Bahrain

Bahrain's recorded past begins with the ancient civilization of Dilmun, which flourished on the islands and adjacent Arabian coast from roughly the late fourth millennium BCE. Mentioned in Sumerian and later Mesopotamian texts as a sacred land and a vital entrepot, Dilmun linked the cities of southern Mesopotamia with the Indus Valley through the trade in copper, dates, pearls, and timber. Burial mounds at A'ali and the temple complex at Barbar testify to its prosperity. After Dilmun's decline, the archipelago passed under the influence of successive regional powers, including the Assyrians, the Achaemenid Persians, and, in classical times, the Hellenistic world, where Greek geographers knew it as Tylos.

With the rise of Islam in the seventh century, the islands and the eastern Arabian mainland, then collectively called Bahrayn, embraced the new faith and became part of the early caliphates. From the late ninth century the region was the heartland of the Qarmatian state, an Ismaili polity that briefly challenged Abbasid authority. Subsequent centuries saw rule by the Uyunids, the Usfurids, the Jarwanids, and the Jabrids, before the Portuguese seized the islands in 1521 and built the fortress whose ruins still dominate the northern coast. Safavid Persia displaced the Portuguese in 1602 and held Bahrain, with interruptions, until 1783, when the Bani Utbah, led by the Al Khalifa family from the Arabian mainland, expelled Persian forces and established the dynasty that continues to rule.

To preserve their position against Omani, Wahhabi, and Persian pressure, the Al Khalifa rulers entered into a series of treaties with the British East India Company and the British Crown during the nineteenth century, culminating in the 1880 and 1892 agreements that made Bahrain a British protected state. Britain managed Bahrain's foreign relations and shaped its administration through a resident political agent, while the discovery of oil in 1932, the first on the Arab side of the Gulf, transformed the economy and accelerated the development of modern infrastructure, schools, and a salaried civil service.

Bahrain became fully independent on 15 August 1971, after a United Nations survey confirmed local preference for a sovereign Arab state and Iran withdrew its longstanding territorial claim. A constitution promulgated in 1973 provided for an elected National Assembly, but the body was dissolved in 1975 and the country was governed by emiri decree for the next quarter century. Unrest during the 1990s, centered on demands for the restoration of parliamentary life, was followed by a reformist turn under Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, who succeeded in 1999. A National Action Charter approved by referendum in 2001 led to the 2002 constitution, under which Bahrain was redesignated a kingdom and a bicameral legislature was created.

In February and March 2011, large protests inspired by the wider Arab uprisings called for deeper constitutional reform; the demonstrations were suppressed with assistance from a Gulf Cooperation Council force, and a subsequent independent commission of inquiry documented the events. In the years since, Bahrain has deepened its alignment with Saudi Arabia and the United States, hosts the headquarters of the United States Fifth Fleet, and in 2020 normalized relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords. The present-day state is a constitutional monarchy in which the Al Khalifa dynasty exercises executive authority alongside an appointed Shura Council and an elected Council of Representatives.