Page 196 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Sorcerers' Apprentices 193

government would not remain indifferent to any attempt to change the internal

status quo in Qatar.

Affluence struck the Trucial Coast in the later 1960s and began to work its
familiar alchemy, transmuting simple metal into dross. The wealth was
confined, in the first instance, to two shaikhdoms, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Oil
was struck in Abu Dhabi waters in 1959 and onshore the following year.
Production began in 1962. A few years later oil was also found in Dubai waters
and production started in 1969, adding to the revenue the shaikhdom already

derived from its function as a trading entrepot.
Before the coming of oil the tribes of the Trucial Coast led lives much akin to
those of their neighbours in Oman, subsisting on fishing, pastoralism and
limited agriculture. Though privation had been their lot for many decades,
they had at times in the past enjoyed marginal prosperity. In the first half of the

nineteenth century they had been among the chief carriers of the Gulf’s trade,
voyaging as far away as India, Africa and the Red Sea to exchange horses and
donkeys, fruits and pearls, wool and hides and the other products of Arabia
and Persia for rice and grains, sugar and spices, cotton and woollen piece
goods, and a wide variety of European manufactures. They supplemented
their legitimate commerce with piracy, sometimes on a grand scale, and they
controlled much of the slave trade from East Africa and Ethiopia to Arabia and

the Gulf. Well before the century was out these pursuits had all been lost to
them. Piracy and the slave trade had been suppressed by the British, all but a
minute portion of the carrying trade had been taken over by European and
Indian steamships, and only the pearl trade, along with some clandestine

running of slaves and arms, enabled the tribes of Trucial Oman to earn enough
to purchase necessities and lesser luxuries from abroad. When the pearl trade
withered away in the 1930s they were reduced to near destitution. Some
compensation was afforded their rulers after the Second World War by the
concessionary payments made by oil companies for prospecting rights; but the
payments went directly to the rulers of the shaikhdoms, and in any case they
were not substantial enough to rescue the economy of Trucial Oman from

stagnation. So from the late 1940s onwards the tribesmen drifted northwards
every year in their hundreds to seek work in the oil states of the upper Gulf and
thereby support their dependants at home.
With the discovery and exploitation of oil in Trucial Oman itself the need for
such emigration vanished. Fortune was to smile upon the tribes as never before

in their history, transforming their existence within the space of a decade from
one of penury to one of ease and plenty. At the time that Trucial Oman became
independent and was transformed into the United Arab Emirates, the total
population of the seven shaikhdoms (or ‘emirates’ as they now preferred to
style themselves) was reckoned to be in excess of 200,000. (Three years earlier,
in 1968, the first census ever taken recorded a total of some 180,000 souls.) By