Page 268 - UAE Truncal States

A City Stale - Example Dubai

wilhin the town. The remainder of Ihe population was made up of
250 Persian households. 200 Baluchi houses and the Indian British
subjects.
The only inland settlement which could be considered as being
subject to the Rulers of Dubai was Hajarain in the Wadi Hatta,
which, in its disputes with the inhabitants of the Na'im protected
village of Masfut, looked to the Ruler of Dubai for support. In later
decades the name Hatta was adopted for that village, and for some
time now rulers of Dubai have had a representative in Hatta and
services for the village are now the responsibility of the municipality
of Dubai. The inland oases of KhawanTj and 'Awir, some 17 to 20
kilometres from the coast, in relatively well-wooded dune country,
are both more recent developments of gardens and out-of-town
houses which became possible with the installation of pumps in
water wells.
The data which are available on the economic activity of Dubai in
the first decade of the 20th century may not be correct in all details,
but they provide part of the general picture of a growing multi­
national, sea-orientated pearling and trading community. Dubai had,
of all the Trucial Slates’ ports, the highest number of men employed
on pearling boats (6,936 according to Lorimer)7 although it had only
335 boats, while 410 boats belonged to Abu Dhabi. But while many of
the people who manned those boats which sailed from Abu Dhabi
came in from the desert at the beginning of the pearling season, the
crews manning the Dubai pearling boats, and their families, lived in
town all the year round. The gross revenue from taxes levied by the
Ruler of Dubai at that time, 41,388 Rupees was only surpassed by
that of Abu Dhabi, 43,964 Rupees. The number of exempt boats and
men was, however, so high (210 boats and 3,813 men) that the Ruler
had a net income of only 20,860 Rupees,8 but the community of
exempt people did have to pay for the upkeep of 100 beduin guards to
watch over the, by then, no longer walled quarters of the town during
the absence of most of the local fighting men in the summer. The
exemptions which Dubai accorded at that time, particularly to the
majority of the Bani Yas—though they could also extend to others—
left the community as a whole much better off. In later decades this
relative laxity in taxation encouraged entrepreneurs in the pearling
trade to settle in Dubai.
The rule of the liberal and far-sighted Maktum bin Hashar not only
covered part of the period during which the pearling industry
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