Page 65 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

The making of Gulf port towns before oil 45

A useful starting point to discussing the history of Gulf coastal settle-
ments is to consider the relative influence of indigenous and foreign actors
in their development. Economically, the port towns of the Gulf were part
of that regional trading world so evocatively portrayed by Hala Fattah,
3
which included southern Iraq and Iran, and the Arabian Peninsula. As
nodes of commercial exchange they became the natural focus of tribal and
imperial competition. While the fortunes of port economies relied on the
delicate balance between tribal rulers and merchants, the presence of the
East India Companies since the seventeenth century affected the ability of
ruling families to use revenue from maritime trade for the purpose of
political centralisation. Yet regional ports were prone to develop autono-
mously from the land empires which controlled Iran, Iraq and the Arabian
Peninsula. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the settle-
ments of the Arab coast, with the notable exception of Basra under
Ottoman control, became the seats of independent tribal governments:
the Al Sabah and Al Khalifah principalities based in Kuwait Town,
Muharraq and Manama; the confederation of city-states controlled by
the al-Qawasim (sing. al-Qasimi), including Sharjah and Ras al-
Khaymah; and the Al Bu Falasah and the Banu Yas principalities based
in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Until the mid nineteenth century, the ports of
southern Iran also prospered under Arab families of tribal descent which
succeeded in keeping the Qajar government at arm’s length.
Reflecting a long history of empire by proxy, the commercial and
political encroachment of Europe in the Persian Gulf did not affect sub-
stantially the spatial and socio-political organisation of its port towns.
Coastal settlements remained essentially ‘native’ towns untouched by
the transformative powers of foreign military outposts and colonies of
settlement. In Indonesian ports, in contrast, the Dutch East India
Company enforced an elaborate system of administration and the segre-
4
gation of native populations from Company employees. Since European
trading stations made their appearance in the Persian Gulf in the seven-
teenth century, the bulk of foreign trade continued to be conducted by
local intermediaries and by transient foreign merchants, soldiers and
administrators. Ottoman Basra, for instance, had large numbers of
Greek, Italian, Dutch and English traders. In the same way as Manama,
patterns of residential settlement suggest that it developed as an open port

3
Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade.
4
See for instance the case of colonial Makassar. H. Sutherland, ‘Eastern Emporium and
Company Town: Trade and Society in Eighteenth-Century Makassar’ in F. Broeze (ed.),
th
th
Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the 16 –20 Centuries (Kensington: New South
Wales University Press, 1989), pp. 97–128.