Like many of the small Persian Gulf states, the Kingdom of Bahrain possesses an internal security apparatus comprised overwhelmingly of foreign officers. Heralding from various corners of the former British Empire, these recruits are generally described as the politically malleable muscle relied upon by the ruling family to quell internal political threats and sustain autocracy. While the Bahraini government’s current practices of recruiting foreign Sunni officers received increased attention after the country’s 2011 uprising, there has been very little research into the historical origins of this phenomenon. This lacuna in the scholarship has led some scholars to attribute foreign recruitment to the sectarian imperative of supporting Sunni hegemony in a majority Shia state dating back to its years as a British protectorate. Problematically, these analyses not only ignore the non-sectarian motivations behind policing and securitization in Bahrain during the colonial era, but also gloss over the labor struggles, race relations, and cross-sectarian political unrest that lie at the core of the security apparatuses’ early development. By misrepresenting these critical nascent stages, one fails to understand how the Bahraini government’s reliance on foreign recruits initially developed and functioned to preserve the hegemony of the ruling family after Britain’s withdrawal in 1971. This paper fills in these gaps by starting from the premise that pre-independence Bahrain was not presided over by a unified sovereign. Between the interests of British colonial officials, an American oil company, the Al Khalifah ruling family, as well as local political movements and social classes, there were competing interests that played out in overlapping spheres of jurisdiction and in occasionally contradictory ways through the various security forces active on the archipelago. I argue that the imperative of protecting the ruling family’s economic interests as well as those of British and American officials and oilmen provided the initial stimulus for recruiting martially trained officers from Britain’s rapidly decolonizing empire, a practice that was further regularized and institutionalized after independence. Drawing on both British and American archival documents, this paper casts doubt on retrospective analyses that transpose contemporary sectarian sociopolitical dynamics onto an earlier period when such imperatives had little bearing on each sovereign’s security calculations. Closely examining the tandem development of Bahrain’s economy and security apparatuses, this paper sheds new lights on the ways in which Bahrain’s foreign-dominated police forces were not fashioned by, but rather helped shape the conditions of possibility for, state-institutionalized sectarianism in the post-independence era.