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46 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

town organised around professional activities, religious sites and local
5
notables. In the other ports of the Arab coast there were only a handful
of European and American residents until the discovery of oil, although by
the end of the nineteenth century they had become important stations of
British shipping to and from India.
The movement of tribal peoples and merchant capital, rather than
European intervention, constituted the dynamic matrix of regional urban-
isation. Ruling families themselves had started their careers as urban
leaders by embracing merchant seafaring. The Al Khalifah and Al
Sabah, for instance, had abandoned pastoral nomadism during their
overland migration from Najd to the Gulf coast. Once settled there they
acquired vessels and sailed across the Gulf waters, attracted by its rich
6
pearl fisheries and by the opportunities offered by the pearl trade. The
history of the Hawala, a group of nomadic maritime traders originally
from the Iranian coast, is equally instructive on the importance of this
itinerant maritime tradition. At the end of the seventeenth century, some
Hawala tribes started to compete for the control of the pearl banks around
Basra and Bushehr. A few decades later, they ruled Bahrain and Qatar,
opposing the consolidation of the Al Khalifah and the Al Sabah on the
7
coast. Moreover, after the collapse of the Safavid Empire, the rise of the
al-Qawasim in the eastern Gulf was closely associated with their profile as
tribal warriors cum merchant seafarers.
With the gradual imposition of the Pax Britannica after 1820, British
naval technology and commercial culture had a considerable impact on
trade, communications and on the portfolios of some indigenous entre-
preneurs. Gulf ports, however, did not become the powerhouses of colo-
nial global economies in the same way as Bombay, Colombo or Shanghai.
As British interests in the Gulf remained confined to its maritime security,
coastal settlements did not serve as the lynchpins of economic and polit-
ical penetration into the hinterland. Since the 1880s, for instance,
Colombo boomed as a reflection of the expansion of Sri Lanka’s planta-
tion agriculture and the export of commercial crops such as coffee, tea and
rubber. Colonial Bombay gained prominence as a gateway to western
India as a result of the extensive railway network which was developed

5
D. R. Khoury, ‘Merchants and Trade in Early Modern Iraq’, New Perspectives on Turkey,
5–6(1991), 53–86 (55); Abdullah, Merchants, Mamluks and Murder, p. 23.
6
al-Nabhani, al-Tuhfah al-Nabhaniyyah, pp. 82–3, 85.
7
In Arab milieu the name Hawala is said to have derived from the Arabic verb tahawwala
(‘to move around’) while Niebuhr in the 1750s suggested that their tribal name meant
immigrants. Slot, The Arabs of the Gulf, pp. 18–19, 195–6, 230; Muhammad Gharib
Khatam, Tarikh ‘Arab al-Huwilah (Beirut, 2003), pp. 79–85.