Society and Daily Life Practices in Qatar Before Oil Industry; A Historic Study Based on Archaeological Record and Text A series of archaeological sites in Qatar have been attesting multifaceted aspects of the society and daily life practices before oil industry, particularly in the period from the eighteenth the early twentieth century. The archaeological walled city of Al-Zubarah, for instance, has been excavated, first, in the early 1980s by a Qatari mission, and since 2010 by the University of Copenhagen, in partnership with Qatar Museum Authority (Rees, G.; Walmsley, A. G.; Richter, T. (2011). Due to its outstanding cultural importance to the common heritage of humanity, the site has recently been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The geostrategic location of the city al-Zubarah alongside with its sea port, fort and rich archaeological discoveries are evidence for the city’s role as a major pearl and trade center in the Gulf region before oil industry. In addition, the uncovered public buildings and dwellings of different types and functions are attesting an urban pattern of a major city in Qatar at that time. In addition to the uncovered architecture, the revealed material culture at Al-Zubarah, particularly the large variety of vessels and tools are characterizing the people's social and daily life practices . In light of the above, this paper will discuss the characteristics of Qatar’s society in the period from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century shedding light on the communal identity, daily life practices, and trade with the surrounding regions. Reference. Rees, G.; Walmsley, A. G.; Richter, T. (2011). "Investigations in the Zubarah Hinterland at Murayr and Furayhah, North-West Qatar". Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 41: 309–316.

It is the airports of Arabia that figure most prominently in global networks today with Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways jockeying for passengers headed between Asia and the Western Hemisphere. Yet one hundred years ago the region’s seaports played a similar role for passengers heading between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. Aden in particular was a global entrepôt par-excellence, but Bahrain, Jedda and Muscat were also important nodes of Indian Ocean trade. Scholarship on space and capitalism has powerfully outlined how capitalist forms of production and circulation have produced certain types of urban spaces. The fixed capital invested in steamship ports around the Arabian coastline are powerful evidence of how European capital shaped the physical space of Arab cities. Roads were built, buildings were erected, and land was reclaimed from the sea in order to mirror port-cities in Europe. The trading networks in which these cities operated were reordered to cater to colonial capitalists. Yet while these steamship docks connected the Arabian coastline to Europe, it was dhow bandars which allowed capital and commodity flows to reach the ordinary consumer around the Indian Ocean. The modern industrial spaces of the steamship port were dependent upon the informal and pre-industrial spaces of the bandar. The dhows, and the bandars where they anchored were nonetheless also capitalist spaces which were essential for the distribution of mass-produced commodities to dispersed populations around the ocean. Bandars were spaces that catered to the lean, flexible and diversified operations of diasporic capitalists. Consequently, this paper argues that 19th century capitalism produced two distinct but complementary nodes of capital flows along the Arabian coastline: ports and bandars. Steamship ports were capital-intensive, European-designed spaces built to create and exploit economies of scale. But these ports were intimately linked to dhow bandars which were labor-intensive, unplanned spaces which provided the flexibility and informality vital to reaching diverse and dispersed producers and consumers. Drawing on state archives in Britain and India, British shipping company records and merchant correspondence from the Gulf, this paper details the shape and function of these two spaces and how they developed in tandem.

Port cities of the Indian Ocean rim are conceptualized as “nodes” connecting the Indian Ocean world. These cities along the littoral are cast as being a part of a littoral society, having more in common with each other than their interiors or “hinterlands.” This concept of a littoral society however is a confusing one due to its inconsistent use and the inability of current scholarship to explain its implications beyond simply a common maritime lifestyle. The exceptionalism of maritime life along with the fact that many cities were in fact walled contribute to a strict, spatially segregated understanding of the interactions of Indian Ocean littoral society. This is perhaps the danger of speaking so broadly across such a vast geography. While I do not suggest that a kind of Indian Ocean society does not exist, I think that the flatness of term “littoral society” can be remedied by careful sorting of the Indian Ocean into several large circulations, centered on redistribution ports that interact smaller networks of port cities. Tracing movement and exchange on a smaller scale then allows us to better piece together a large unit that can be brought into a conversation about the greater Indian Ocean. This paper considers the Western Indian Ocean to be one of the larger units of the Indian Ocean world, and will look specifically at flows between ports in the northern part of this unit in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This paper has two main goals: the first is to map relationships between port cities of the Northern Gulf (specifically Kuwait, Bushehr, Ma’shour and Muhammera) and the nature of the circulations between them. The second is to work important overland interactions into the story of the littoral society. It will do so by using British state records, as well as personal papers held by merchant families and oral history interviews.

Scholars of the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula have long sought to understand the means by which modern states emerged and extended their reach across new national spaces in the twentieth century. Scholars have focused on oil concessions, boundary demarcation, the suppression of rebellions, and political negotiations between the British and local sheikhs who exercised nominal sovereignty over “hinterlands” such as the Hajjar Mountains in the northern Trucial States. Yet the emphasis on oil concessions and subsequent efforts to extend formal state power into the interior masks many other spatial transformations that had a greater impact on the lived experience of Trucial States citizens than the oil and elite politics documented in the literature. Using oral histories, Emirati memoirs, maps, and British archival sources, this presentation examines how late 1960s British officials and Trucial States citizens conceptualized and continually reformulated regional commercial networks in a period marked by rapid economic and political change. Starting in the early 1960s, the British sought to create a federation that would survive British military withdrawal and prevent Nasserists, Baathists, and other radicals from gaining a foothold in the Gulf. Central to the success of this projected federation was the extension of state power to the mountains of Ras al-Khaimah and Fujairah, an area long imagined as underdeveloped and ungoverned. To support this future political entity, the British formed the Trucial States Development Council (TSDC) to oversee the construction of modern infrastructure. The British and TSDC aimed to facilitate rapid movement of goods and people within the Trucial States, commercialize agriculture, and open up the hinterlands to resource exploitation. The construction of the region’s first paved roads between emirates was marked by high-profile struggles between the British, the Arab League, and eventually Saudi Arabia for control of the development process. British development experts documented the agricultural economy of an area ranging from Dubai to Ras al-Khaimah to Muscat, with the goal of introducing cash crops and new farming techniques. New jetties in Gulf port cities were built with rocks quarried in the Hajjar Mountains – an enterprise involving a German construction firm, Abu Dhabi money, and Baluchi labor, which local residents met with armed resistance. These historical episodes exemplify how the spatial integration of the northern Trucial States was a key part of the lower Gulf’s incorporation into the global capitalist system – a process not sufficiently explained by oil and elite politics.