Today, discussions of the Arab world, especially the Gulf States, are increasingly defined by the use of ethnosectarian terms. Such divisions are often assumed to be directly related to Islamism and oil, but their roots can be traced back much further – to the early twentieth century and Bahrain under British colonial rule. Drawing on a wealth of local literature unexamined in previous English-language studies, Omar H. AlShehabi analyses how colonialism and modernization contributed to Bahraini society’s division along ethnic and sectarian lines. He assesses, too, the impact of emergent political movements of the time, in particular the nationalist al-Nahda renaissance which swept the Arab world in the nineteenth century. A groundbreaking work, Contested Modernity challenges us to reconsider how we see not only the Gulf but the wider Middle East as it was drawn by Britain and France in the aftermath of World War I.