Page 91 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

The making of Gulf port towns before oil 71

Despite their diversity, the pearling and trading towns of the Arab coast
shared a similar social organisation and political institutions which were
tied to both the desert and the sea. The political supremacy of tribes and
the absence of centralised administrations set them apart from the ports
under Ottoman and Qajar control, contributing to the instability of local
government and to the precariousness of urban public security. The
tension between mercantile communities, immigrants and tribesmen,
often the only militarised segments of urban society, compounded by
infighting among ruling families, accentuated their political disunity.
For much of the nineteenth century, ruling dynasties exercised control
over residents through their militias and by forging crucial political alli-
ances with merchants and community leaders. These constraints facili-
tated the autonomous organisation of large segments of urban society,
particularly in towns with a more heterogeneous population. Ports such as
Manama and Dubai, in particular, evolved almost as ‘voluntary’ associa-
tions with their immigrant populations of non-tribal stock and mobile
workforce. Immigrants were often able to maintain links to their countries
of origin and their religious and linguistic specificity. In this respect, rather
than city-states, these port polities evolved as relatively open ‘city-
societies’ in the sense suggested by the historical anthropologist Richard
O’Connor with reference to the city states of pre-modern South East
Asia. 78
From this perspective, urban polities emerged out of consensus and a
balance of power, rather than conflict. As clearly suggested by the mobility
of merchants across the region, the port towns of the Arab coast consti-
tuted a sort of commonwealth whose success depended on their ability to
attract settlers with benefits of residence. Urban rulers faced further
challenges in the wake of the economic and demographic expansion of
the late nineteenth century. Towns-in-the-making had increasingly com-
plex societies and stood in stark contrast with the mobile and relatively
egalitarian environment which had produced their tribal rulers. While in
Bedouin life, public order and the position of leaders was based on the
supremacy of the tribe, in the towns, as noted by Lienhardt for the Trucial
States, ‘the primacy of the sheikhs is not so much primacy in an ethnic
group [i.e. the tribe] as primacy in a fixed place: the town itself’. 79 In other
words, bonds other than tribal solidarities started to provide a source of

78
S. Chutintaranond and C. Baker (eds.), Recalling Local Pasts: Autonomous History in
Southeast Asia (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2002), pp. 171–4; R. A. O’Connor, ‘A
Regional Explanation of the Tai Müang as a City-State’ in Moregns Herman Hansen
(ed.), A Comparative Study of Thirty City-State Cultures (Copenhagen, Kongelige Danske
Videnskabernes Selskab, 2000), pp. 431–44, (433–8).
79
Lienhardt, Shaikhdoms of Eastern Arabia, p. 210.