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The External Influences
Resident in Bushire, who had been directly responsible for this area
and was assisted by the Residency Agent in Sharjah, a local servant
of the Indian Government, handed the routine supervision over to the
Political Agent in Bahrain in 1934. The reason for this change was
that the establishment of landing facilities for RAF and Imperial
Airways planes in more than one of the shaikhdoms required closer
local liaison than previously. This routine work grew so rapidly in
volume and in importance that the Government of India eventually
recognised that the local Residency Agent could no longer cope with
it alone. Therefore the first British-born Political Officer, appointed in
1937, was Captain J. B. Howes, formerly an employee of the oil
company IPC, which was then seeking concessions from the Rulers
of the Trucial Slates; he resided in Sharjah only during the winter
months. This arrangement continued until 1948,82 when Mr P. D.
Stobart became the first Political Officer to live in Sharjah throughout
the year.83 The post of local Residency Agent was abolished in 1949.
A gradual change in style of administration and in emphasis of the
objectives of the British presence in the lower Gulf was to be
expected when the British Indian Empire ceased to exist in 1947. For
just over a year the conduct of relations with the Gulf Slates was the
responsibility of the India Office in London, which eventually
became part of the Commonwealth Relations Office. But since neither
the Trucial States nor any of the other Gulf States had ever been as
directly linked to Britain as the former colonies and protectorates of
the Commonwealth, the Foreign Office, not the Colonial Office,
became ultimately responsible in 1948. Initially this did not mean a
complete set of new faces for the various posts in the Gulf: the
Residents, Agents and Political Officers were still mostly appointed
from among the people who were taken over by the Foreign Office
from the Indian Civil Service. But the overall considerations which
guided the Foreign Office in its policy towards these states were more
influenced by world opinion about Britain’s colonial past, and by UN
resolutions on Britain’s current duties in respect of its former
dependents, than had ever been the case when the affairs of the Gulf
were primarily linked to Britain’s interests in and around India. Thus
the British officers serving in the area had to work hard at an
acceptable compromise between serving the British interests, by
then mostly of an economic nature and focused on oil, antagonising
the local Rulers over thorny problems such as cases of slave trading
into Saudi Arabia, and carrying out the humanitarian duties of

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