Protection of the Pearling Industry

How to explore this map: This map has only one data layer. It represents locations of pearling villages in the Gulf region in the early twentieth century. The colors on the map represent the flag of the protecting power of each of the villages. You can click on each of the points to get more information about the location, the number of pearling boats and divers from each place.

Context: This map’s dataset is based on a table provided in vol 2 the Geographical and Statistical section of John Gordon Lorimer’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia. The appendix in which the table is found is entitled “The Pearl and Mother-of-Pearl Fisheries of the Persian Gulf”.

Geolocation: The table was extracted from the above mentioned appendix and the locations found therein (with the exception of the regional toponyms) were geolocated using mixed methods. A first pass was made using the Geocode by Awesome table plug in for Google Sheets. These were hand checked with the passages in which the places were found in Lorimer’s Gazetteer for accuracy and complementary geographic coordinates were taken from GeoNames and Google Maps. No GeoNames IDs are included. It is perhaps significant that some of the pearling settlements were transient or are now abandoned.

Notes on data decisions: OCR errors were corrected to represent best possible readings of the digitized Gazetteer. The designation (Do. = “ditto”?) was replaced by the appropriate values.

Further mapping: Shown here is only one aspect of the dataset. Maps could easily be made of the numbers of divers and boats.

Unidentified locations: In building this dataset, we were unable to locate several places

  • Hālat-bin-Anas (Bahrain)
  • Hālat Bin-Iswār (Bahrain)
  • Jaon (Bahrain)
  • Rās Ghurāb (Shībkūh region, Iran)
  • Buraghleh (Shībkūh region, Iran)
  • Saif-ash-Shaikh (Shībkūh region, Iran)

If you can locate these places on a map, or know what the place is called today, write us at opengulfNYUAD@gmail.com. Thanks in advance! We will acknowledge your local knowledge.

License: Creative Commons 4.0 BY-NC-SA International
Creative Commons License

Suggested Citation: OpenGulf Project (2020). Protection of the Pearling Industry Map. https://opengulf.github.io/pearling.html. Accessed xxxx.yy.zz. 10.5281/zenodo.3955081

Last update: 24 July 2020