7 - Governing and Regulating Diversity: Urban Government in Jeddah

Summary

This chapter investigates the governance of a diverse city over time, with a special emphasis on those institutions which interfaced between the imperial representatives and the local elites. In the Ottoman reform period, these consisted primarily of an array of different consultative councils at various levels (municipal and provincial). Notably under Saudi rule, these were slowly integrated into the emerging new Kingdom, accompanied by a gradual change in the urban elites controlling the city. The chapter also investigates the implementation of law and order. Finally, it tackles attempts to regulate immigration from Ottoman times to the early Saudi nationality law, and the different rationales behind attempts to limit or rather circumscribe the presence of foreigners. Policies were driven, in Ottoman times, by fears of imperial intervention and attempts at poverty limitation, while, in the Saudi period, an initially liberal approach to nationality soon gave way to more exclusive considerations.