Page 67 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

The making of Gulf port towns before oil 47

8

around the city after 1853. The Gulf did not offer resources for expand-

ing European economies and industries. Moreover, after the establish-

ment of Aden as a British colony in 1839 and the opening of the Suez

Canal in 1869, the region remained largely peripheral to trans-continental

European commercial routes as the Red Sea replaced the old overland

passage from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean through Iraq and

9

Syria. Useful comparisons can be also drawn with contemporary devel-

opments in the Eastern Mediterranean, where British and French eco-

nomic penetration had momentous implications for ports nominally

under Ottoman control. Beirut, Haifa and Alexandria boomed with the

influx of foreign capital, and were profoundly transformed by the integra-

tion of Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt into the world economy. 10

The regional context: the long eighteenth century

and the Pax Britannica

The ‘tribal breakout’, as Christopher Bayly puts it, which undermined the

authority of the Ottoman, Mughal and Safavid Empires in the eighteenth

century reverberated across the Persian Gulf generating a surge in tribal

power throughout the region. 11 In the east, the al-Qawasim and Hawala

tribes strengthened their position as the result of the power vacuum left by

the collapse of the Safavids in 1722 followed by the death of Nadir Shah in

1747, and by the decadence of the Omani Empire which had been

involved in a long war with Iran. 12 In the west, al-‘Utub groups, and

particularly the Al Khalifah and the Al Sabah, took advantage of the

multiple threats faced by the Ottoman Empire in southern Iraq and in

the Arabian Peninsula: the establishment of local rule by Georgian

Mamluks in Basra and Baghdad and the emergence of the first Sa‘udi

state in Central Arabia between 1744 and 1818.

8

For a discussion of colonial port cities in relation to their hinterlands see D. K. Basu, The

Rise and Growth of the Colonial Port Cities in Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1985), pp. 1–22; K. Dharmasena, ‘Colombo: Gateway and Oceanic Hub of Shipping’ in

Broeze (ed.), Brides of the Sea, pp. 156–69; R. Murphy, ‘Colombo and the Re-Making of
th
th
Ceylon’ in F. Broeze (ed.), Gateways of Asia: Port Cities of Asia in the 13 –20 Centuries
(London and New York: Kegan Paul, 1997), pp. 195–209.
9
K. McPherson, ‘Port Cities as Nodal Points of Change: The Indian Ocean, 1890s–1920s’,
pp. 84–7.
10
R. Ilbert, ‘De Beyrouth à Alger: la find’un ordre urbain’, Vingtième Siècle, 32 (1991), 15–24;
M. Seikaly, ‘Haifa at the Crossroads: An Outpost of the New World Order’ in Fawaz and
Bayly (eds.), Modernity and Culture,pp.96–111; C. Issawi, ‘British Trade and the Rise of

Beirut, 1830–1860’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 7 (1977), 91–101.

11
C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (Harlow:
Pearson Education, 1989), pp. 35–52.
12
Slot, The Arabs of the Gulf, pp. 346–53.