Migration in Pre‐oil Qatar: A Sketch

Abstract

The Peninsula of Qatar historically has been a site of diverse forms of human mobility ( Figure 1). Unlike the conventional representations which depict Qatar as a small locale, closed by virtue of cultural traditions and geography, Qatar has forged human interaction and exchange for hundreds of years. Caravans bringing people from the Najd desert are probably some of the most documented. The groups settled in Qatar, mediated clashes inherent between settlers and original owners of the land created a sense of harmony and perfected Qatari extraordinary skill at mediation and reconciliation. Qatar's maritime economy with its dug-up dhows rode the seas to travel as far away as Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, and eastern Africa where mangroves and other goods were in high demand. Despite Qatar's notoriety for small populace and massive migrant labour, this reality remains far from contextualized. In this essay, we offer a conversation about who arrived during the State's pre-oil period -roughly before the 1930s -and what were their societies of origin partaking in the commerce of silk and pearls before the discovery of oil reconfigured economy, labour markets, and exchanges in music, folklore, food-ways, silk, and spice. This essay describes these early waves to stress an early Qatari cosmopolitanism spawned by the variegated array of its maritime activities and exchanges. In describing these early migrant communities, we do not reify the notion of migrant or community, for these concepts themselves are migratory and mobile. We provide a description on the basis of their own

The exotic veil: Managing tourist perceptions of national history and statehood in Oman

“…As Hanieh, (2016) highlights, these states are usually politically and economically dominated by one clan, which typically controls and exploits the country's petrochemical wealth. The persistent dominance of these families is widely resented among those tribes that lost out in the post-independence settlements; and among former slave families, which continue to experience exploitation and discrimination (see Alpers, & Hopper, 2017;Alsudairi & Abusharaf, 2015).…”

Bordering Zubara: oil politics, the 1937 Qatari-Bahraini conflict, and the making of a modern Arabian (Persian) Gulf Borderland

“…Such exclusion was also part of the Al-Khalifa side's narrative on Zubara's built landscape. In highlighting only Al-Khalifa building achievements, this narrative ignored those of other tribes of old Zubara, particularly the Al-Musallam, which had long dominated the area when the Al-Khalifa first arrived in 1766 (Kinzel 2014;Alsudairi and Abusharaf 2015). Moreover, like the linear narrative on Al-Naim submission to the Bahraini ruler, this landscape narrative did not accommodate historical change.…”