The Pearl Divers’ Uprising of 1932 and the Imperial Category of Foreigner in Interwar Bahrain

This article examines the 1932 pearl divers’ uprising in Manama, the largest political mobilization of pearl divers in the Gulf’s modern history, as an instance of anti-imperial praxis. It analyzes the kind of imperial power that these workers mobilized against by foregrounding British deployment of the designation of foreigner as a classificatory tool to govern the scores of divers who traveled to Bahrain each summer to participate in the annual pearl dive. In the interwar period, Britain’s capacious juridical capacity to designate certain subjects as foreigners proved useful in containing popular political energies on the islands. With the creation of a rationalized governmental bureaucracy in 1923 and sweeping reforms to the pearl industry in Bahrain, British officials combatted the growing opposition to their rule by resorting to deportation, restrictions on organized labor activity, and an active effort to shape an acquiescent political subjectivity for those who were deemed to arrive from elsewhere. By centering the imperial category of foreigner as an attempt to mold political behavior, the 1932 uprising can be understood as a rejection of the British-led Government of Bahrain’s newfound capacity to shape subjectivities and properly situated within the Gulf’s anti-imperial currents of the twentieth century.