gulf in History’,7–10
October 2004. For a reassessment of the fortunes of Basra’s trade in the eighteenth
century, see T. A. J. Abdullah, Merchants, Mamluks and Murder: The Political Economy of
Trade in Eighteenth-century Basra (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001),
pp. 49–56, 117–19. For the nineteenth century see H. Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade,
particularly 102 ff.
2
See for instance Slot, The Arabs of the Gulf; W. Floor, ‘Dutch Trade with Mascat during the

Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 16 (1982), 197–213; Sultan ibn

Muhammad al-Qasimi, Power Struggles and Trade in the Gulf, 1620–1820 (University of
Exeter Press, 1999); F. Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia
and Qatar (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Onley, The Arabian Frontier of
the British Raj.