Combination beyond ideational diffusion: origins and vectors of Bahrain’s Arab nationalism through uneven and combined development

Abstract

One cannot easily situate the Gulf Arab states homogenously within the literature on Arab nationalism in the scholarship of the International Relations of the Middle East (IRME). Despite the recent historiography of ‘other histories’ of Arab nationalism in the Gulf, the extant research on the international relations of the Gulf has rarely theoretically interrogated how Arab nationalism derived from and evolved through the progression of rentier economy in the Gulf under British Colonialism as a peculiar historical process of late-capitalist social formation. To advance such a theoretical endeavour, this paper applies the concept of uneven and combined development (UCD) to the case of Bahrain under British colonialism. It argues that combined capitalist development in the Gulf under British colonialism fully activated Arab nationalism through the social mechanism of oil commodification. This historical process of combination created a vector for Bahrain’s early capitalist development and generated changing class relations and internal contradictions associated with the origins of Bahrain’s Arab nationalism. Most importantly, ‘combination’ transformed an early diffused national consciousness in the era of al-Nahda into a nationalist ideology in modern times, of which its agenda presents Bahrain’s peculiar experience among other non-peculiar cases in the Middle East.