Smaller in size than the state of Nagaland in north-east India, Qatar stands for its outsized influence even in the Arabian peninsula. It has one of the highest GDP per capita in the world and is often the stage at which regional geopolitics plays out. For much of the region’s history, the littoral between Kuwait and Qatar was known as Bahrain while Qatar was one of its dependent tribal chiefdoms. The present state of Qatar ruled by the House of Thani emerged in the 19th century with the backing of the British government, which was keen to secure its trade routes.

While presently nearly all the Gulf states including Qatar have oil as their chief export and mainstay of the economy, less than 100 years ago it was the pearl trade that was the most prominent export and brought prosperity to the region.

Pearling in the Gulf region has been prevalent since ancient times, referred to in poetry as the ‘tears of the beloved, and ‘fish eyes’ by the Babylonians, the Quran refers to them as something that belonged to paradise.

Qatar and the Arabian peninsula in general has been the bridge between south Asia and the West i.e Mesopotamia. Archaeological digs near Doha have thrown up pottery that provides evidence of the Dilmun civilisation (2450-1700 BC) which thrived in this region.

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Habibur Rahman wrote in The Emergence of Qatar, “…sea traffic from the Gulf to Mesopotamia, carrying copper, gold, precious stones, ivory, teakwood, frankincense, and spices, also linked this country (Qatar and the Gulf) with India and the ancient Far East… and the expansion of Islam into the subcontinents of Iran and India gave fresh impetus to maritime trade in the Gulf. By exploiting the monsoon winds, Arab seamen and merchants in the 8th to 13th centuries became regular visitors to the ports of the East African coast and the Malabar coast of India”.

The Portuguese first interacted with the Arabs of the Gulf in the 16th century and established outposts along the coast as well as the mainland. “They traded for spices in India and for pearls in Bahrain and its vicinity”, wrote Rahman. Some other goods were silks, silver, amber and horses. In fact, according to widely held belief it was an expert Arab sailor, Shihab al-Din who helped Vasco de Gama reach Calicut in India from Malindi (now in Kenya).

The Rise of Qatar

In many ways the ‘scramble’ in the Arabian peninsula and the interplay of regional powers like the Wahabis, Omanis, Utubs and international players like the Ottomans and the British led to the birth of a sovereign Qatar.

Allen J Fromherz wrote in Qatar: “Qatar is one of the world’s most unlikely political entities. Surrounded by powerful and expansionist neighbours and projecting into Gulf waters, waters rocked by centuries of conflict, Qatar has one of the more extraordinary stories of state formation in the Gulf. Unlike the long-established ruling families of other Gulf States such as Al-Sabah of Kuwait or the Zayed family of Abu Dhabi who had a coherent, if admittedly local, political presence in the region long before the British dominated it, the power of Al-Thani of Qatar is relatively young.”

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Through inter-tribe conflicts and powerplay around the 1780s the Maadhid tribe began gaining control of present-day Qatar region. Under the leadership of Mohammad bin Thani, the leader of Maadhids, they eventually established supremacy and won the support of the British to stake claim. Rahman wrote, “Shaikh Mohammad bin Thani’ s position as ‘the Chief’ of Qatar received legal recognition when in September 1868 he signed a treaty with Colonel Lewis Pelly (November 1862 to October 1872), the Resident in the Gulf, bringing a significant change in the political status of Qatar. The treaty referred to Shaikh Mohammad bin Thani as the ‘principal Chief of Katar’. In fact, the 1868 Treaty reconfirmed the existence of a local leadership in Qatar similar to that elsewhere in the region.”

The Bombay Connection: A Hub of Pearl Trade

Till the 1900s, Bombay was the hub from where pearls were exported to other countries. Because of this link, India traders settled in large numbers in the Gulf. Called the Banyas, they could thrive in this trade due to the advantage of long-term credit facility provided by bankers in India. They therefore became influential actors and dominated the export of pearls. Until the end of the 19tb century, pearls were exported to Bombay, and from there to other world markets.

A new layer was added to this commercial link with the conquest of India by the British who then started using Bombay as a naval base to influence the geopolitics of the region. In the Gulf, the under the Thani family, Qatar became a British protectorate in 1916 in return for concessions on foreign affairs and sovereignity. Interestingly, the Indian Rupee remained the de facto currency in all the gulf states till the 1960s when the Gulf Rupee came into circuluation. Fromherz noted, “Until World War I almost all British agents in Bombay saw much of the Gulf coast as a chaotic region to be passed over as quickly as possible enroute to India. Bombay almost always overruled British agents in Cairo who often had a more subtle understanding other importance of internal Arab affairs but who may not have appreciated as fully the economic importance and weight of British interests in the subcontinent It was this control of Gulf affairs from Bombay and the easy dismissal of the importance of the land and tribes of the Gulf that gave Al Thani the space to assert a tenuous independence not only from the British but from their rapacious neighbours”.

The British had been exiling recalcitrant and rebellious tribal chiefs from the Gulf across the Arabian sea to Bombay, throughout the late 19th and early 20th century. Several decades later, around 2006, M F Hussain, Bombay Progress Artists’ Group co-founder and perhaps India’s most famous painter, exiled himself to Qatar after he and his shows were attacked by fundamentalists, and died a Qatari citizen in 2011.

HistoriCity is a column by author Valay Singh that narrates the story of a city that is in the news, by going back to its documented history, mythology and archaeological digs. The views expressed are personal