Page 183 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

i8o Arabia, the Gulf and the West

his illusions. On 31 May 1861 he was made to sign an undertaking to observe

the maritime truce in perpetuity, and to honour the engagements he had
concluded in 1847 and 1856 to abandon the slave trade. In return, he was
recognized as independent ruler of Bahrain and the security of his territories
was guaranteed. Later in the century, in 1880 and 1892, as a consequence
primarily of Turkish attempts to interfere in Bahrain, further undertakings

were obtained from the Al Khahfah, which bound them to have no direct
dealings with foreign powers and not to alienate any portion of their territories
without the permission of the British government.
From 1861 onwards Bahrain never again had to make the kind of humiliat­
ing submission to her larger neighbours that she had been earlier forced to
make to keep out of their clutches. Turkish influence in the Gulf was ended by

the 1914—18 war, and the Al Khalifah’s relations with the Saudis, after Abdul
Aziz ibn Saud had re-established their power in central and eastern Arabia in
the first two decades of this century, were reasonably amicable, even during the
1920s and 1930s when Ibn Saud was at odds with their kinsmen, the Al Sabah
of Kuwait. Only the Persians persisted with their pretensions to sovereignty
over Bahrain, using any and every occasion to pursue them, and more particu­

larly when some event or other seemed to them to derogate from their alleged
sovereign rights over the island. Thus in 1927 they protested to the League of
Nations about the description of Bahrain in the Anglo-Saudi treaty of that year
as a state ‘in special treaty relations with His Britannic Majesty’s Government’;
and they objected again in 1946-7 when the British political residency in the
Gulf was transferred, without their sanction, from Bushire to Bahrain. Neither

the Al Khahfah nor the British government were much perturbed by these
complaints, since the Persian claim to sovereignty was exceedingly flimsy and
the Persian government could do little to make it good while Bahrain remained
under British protection. Eventually, as we have seen, the shah publicly
renounced the claim in 1970, though whether his successors have also relin­

quished it is far from certain.
Oil was discovered in Bahrain in 1932 by the Standard Oil Company of
California, operating through its subsidiary, the Bahrain Petroleum Company,
and the first shipment of oil was loaded in 1934. The revenues from oil
production came at a fortunate moment for Bahrain, for the shaikhdom had
been hard hit by the world-wide economic depression and by the collapse of its
principal source of wealth, the pearling industry, largely through the com­

petition from Japanese cultured pearls. Because the oil revenues were not
large, and because Bahrain already enjoyed a higher standard of living than any
of the other minor Gulf states, the added wealth caused no dramatic dislocation
of either the shaikhdom’s economy or the lives of its inhabitants. The asic
situation has not changed radically in the forty years since then, despite the

increase in the shaikhdom’s wealth of late years. Bahrain’s economy is on
whole well balanced. The shaikhdom is a major trading entrepot and cen