Page 358 - UAE Truncal States

The External Influences
financing a project was soon to be no longer a problem? Some form of
political union was anticipated, and therefore more effort might have
been made to provide these states with national administrators to
run the country in the future. 130
Whichever route might have been followed, that is to provide an
education predominantly in the technical or predominantly in the
administrative field, the outcome would have been rapidly overtaken
by events. After all, education is a long-term process. Even after the
discovery of oil in commercial quantities in Abu Dhabi in 1960 it was
impossible to predict that the resultant economic boom would be so
great, and would build up so rapidly. It was also not possible for
people to obtain training, in the lime before the boom and before the
union in 1971, in the management of the new situations that were
themselves a product of the economic and political changes.
British involvement in development in Abu Dhabi was always of a
different nature from that in the rest of the Trucial Stales. It was
consultative, not active. One of the reasons why a British Political
Officer was sent to Abu Dhabi in 1957 and the post was upgraded to
Political Agent in 1961, and why the British Government took great
pains to find suitable British advisers for the Ruler, was that they
wanted to encourage the Ruler to speed up development himself.
These advisers were directly employed by the Ruler of Abu Dhabi,
and therefore took their instructions from him and not from a
development agency or from the British Government. As in the case
of the employees of the Development Office, or other expatriates
working in Dubai, they frequently made a valuable contribution to
development in their special fields. But they could not be expected
to be particularly interested in the problems concerning the co­
ordination of development efforts throughout all the Trucial States.
In the late 1960s Abu Dhabi had become wealthy and was making a
considerable financial contribution to the development of the
northern Trucial States; the standard of living of the people in Abu
Dhabi improved dramatically compared to the changes in the other
states. The long term significance of this imbalance was not
recognised at the time, even by the advisers. Yet its rectification
would have facilitated the transition to a unified State which sooner
or later was to replace the anachronistic array of small shaikhdoms.
The Ruler of Abu Dhabi, Shaikh Shakhbut bin Sultan, repeatedly
turned down offers from the Political Agency to include Abu Dhabi in
assistance programmes and surveys. But it was Shaikh Shakhbut

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