On the face of it, Salem Al-'Arayyedh's life was an exceptional one. Born in Bombay into a family of Bahraini pearl merchants with branches in that city, Al-'Arayyedh spent his years as a young adult moving between the pearl trade and a clerkship in the Bombay-based firm of Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Upon his return to Bahrain in the 1920s, he was to pay a pivotal role in shaping the Bahraini court system, which at the time was still developing under the aegis of Great Britain, the shaikhdom's protector. He quickly rose to prominence both as a lawyer and administrator, and even developed a reputation as a tough schoolteacher. When placed within a regional context, however, Al-'Arayyedh's life illustrates broader historical transformations that were taking place. For decades prior to his arrival in Bahrain, the Indian Ocean was undergoing a process of legal transformation in which such far-flung and distant ports as Rangoon, Zanzibar, and Aden were being integrated into a common legal arena centered in Bombay. In this process, legal institutions developed in Bombay were extended into these ports, creating a legal cohesion under the British Empire that had never existed before. Although it was a relative late-comer, Bahrain was very much a part of this process, and cadres of legal personnel like Al-'Arayyedh helped integrate it firmly into this arena. Part of a much broader project on the legal transformation of the Indian Ocean region, this paper draws on the biography and writings of Al-'Arayyedh and places him within broader regional and historical currents to tell the story of legal change in Bahrain. My thesis is that his writings, which will be set against his upbringing in a transnational family network of pearl merchants so as to make clear the transnational dynamics that shaped his legal imaginary, envision the Gulf and Indian Ocean as a singular legal space. More broadly, I argue that it was through legal personnel like Al-'Arayyedh that British India was able to expand the frontiers of its empire of law in the Indian Ocean. By placing his experience within a much broader Middle Eastern and Indian Ocean context, the paper will dislodge the historiography of the Gulf from that of the Middle East and, as Al-'Arayyedh himself aimed, to integrate it more firmly into that of the Indian Ocean, while exploring the ways in which legal personnel directed the institutions and practices of empire.