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Chapter Eight

7 British involvement in the 1950s and 1960s

A change of attitude
While the British authorities had kept the closest watch for possible
infringements of Britain’s confirmed rights and privileges, her duty
towards the people of the area was seen in India to be confined to
keeping the peace at sea. A few years after the Second World War
Britain’s policy towards the Trucial Stales changed to include a novel
feature: it was maintained by many of those who then influenced
Britain’s policy towards its weaker proteges that she should assume
a certain amount of responsibility for the betterment of the welfare of
the population in those areas.
This voice of social conscience was stirring throughout the
western world of the post-war decades, strongly enough to arouse
bad feelings if such responsibility was not shouldered and no
development assistance was rendered. Yet reality always fell short of
this idealistic notion of brotherly responsibility for the weaker
partners, for no nation can sustain for long a largely altruistic foreign
policy. Development help of all kinds necessarily also serves in the
first place the donor nation’s interests, be they the need to secure the
supply of raw materials, to guarantee the stability of a vital region or
to pacify pressure-groups at home. Great Britain, too, was in the
event able to make only the minimum contribution to the social
development of the people in the Trucial States: a minimum as
compared to the requirements of the then impoverished and
backward region; a maximum if looked at in the light of British
commitments to similar tasks in its overpopulated former colonies.
During the decades while Britain’s former wealth, resources and
world power were vanishing fast, her development assistance to the
Trucial Slates had to be fairly accurately tailored to match whatever
benefit she could hope to derive in return for maintaining her
influence over this area.

Growing financial commitments of the oil companies
In the 1950s, the commencement of large-scale oil exploration
channelled relatively vast amounts of foreign investment into the
Trucial States for the first time. The two main oil companies were
British-based, although some of the shares were held by foreign
companies,79 and this placed the British authorities under some
obligation to safeguard the investments. After a winter of seismic
work in the Trucial States in early 1949, Petroleum Development
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