On the evening of Monday, 9 February 2026, the ACRPS Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies Unit hosted Fahad Bishara, Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies and a researcher at the Unit, for the third in its lecture series for the 2025-2026 academic year. The lecture, “The Gulf before Oil: An Economic History in the Age of Capitalism”, was introduced by Abdulrahman Alebrahim, Assistant Professor at the Doha Institute History Department and researcher at the Unit.
Bishara began by presenting a commercial price list of goods sent from Bombay to Kuwait via a Kuwaiti merchant, pondering how such lists might be read today, and whether the economic history of the Gulf in the pre-oil era might be rewritten by tracing commodities and their trajectories. He explained that, despite the abundance of studies on the Gulf before oil, they have not produced a clear economic periodization of the era. Political periodization, which is linked to settlement, tribal relations, state formation, and the expansion of the British Empire, has instead predominated.
Bishara proposed a new framework for writing the nineteenth-century economic history of the Gulf by situating it within the history of global capitalism, associated with the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of commodification as its defining feature. Capitalism, he argued, was not merely a European technical development but a historical phase of socio-economic transformation that extended to the colonies, particularly India, thereby allowing the history of the Gulf to be reread as part of this global trajectory. He stressed the importance of reading this history from the “inside out”, drawing on local sources such as commercial correspondence, sharia court records, British colonial court records, fatwas, and trade documents. These sources reveal shifts in the legal and regulatory frameworks that structured economic exchange, rather than requiring ready-made narratives to be imposed upon local archives. In this context, he called for viewing the Gulf within the Indian Ocean world as a transregional arena for the circulation of goods, people, and ideas, rather than as a mere geographical framework. Ports such as Karachi, Bombay, Aden, and Zanzibar formed key nodes in the network of industrial capitalism.
Bishara argued that as the infrastructure of colonial capitalism expanded, a Gulf mercantile community emerged in India, particularly in the Bombay Presidency, citing the opening of a branch of the National Bank of India in Aden in 1895. Bombay was central to this network: Arab merchants migrated there and settled, making constant use of the technologies of colonial capitalism – railways, colonial banks, the telegraph, and steamships – to export and import goods. By the mid-nineteenth century they had established themselves within Bombay’s commercial society, forming partnerships with groups such as Gujarati Bania merchants. Bishara noted that Gulf Arabs in Bombay during this period were known for trading in horses, using local newspapers and printing presses to advertise their businesses, and turning to Indian courts in the event of disputes. They engaged in various forms of trade, prominently textiles, and foodstuffs constituted the principal commodities imported from India. Thousands of letters, accounts, orders, and price lists demonstrate that India was a major source of grains, pulses, rice, and flour, particularly from the port of Karachi.
Bishara also addressed the pearl trade in the Gulf and the wider Indian Ocean region. Most historians, he noted, date its boom to the mid-nineteenth century, driven by rising demand in Europe and the United States following the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of a new elite. Bombay played a pivotal role as the principal regional market for pearls, especially for Gulf merchants, who effectively monopolized the trade, reaping lucrative profits. They partnered with local Indian merchants and maintained associates in the Gulf: pearls were taken, pledged in Indian banks, and the proceeds channelled to partners in the Gulf – particularly local pearl dealers, who distributed them among captains and sailors. As pearl prices rose, these merchants were able to pressure banks for additional capital, fuelling further expansion and price inflation before the subsequent slump.
Date cultivation was another significant manifestation of commercial prosperity between the Gulf and Indian markets. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, Gulf merchants invested in date plantations and lands in Basra, some of them belonging to ruling families, as well as in Bombay. As the commercial world of Basra, Bombay, and the Gulf ports matured, a regional labour market expanded. While most workers were free labourers, others came from different regions, borrowing from ship captains who in turn borrowed from merchants. Under this system of debt, workers bound themselves into relationships structured by credit and commercial exchange; debt linked individuals within a partnership in production and distribution. In this way, the Gulf entered the market system and began to generate the conditions for the emergence and maintenance of a working class in the region. Labour itself became commodified, as workers were tied to a monetary value tradable within the labour market.
In conclusion, Bishara emphasized that the nineteenth century saw the Gulf’s deeper commercial integration and expansion within the Indian Ocean region. Financial relations increasingly mediated social relations, and these social relations became so embedded within networks of debt, credit, money, and trade became that the Gulf could be described as a commercial society.
