Page 83 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

The making of Gulf port towns before oil 63

by the Wahhabis, he captured a snapshot of life in the town’s harbour by
recalling his encounters in a tavern called the ‘Sailor’s Home’:

the profound ignorance of Nejed regarding Europeans and their various classifica-
tions is here exchanged for a partial acquaintance with those topics; thus ‘English’
and ‘French’,disfigured into the local ‘Ingleez’ and ‘Fransees’, are familiar words in
Menamah, though Germans and Italians, whose vessels seldom or never visit these
seas, have as yet no place in the Bahreyn vocabulary; … But Russians, or ‘Moscôp’
(that is, Muscovites), are alike well known and well feared, thanks to Persian
intercourse. Besides, the policy of Contantinople [sic] and Teheran are freely and
at times sensibly discussed in these coffee-houses, no less than the stormy diplomacy
of Nejed and her dangerous encroachments; ship news, commerce, business, tales
of foreign lands, and occasionally literature, supply the rest of the conversation. Of
religious controversy I never heard one word. In short, instead of Zelators and
fanatics, camel-drivers and Bedouins, we have at Bahreyn [Manama] something
like ‘men of the world, who know the world like men’, a great relief to the mind;
certainly it was so to mine. 59
The making of public opinion reflected the contingencies of local politics
in so far as these affected business and overseas connections. The khans and
coffee houses around the harbour are seldom portrayed as spaces of sub-
version and disorder but as the centres of the commercial life of the town.
Here entrepreneurs met partners, assessed the feasibility of new commer-
cial ventures in the light of current political events, negotiated deals and
recruited crews for their vessels. By the beginning of the twentieth century
Manama’s largest merchant houses were part of international trade net-
works which operated in the proto-globalised trans-regional world champ-
ioned by the British Empire. The Kanu, al-Safar and Sharif families had
branches across the Gulf region and connections to Indian Ocean ports and
Europe, capitalising on the new technologies in communication and ship-
ping introduced by British firms in India and southern Iran. In 1913 the
office of Yusuf ibn Ahmad Kanu, one of the largest import–export mer-
chants of Manama and the local agent of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company,
displayed: ‘office desks and chairs used by the clerks, presses for duplicating
correspondence, a type-writer, a wall-calendar in English, and an American
clock or time-piece, an iron safe of the newest pattern and with a Portuguese
or Eurasian clerk imported from Bombay, to look after the English letters’. 60
A familiarity with Arabic, English, Farsi and Hindi were prerequisites
for the commercial and political success of the upper echelons of
Manama’s notability. Hindu and Persian merchants acted as the British

59
al-Nabhani, al-Tuhfah al-Nabhaniyyah, pp. 141–4; W. G. Palgrave, Narrative of a Year’s
Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia (1862–63), 2 vols. (London and Cambridge:
Macmillan, 1865), vol. II, pp. 218–19.
60
Cursetjee, The Land of the Date, p. 83.