Page 78 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

58 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

other Gulf ports. 44 After 1838, the enforcement of the Anglo-Ottoman
commercial convention and Ottoman centralisation damaged the posi-
tion of local merchants with bases of operation in Basra. Horse dealers
trading with Bombay moved to Kuwait and Muhammarah, one of the
ports on the Iranian coast, and started to do business with British shippers,
thus circumventing Ottoman port duties. Similarly, increasing trade
restrictions and onerous taxation by the Qajar authorities in the southern
Iranian ports after 1900 favoured the relocation of merchant capital to the
Arab coast. By 1905 the ruler of Dubai had abolished the 5 per cent
customs duty and declared the town a free port. 45
The structure of the pearl industry had profound socio-economic
implications for urban life. Besides favouring the concentration of wealth
and political influence in the hands of tribal entrepreneurs, it also allowed
them to control large segments of the urban population employed in the
business. Although in Kuwait and Abu Dhabi pearl divers of Bedouin
origin were able to establish free cooperatives and finance their own boats,
the majority of the labour force worked on a system of seasonal advances.
These advances, whose repayment depended on the catch and the sale of
pearls, forced divers and their families to rely on ship captains, financiers,
tribal leaders and pearl merchants for their living. In bad seasons crew
members were not able to pay back the monies received before they
boarded pearling boats, leading to the accumulation of debt year after
year and from one generation to another. Further, a chain of dependency
also bound boat captains, pearl dealers and the workforce employed in
the industry of native crafts to tribal entrepreneurs. The fluctuation of the
pearl market influenced patterns of consumption: any reduction in the
quantity of food imports caused prices in urban markets to soar and in
extreme cases brought famine to the population. As divers and pullers
became indebted to boat captains and financiers, they were inevitably
46
drawn into forced labour to make up for their losses.
Accounts of the industry by Europeans often stressed its exploitative
nature, in some cases denouncing it as a form of slavery. In 1924 Paul
Harrison noted that in Bahrain ‘the diver is known as a slave for the rest of
his life’. 47 While the association between debt and slavery featured

44
R. Taylor, ‘Extracts from Brief Notes Containing Historical and Other Information
Connected with the Province of Oman; Muskat and the Adjoining Countries; the Islands
of Bahrain, Ormus, Kishm, and Karrak; and Other Ports in the Persian Gulf’ (1818), fiche
1089–90, pp. 17–18, V 23/217 IOR; Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade,p.67.
45
Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, pp. 171–8; al-Sayegh, ‘Merchants’ Role in a
Changing Society’, 90; Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. I, p. 322.
46
Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. I, pp. 2220–93; Lienhardt, Shaikhdoms of Eastern Arabia,pp.150–64.
47
P. W. Harrison, The Arab at Home (London: Hutchinson, 1925), p. 80.