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Chapter Six

                 activities there, the demand for domestic slaves in al Hasa grew. The
                 economic situation in the Trucial States in the 1940s was going from
                 had to worse, general security outside the towns was low, and some
                 unscrupulous individuals were tempted to snatch Baluchis, ex­
                 slaves, and even Arabs, and sell them through the channels which
                 soon opened up. Thesiger recounts that while he stayed in al 'Ain in
                 October 1949 a well-known slave dealer from al Hasa, 'Ali al Murri,
                 had recently started trading between Hamasah and al Hasa, and
                 Thesiger’s companions claimed that when 'Ali al Murri visited a well
                 just before Thesiger’s parly arrived there, he had forty-eight slaves
                 with him.70
                   Many incidents of kidnappings of Baluchis, Persians and negroes
                 and their being transported from or via the Trucial Slates to al Hasa
                 are reported during the period before the Saudi force was evicted by
                 the Trucial Oman Levies in October 1955, thus ending a dispute
                 which had hindered the oil company’s activities. During the late
                 1950s the patrols of the Trucial Oman Levies, who were in 1956
                 renamed the Trucial Oman Scouts, made the transport of any sort of
                 contraband difficult.* however, the quickening pace of the economic
                 development concentrated the minds of people on the new opportu­
                 nities at home on the Trucial Coast, and the supply of slaves from the
                Trucial States to al Hasa dried up completely.
                   While these activities were flourishing in periods such as during
                 the pearling boom and at the beginning of the oil industry in Saudi
                Arabia, the individual outlaw or the beduin raider who kidnapped
                immigrants and tribal people alike made a quick profit out of selling
                them to the few inveterate dealers. The “unfortunate victims’’, as they
                were usually called in British documents, were not necessarily all
                that unfortunate. During the 1920s the Baluchis who arrived on the
                Trucial Coast had fled from strife and famine at home to seek work,
                food and shelter, all of which were usually more securely provided if
                they belonged to a master than if they tried their luck on their own in
                the rough-and-tumble of the expanding pearling ports. As for the
                individuals who ended up as domestic servants in a Saudi household
                or working in one of the newly established farms in al Hasa during
                the 1940s and early 1950s, most were more comfortable there than
                they would have been in the then depressed shaikhdoms of the
                Trucial Coast. This is the gist of a number of accounts, for when
                relatives succeeded in tracing their kidnapped kin to where they
                were  living, by then usually as free members of a  well-to-do

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