The pearling era
Pearl diving in Bahrain goes back at least four thousand years, when the Assyrians first made mention of this economic activity in ancient Dilmun. Bahrain’s pearls were subsequently mentioned in Roman chronicles. Bahrain’s pearls enjoyed legendary status for their purity, brilliance and stunning beauty. Some experts claim that the esteemed quality of Bahrain’s pearls is partly due to oyster beds being situated near to underwater sweet water springs.
The pearling trade peaked during the nineteenth century, when pearls were more precious than diamonds and famous jewelers were attracted to Bahrain’s shores in search of the best stones. Some of the restored areas of Muharraq, including commercial and residential buildings, are testament to the wealth and prestige which Bahrain enjoyed during this period.
By this time a complex economy had sprung up around Bahrain’s pearling industry, with well-established pearling crews going out each season, and a network of dealers, ship-builders, financers and others who serviced the industry in various ways.
However, at the outset of the 1930s the pearling industry suffered a sudden and catastrophic collapse, as the Japanese succeeded in developing cultured pearls using freshwater muscles. Within the space of a couple of years, pearling went from being the backbone of the economy in this small nation of somewhere around 100,000 citizens in the early twentieth century, to an almost complete cessation of activity. However, as we will see in the next chapter; at exactly this same moment Bahrain was to become the first location in the region to discover oil, meaning that overnight, workers who had risked their lives diving for pearls became core employees for the Kingdom’s nascent oil industry.
Hence much of the evidence of this traditional industry disappeared very quickly, particularly as within a few decades Bahrain’s coastline would change beyond all recognition, due to land reclamation activity which also did much damage to the oyster beds from which pearls had been harvested.
In recent years there has been belated recognition of the importance of the pearling industry to Bahrain’s cultural heritage and efforts have been made to restore what evidence remained of this trade, in parallel with work to restore some of Bahrain’s traditional markets and other important historical sites in Muharraq, Manama and elsewhere. According to UNESCO’s description of Muharraq’s pearling buildings “Most of the structures have survived relatively unaltered since the collapse of the pearl industry in the early 20th century and bear witness to distinctive building traditions that the industry fostered, and particularly their high standard of craftsmanship in timber and plaster. These buildings evoke memories of that industry, its supporting social and economic structures, and of the cultural identity it produced.”
“The site is the last remaining complete example of the cultural tradition of pearling and the wealth it generated at a time when the trade dominated the Gulf economy… It also constitutes an outstanding example of traditional utilization of the sea’s resources and human interaction with the environment, which shaped both the economy and cultural identity of the island’s society” World Heritage Committee.
For at least as long as Bahrain has been famed for its pearls, Bahrain has also been a pivotal location for long-distance maritime trade. In a region where drinking water was often almost impossible to come by, Bahrain was famous for its freshwater springs which made it a welcome destination for sailors travelling between the Indian subcontinent and the Arab world.
Through much of recorded history, the Arabian Gulf was primarily an Arab lake. Successive Persian empires rarely occupied the northeast coast alongside the Zagros mountains, which for the most part consisted of small ports controlled by Arab tribes. For example the Hawala peoples hail from the interior of the Arabian Peninsula but migrated to the Persian coastline and later many of them settled in Bahrain. The Kingdom of Hormuz had been ruled by Omani emigrants, while the Banu Qaisar on Qais Island were also an Arabian tribe. The Qawasim tribes which came to prominence in the modern Emirates, had major bases on both north and south shores of the Gulf. Throughout the Islamic period, such networks of Arab tribes dominated local and long-distance trade through the Arabian Gulf.
When powerful and wealthy Arab rulers controlled key cities like Baghdad, Damascus and Basra, vast quantities of valuable goods flowed both ways through the Arabian Gulf. Alongside pearling, Bahrain succeeded in enjoying prestigious wealth as a result of its lucrative trading position.
However, trade suffered during periods when Red Sea or overland routes came to prominence. Even during the twentieth century, Bahrain exploited its central position in the Gulf region to become an important hub for industries like aviation, banking, commerce and tourism.