Bahrain historical timeline

Origins

Bahrain was Dilmun, a Bronze Age trading power that linked Mesopotamia to the Indus valley from around 3000 BC and appears in Sumerian texts as something close to paradise. It left tens of thousands of burial mounds, one of the largest prehistoric cemeteries anywhere. Fresh water bubbling up through the seabed made the island an anchorage worth holding, and pearling made it worth fighting over. Greeks knew it as Tylos, the Portuguese held it from 1521, and the Al Khalifa family took it in 1783.

Turning points

Treaties with Britain from the 1860s made Bahrain a protected state, and a British adviser ran its administration from 1926 to 1957. Two things then happened in the right order. The Japanese cultured pearl destroyed the pearling economy in the 1930s — and in 1932 Bahrain became the first place on the Arab side of the Gulf to strike oil. Independence came in 1971. Because its reserves were small, it was also the first Gulf state to face life after oil, which pushed it into banking, aluminium and services decades before its neighbours had to think about it. The causeway to Saudi Arabia opened in 1986. Protests in 2011 during the Arab Spring were put down with Gulf military assistance, and the politics of a Shia-majority population under a Sunni monarchy remain unresolved.

Influential people

Sheikh Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa, who ruled from 1961 to 1999 and oversaw independence. Charles Belgrave, the British adviser who built the modern administration, for better and worse. And the pearl divers themselves, whose working lives are the subject of the country’s UNESCO listing.

Cultural evolution

The pearling path through Muharraq — merchant houses, a mosque, the shore where the boats left — is inscribed by UNESCO as the last complete record of an economy that once employed most of the population. Bahrain has kept small Christian and Jewish communities, which is unusual in the Gulf, and has long served as the region’s more relaxed social outlet, a role the causeway made structural.

Present-day significance

The economy runs on finance, aluminium smelting and refining rather than on its own crude. Formula One has raced here since 2004 and the Grand Prix is the country’s largest annual event. The United States bases its Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, which gives a small island an outsized place in Gulf security.