Page 454 - Truncal States to UAE_Neat

Notes to Chapter Three

responsibility of the company to ensure that the local labour force
always got a fair deal. The company subsequently laid down standard
conditions of service with which all contractors were obliged to comply.
63 During the latter half of 1967 a local labour force of 110 men, which had
been assembled for the construction of the Bu Hasa degassing station,
were laid off and Ahmad bin Hasan ensured that their interests were
safeguarded.
64 He has also been the 'arlf in one of the villages of the Buraimi area and
later became the chairman of the National Assembly of Abu Dhabi
when it was created in 1971.
65 See also for the following, above, pages 50ff.
66 See also UK Memorial II, Annex G, no. 1, pp. 273ff.
67 See below, page 217.
68 This was why Buti bin Muhammad bin Khalfan, a Mazru'i who was
married to the Ruler’s Qubaisi aunt Wudlmah, was sometimes called
wali of Dalma although he did not even always reside in his house on the
island.
69 The examples for the various manifestations of actual authority
exercised by a Ruler over a tribal society are drawn mostly from Abu
Dhabi because for this part of the Trucial States there exists the most
comprehensive documentation especially for the early 1950s in form of
material collected for and used in the UK Memorial. This material has
also been used and quoted extensively in J.B. Kelly, Eastern Arabian
Frontiers.
70 The growth of the trade may be seen by comparing the earliest and the
last of the years for which statistics of the value of the pearl exports are
given in the Gazetteer: In 1873/74 the Trucial States exported about
1,180,000 Rupees-worth to India; in 1905/6 it was 8,000,000 Rupees, a
more than sixfold increase in just over three decades. See Lorimer,
Histor., p. 2252.
71 “The first chief to levy dues is believed to have been the Shaikh of
Bahrain, who is said to have instituted, about the beginning of the 19th
century under the name of Nob, a tax which was devoted (at least in
theory) to the maintenance of four armed vessels on the banks for the
protection of the Bahrain pearl fleet." Lorimer, Histor., p. 2241.
72 After Wilson, A.T. "Some Early Travellers in Persia and the Persian
Gulf’, in Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society, vol. 12, pp. 68-82,
1925.
73 See also for the following Lorimer, Histor., pp. 2240ff and Annexure
no. 6, pp. 2284ff., with a table of the taxes levied annually by local
authorities.
74 One bag of rice was then worth about 14 Rupees.
75 Other taxes mentioned for this period in Lorimer, Histor., pp. 2284-9
were mabaiyah, a royalty on the sale of pearls by captains,

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