Manama

• 1. Introduction

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  Manama, the capital of Bahrain, sits on a small peninsula jutting into the Persian Gulf, home to roughly 743,000 people as of 2025. Beneath the glass towers of its financial district lies a city that has been fought over, traded through, and rebuilt across several thousand years. The Dilmun civilisation was here in 3000 BC, moving goods between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. Portuguese soldiers raised a fort on its outskirts in the early 1500s. Safavid Persians expelled them in 1602. Tribal confederations, Omani forces, British gunboats, and Arab nationalists have each left their mark. What made this small island city worth so much effort to so many powers, for so long? And how did a port once described by the British as chaotic and neglected become one of the Gulf's premier banking centres? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Name and Its Layers

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  Around the year 730 of the Islamic calendar, roughly 1330 AD, a manuscript recorded the town's name for the first time. A visitor named Turan Shah of Hurmuz had come to the island, which his own predecessor Tahamtam II had already absorbed into the Kingdom of Hormuz. The name he recorded was Manamah, without the definite article that later versions carry. One reading of the Arabic word traces it to "the place of rest" or "the place of dreams." A separate possibility reaches across to Persian, where the components can mean something closer to "my letter" or "letter of me," echoing the structure of the Persian royal epic Shah Nameh, the Book of Kings. Bahrain's centuries under the Sassanian and Achaemenid empires made Persian linguistic influence on local place names entirely plausible. Another city in Bahrain, Shah Khorah, carries a distinctly Persian name. Whether the sleepy poetry of "place of dreams" or the more bureaucratic resonance of "my letter" is closer to the original intention, no one today can say with certainty. What is clear is that by the 14th century, the name was already in use for a settlement that had existed in one form or another since the Bronze Age.

• 3. Pearl Wealth and Political Turbulence

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  During the Safavid era, the yearly income from exported Bahraini pearls reached 600,000 ducats, carried out to sea by around 2,000 pearling dhows. The Portuguese traveler Pedro Teixeira noted extensive cultivation of barley and wheat on the islands. A migration of Shia cultivators from Ottoman-controlled Qatif and al-Hasa in 1537, fleeing religious persecution, added further agricultural labour. Persian markets opened to Bahraini exports, and the islands thrived. Then, in 1783, the Bani Utbah tribal confederation crossed over and expelled the resident Persian governor Nasr Al-Madhkur. The Al Khalifa family took power, terminating all political ties with Persia. The early 19th century turned violent. Omani forces invaded in 1800, Wahhabi forces followed in 1810-11, and a civil war among Bahrain's co-rulers broke out in 1842. The town's port shut down. Most merchants fled to Kuwait and the Persian coast. When the English scholar William Gifford Palgrave visited Manama in 1862, he described a scattering of ruined stone buildings surrounded by the huts of poor fishermen and pearl-divers. The trading city that had supplied ducats to Persian treasury accounts lay nearly empty.

• 4. Britain's Long Hand

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  The General Maritime Treaty of 1820 was not an invitation Bahrain was free to decline. British warships had arrived in the Persian Gulf in response to piracy, and the Gulf states, including Bahrain, were pressed to sign a document prohibiting piracy and slavery. The Perpetual Truce of Peace and Friendship followed in 1861, with Britain taking responsibility for Bahrain's defence in exchange for control of its foreign affairs. Isa ibn Ali Al Khalifa became Hakim in 1869, and from that point Manama became the centre of British activity in the Gulf. Pearling earnings recovered, growing sevenfold between 1873 and 1900. Native agents, often drawn from Persian or Huwala minorities, fed reports back to British India and the residency in Bushehr. The construction of a British political residency in Manama in 1900 formalised what commerce had already made obvious. In 1919, Bahrain was officially integrated into the British Empire as an overseas territory under an order-in-council decree issued in 1913. The aging Hakim Isa ibn Ali was pushed out in favour of his son Hamad ibn Isa Al Khalifa. Charles Belgrave, arriving from the Colonial Office in 1926, reorganised the State Police and ran the Finance and Land departments. Customs were reorganised in 1923, civil courts opened the same year, and land registration followed in 1924. The reforms were thorough enough to be resented.

