Bahrain

An island that was the pearl centre of the Gulf, the first to find oil, and the first to run out. Bahrain was Dilmun in the third millennium BCE, a trading power linking Mesopotamia and the Indus, and its freshwater springs made it valuable in a region without them. Pearl diving employed most of the population until the 1930s. The Al Khalifa took the islands in 1783 and signed treaties with Britain through the nineteenth century. Oil was struck in 1932, the first on the Arab side of the Gulf, which gave Bahrain a generation's head start in schools, hospitals and administration - and reserves small enough that it had to diversify early into banking, aluminium and refining. Independence came in 1971. The country has a Shia majority and a Sunni ruling family, and that division has driven repeated unrest; protests in 2011 during the Arab Spring were suppressed with the help of Saudi and Emirati troops crossing the causeway. The US Fifth Fleet is based here. Formula One has raced at Sakhir since 2004. Manama is the capital. The country has about 1.5 million people on around 780 square kilometres, the smallest Arab state. Arabic is official and English widely used. The King Fahd Causeway has linked it to Saudi Arabia by road since 1986. Bahrain's burial mounds number in the tens of thousands. It was the first Gulf state to have a public school system, opened in 1919. Bahrain means two seas in Arabic, referring to its fresh and salt springs.

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