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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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