• 5. Oil, Collapse, and Reinvention

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  In 1907, the pearling industry supported 917 boats and employed up to 18,000 people. The estimated annual income from pearling in 1926 was 1.5 million pounds. Three years later, Japanese cultured pearls entered world markets and the numbers collapsed. Between 1929 and 1931, pearling entrepreneurs lost more than two-thirds of their income. The Great Depression piled on. Businessmen, shopkeepers, and divers fell into debt. Oil was discovered in 1932 and exports began in 1934. The bankrupt divers began drifting toward the oil fields, and the pearling industry, after centuries of sustaining the Gulf economy, faded away. Manama's role as a British military hub grew during the Second World War; the country served as a strategic airbase between Britain and India, hosted RAF Muharraq and a naval base at Juffair. The Italian Air Force bombed Bahrain in 1940. After Indian independence in 1947, the British Gulf residency relocated from Bushire to Manama. When anti-British unrest erupted in 1956, sparked by the Suez Crisis, the National Union Committee organised demonstrations. Buildings belonging to Europeans, the main Catholic church, and petrol stations were set ablaze. Protesters outside the British residency called for Belgrave's dismissal; the Foreign Office removed him the following year. Bahrain gained independence in 1971 and Manama was named its capital.

• 6. The Financial Hub Takes Shape

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  After independence, villages and hamlets on Manama's edges were absorbed into a single expanding urban area. New neighbourhoods such as Adliya and Salmaniya were incorporated. By 1981, foreigners outnumbered Bahrainis two-to-one, drawn by the construction boom and work from the Indian subcontinent. The Diplomatic Area in the city's northeast became the engine of economic diversification. Financial institutions there numbered 187 by 1986. In 2001, the National Action Charter, endorsed by King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, was approved by Bahrainis and restored parliamentary and municipal elections. Further elections in 2006 and 2010 brought in Islamist parties including Al Wefaq, Al Menbar, and Al Asalah alongside independent candidates. A month-long uprising in 2011 prompted the intervention of Gulf Cooperation Council forces and a three-month state of emergency. The Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry published a 500-page report on those events. Through all of this, Manama accumulated more than two hundred financial institutions and banks in its central business district alone. The Arab League designated the city the 2012 capital of Arab culture. The Globalization and World Cities Research Network classified it as a beta global city in 2018.

• 7. Learning and Moving Through the City

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  Before the 20th century, Quranic schools were the only educational option in Bahrain. The first modern school opened in Manama in 1892, a missionary elementary school set up by the Reformed Church in America, teaching English, Mathematics, and Christianity. Leading merchants sent their children there until financial difficulties forced it to close in 1933. It reopened as Al Raja School and continues operating today. A separate school, Al-Ittihad, opened in 1910 funded by Bahrain's Persian community. The first public school for boys, Al-Hidaya Al-Khalifia, opened in Muharraq in 1919. Its founding was credited to Shaikh Abdulla bin Isa Al-Khalifa, son of the then-ruler, who proposed the idea after returning from post-World War I celebrations in England. A second public boys school, the Jafaria School, opened in Manama in 1926. The first public school for girls followed two years later. On the roads, the first car arrived in Manama in 1914. Vehicle numbers climbed from 395 in 1944 to 3,379 in 1954 and then to 18,372 by 1970. A bridge connecting Manama to Muharraq was built in 1929; a new causeway replaced it in 1941. A four-lane highway atop a 24-kilometre causeway, linking Bahrain to the Saudi Arabian mainland, was completed in December 1986 and financed by Saudi Arabia. Bahrain International Airport, on Muharraq Island roughly 7 kilometres from the central business district, opened in 1932 and sits at the centre of a regional air network connecting Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America.