An era gone by

Publication: August 2012

Available: Amazon £95.00/US$ 136.85

By Fran Gillespie

Almost 20 years ago, an archaeologist found a pearl.

The archaeologist was Dr Robert Carter, senior lecturer at UCL-Qatar, and the tiny drilled pearl turned up on a fifth and sixth millennium site on the bay of Kuwait. One of the oldest Gulf pearls ever found, it caught the interest of Carter, one of the Kuwaiti-British expedition’s field directors, and he began to research the history of the Gulf pearl fisheries.

The result in 2005 was an academic paper The History and Prehistory of Pearling in The Persian Gulf. From then on things mushroomed. Encouraged by the widespread academic interest in his research, the author published last year what will surely be the definitive volume on the subject.

Surprisingly for such a fascinating subject, no such in-depth study has previously been attempted. At 165,000 words and packed with over 350 photographs in colour and black and white, some of them never before published, the volume is – literally – a heavyweight contribution not only to the history of pearling but to the complicated history of the region.

It covers the whole history of the pearl in the Arabian Gulf, from sites like the one in Kuwait Bay, pearls in classical literature and Greek and Roman sites, through to the boom years of the late 18^th and the 19^th centuries and the catastrophic collapse of the industry in the 20^th century which led to decades of grim poverty.

Until the 1930s, pearls were a major product of the coastal peoples of the Gulf. Fished by the millions, they became a pillar of the regional economy, dominating the lives of everyone in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and what is now the UAE.

At its height at the beginning of the last century some 70,000 men were employed as pearl fishers. Then the industry collapsed. Popularly blamed on the development of the cultured pearl, the underlying catalyst for the disaster, says Carter, was the economic recession affecting the whole of the Western world following World War I, leading to the Wall Street crash of 1929.

Had it not been for the providential discovery of oil, fishing villages like Kuwait, Manama, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah and Ras-al-Khaimah, which had grown into prosperous pearling and trading city-states, would have been rapidly depopulated and would have shrunk once more into obscure little settlements.  

Illustrations range from calligraphy pages of the Holy Qur'an to old photographs of the pearl divers, their dhows and equipment, taken less than a century ago but evoking a long-vanished world. Some 25 maps are included, many made by Europeans who came in increasing numbers to the Arabian Gulf as explorers, invaders or merchants.  

Lengthy sections on the staggeringly complicated division of income derived from each catch by the boat crews, and even more complex methods used by merchants to calculate the value of pearls, will mainly concern only those with a serious academic interest. But overall the book will fascinate not only those academics who want to delve deeper into the subject but the average reader who wishes to know more about the growth of the pearl fisheries and the colourful history of the region. This is a book to be dipped into again and again, rather than read from cover to cover, and the illustrations, with accompanying detailed information, are a joy.

The price puts Sea of Pearls rather beyond the pocket of many individual readers, but hopefully it will find its way into every library throughout the Gulf states. Reading about the hardship following the collapse of the pearl fishing industry one can only exclaim, as a young Qatari boy did recently, ‘Thank God the oil came!’