Page 75 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

The making of Gulf port towns before oil 55

tribal settlers. 35 As late as 1930, the tribal character of Kuwait contrasted
with the cosmopolitan outlook of Manama as noted by H. V. Briscoe, the
British Political Resident in the Gulf:
It may be asked why we should not allow Bahrain [Manama] to be run as, for
instance, Kuwait is, as an Arab city on Arab lines. The answer is that the pop-
ulation of the two cities is wholly dissimilar. The population of Kuwait is largely
Bedouin: their outlook is towards the desert … The population of Bahrain is
heterogeneous and divided by racial and religious difference – Nejdis,
Wahhabis, Persians, Sunnis, Shias and large colonies of Muhammedan and
Hindu Indians. Bahrain is a purely commercial centre, its outlook is towards
Bombay and the stock markets of the world on which it depends to sell its pearls. 36

Merchants, tribal rulers and urban economies
In the age of informal empire Gulf ports maintained the distinctive fea-
tures of ‘indigenous’ trading towns which had characterised their early
development. The close relationship between merchants and tribal rulers,
and the control of the pearling industry and of intercoastal trade, con-
tinued to define their political and social hierarchies as urban settlements.
The merchant capital produced and invested inside these settlements was
the most important resource base which underpinned the consolidation of
tribal dynasties. Arab and Hawala merchants financed regional and long-
distance trade and the pearling industry, the pillars of the indigenous
maritime economy. Those pearling entrepreneurs of tribal descent who
had played a crucial role in the establishment of port facilities provided
direct financial and political support to ruling families until the discovery
of oil, often in the form of loans and tribal fighters. The most influential
mercantile groups of Kuwait either claimed descent from the first al-
‘Utub settlers or had intermarried with the Al Sabah in the course of the
nineteenth century. 37 As already noted, in Bahrain the majority of
the Sunni pearl merchants belonged to the tribal entourage of the Al
Khalifah, often to groups which had arrived in the islands with them
from al-Zubarah and Kuwait.
The fiscal regime enforced inside port settlements tended to favour
indigenous capitalists and merchants of tribal descent involved in pearl-
ing, reinforcing their symbiotic relationship with ruling families. Rulers
35
Kuwait’s population increased from approximately 6,000 in the 1840s to 35,000 in 1905.
Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, p. 1051; Brucks, ‘Memoir Descriptive of the Navigation of the
Gulf’ (1829–35), fiche 1096, pp. 575–6, V 23/217 IOR.
36
H. V. Briscoe in Political Resident Bushehr to Foreign Secretary to the Government of
India, 13 February 1930, n. 43, R/15/1/332 IOR.
37
Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf, pp. 19, 24–6.