Page 80 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

60 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

Not only did the British residency provide effective arbitration for the
delimitation of the rights of exploitation of pearl banks but in some cases
also initiated the process of delimitation of territorial waters by declaring
pearl banks the inalienable property of local tribes.

Manama, Bahrain: the town of foreigners
The history of Manama pre-dated the tribal scramble of the long eight-
eenth century. Manama developed as true ‘bride of the sea’ as it was a port
before becoming a town. Before the nineteenth century, its development
can be linked to the presence of Qal‘ah al-Bahrayn, the Portuguese fort
which overlooked the town’s natural harbour. Long before the arrival of
the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, the harbour was an important
trade centre, as suggested by the ruins of an old city located near the fort
which served a large agricultural region in the third millennium BC. In the
early thirteenth century, when Bahrain became a dependency of Iran, the
extension of trade networks furthered regional integration, and consoli-
dated the position of Manama in a grid of maritime connections linking
Gulf port settlements to the Indian Ocean, East Africa and the Far East. 52
Before the nineteenth century, the history of the town survives merely as
a locality whose name was recorded in few documents. The first mention
dates back to 1347 when Turan Shah, the King of Hormuz, occupied the
islands after his nephew Shambeh, who acted as local governor, was killed
by an army mutiny. We can assume that the harbour was of some impor-
tance, as in the same period Persian records name the future capital of
Safavid Bahrain as ‘Bilad al-Qadim’ (the Old Town), implying the exis-
tence of a new settlement. Two centuries later, another military campaign
against Bahrain suggests the strategic importance of the area. In 1559 the
Ottoman commander Mustafa Pasha, the governor of al-Ahsa’, launched
an attack against Qal‘ah al-Bahrayn in an attempt to wrest the control of
the islands. After a long siege he was defeated by Portuguese forces and
died in Bahrain. Sixteen years later the military command in Baghdad
resumed plans for the occupation of the fort in order to establish an
Ottoman outpost in Manama harbour which was to be provisioned from
al-Qatif, then under Ottoman control. 53

52
Larsen, Life and Land Use on the Bahraini Islands, pp. 20–1, 95–8, 205; Bibby, Looking for
Dilmun, pp. 60–85.
53
‘Ali Akbar Bushehri, ‘Bilad al-jadid – mawlid madinah al-Manamah’ and ‘Mashad
‘asimah al-Bahrayn’ in al-Wasat, July 2003; Teixeira, The Travels of Pedro Teixeira,
p. 175; ‘Taqarir hawla al-hamlah al-‘uthmaniyyah ‘ala al-Bahrayn’ (‘Documents concern-
ing the Ottoman Attack against Bahrain’), 996h./1559 and 983h./1575, Markaz