Page 71 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

The making of Gulf port towns before oil 51

customs to deal with episodes of tribal warfare at sea. Coastal rulers were
forced to pay compensation for lives and properties and often collaborated
to punish culprits. Economically, the Pax Britannica restored a degree of
security to regional trade. A new political and commercial era for Gulf
ports opened up soon after the collapse of Ras al-Khaymah in 1820. This
era was symbolically marked by the despatch under British escort of al-
Qasimi warships to the port of Lingah to be newly equipped for commer-
22
cial ventures. The volume of goods entering local ports grew steadily as
a result of the prosperity generated by the demand for Gulf pearls and
mother-of-pearl in the world markets. As pearl jewellery, buttons and
luxury household articles became fashionable among the European
and North American upper classes, regional ports refashioned themselves
as mudun al-ghaws, pearling towns. 23

Of tribes, pearls and empire: directives of urbanisation

In the long eighteenth century, the migration of Bedouin and Hawala
merchant seafarers towards the coast and across the Gulf brought the
segmentary opposition of tribal life to the forefront of processes of urban-
isation. 24 In the early years of the Pax Britannica, tribal secession and the
competition between tribes over the control of pearl banks continued to
be an integral part of the process of sedentarisation and town making. As
noted in the 1840s by A. B. Kemball, the Assistant Political Resident at
Bushehr:

it is by no means uncommon for one of the branches of a tribe [of the Gulf
shores] … with a view to secure to themselves greater immunities and advantages,
to secede from the authority and territory of their lawful and acknowledged chief
into that of another, or to establish themselves and build a fort on some other
spot. 25
Kemball’s observations accurately reflect the early history of some of the
most important pearling centres and port settlements of the pre-oil

22
G. B. Brucks, ‘Memoir Descriptive of the Navigation of the Gulf of Persia with Brief
Notices of the Manners, Customs, Religion, Commerce, and Resources of the People
Inhabiting its Shores and Islands’ (1829–35), fiche 1096, p. 543, V 23/217 IOR.
23
The value of pearl exports from the region grew from £483,767 in 1893–4 to £1,076,310
in 1904–5. al-Naqeeb, Society and State, p. 56.
24
We have no detailed information on the history of the port settlements on the Arab coast
before the Government of India started to survey the Persian Gulf in the early nineteenth
century. These surveys are included in V 23 IOR, ‘Selections from the Records of the
Government of India, 1849–1937’.
25
Kemball, ‘Memoranda on the Resources, Localities, and Relations’ (1845), fiche 1090–1,
p. 94, V 23/217 IOR.