Page 49 - UAE Truncal States

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Chapter Two

The link between the tribal structure and the limited
economic opportunities: the “versatile tribesman”
Throughout the major immigration movements and the secondary
dispersal and dissemination of the tribal units, a fundamental issue
became increasingly important: could the economic resources of the
region support the increasing population? The problem facing each
individual group in turn was how it could itself best utilise that share
of the resources which it possessed or to which it had gained access.
There seems no way of assessing with any degree of certainty how
large the population of South East Arabia was at the time of the
advent of Islam. If, however, the many names of tribal groups and of
places mentioned in the Arab and Persian texts mean anything
comparable to what such names mean today, one can assume that the
population density in south-eastern Arabia was similar to what it
was in the 1930s. One can also assume that, even if climatic
conditions had been more favourable, the need for economic
diversification was an urgent one for the population of the area
contemporary with the rise of Islam, and that this pattern did not
change significantly over the centuries.16
It could be argued that this need for economic diversification was,
more than any other factor, responsible for the fact that the tribal
structure of society did not give way over the centuries to patterns
typical of societies organised predominantly along the lines of village
neighbourhoods or of occupational communities, as happened in
other originally tribally-organised societies of the Arabian Peninsula
and even to some extent in the settled areas of neighbouring Oman
proper. There seems to be a close link between this unbroken
preponderance for centuries of the tribal structure as the basis of
society in the area now covered by the UAE, and the type of
economies which the local conditions afforded and the way in which
these limited economic opportunities were exploited. A more detailed
description of the various aspects of the traditional economic
activities and of the extent and mechanics of economic diversifi­
cation is therefore a necessary step in order to arrive at a satisfactory
analysis of the state of this essentially tribal structure of society in
the UAE at the time of the economic and social changes due to the
discovery of oil.
The economic activities to which the geography and climate of the
country lent themselves were: camel-breeding, goat, sheep and cattle
breeding, agriculture—mostly dependent on artificial irrigation—
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