Page 67 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

64 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

that there would be no renewed outbreaks of piracy on a large scale. As the
century wore on, and Britain entered into a closer relationship with these
shaikhdoms, it became an abiding principle of British policy to resist the
assertion of a Saudi paramountcy over them lest it impair the proper obser­
vance of their treaty engagements. In effect, by resolving to uphold the
independence of the littoral shaikhdoms against the Al Saud, Britain set her
face against the expansion of Saudi power in eastern Arabia beyond the limits
of Najd and Hasa.
The last Saudi occupation of the Buraimi oasis in the nineteenth century
ended in 1869 when the Najdi garrison was expelled by the ruler of Muscat.
Thereafter the oasis fell more and more under the domination of the Bani Yas
tribal confederation of Abu Dhabi. The territory of the Bani Yas (who were a
confederacy of some twenty sub-tribes) stretched from Buraimi westwards
across the Dhafrah to the foot of Qatar, and southwards,beyond the Liwa oasis,
to the edges of al-Rimal. They shared the territory with the Manasir, a
powerful nomadic tribe who acknowledged the leadership of the ruling shaikhs
of the Bani Yas, the Al Nihayan family of the Al Bu Falah section, who resided
at Abu Dhabi and had extensive holdings in both the Liwa and Buraimi oases.
The Bani Yas and the Manasir alike had remained inveterately hostile to the
Wahhabis throughout the period of the Wahhabi occupations of Buraimi, and
they invariably turned back or slew any Wahhabi force which attempted the
passage of the Dhafrah in insufficient fighting strength. As a consequence the
Saudi governor in Hasa was forced to maintain communication with the
Wahhabi garrison at Buraimi, 500 miles away, by the sea route from Qatif or
Uqair to Sharjah or Ajman on the Pirate (or Trucial) Coast. It was the Al
Nihayan shaikhs of the Bani Yas, also, who on more than one occasion had
organized the tribal coalitions which had at intervals driven the Saudi garrison
from Buraimi.
For more than half a century after their expulsion from Buraimi the Saudis
made no attempt to venture again beyond the Jafurah. Indeed, they were in no
position to do so, for the Saudi state itself collapsed in the last two decades of
the century, and it was not fully restored until (as we shall see in a later chapter)
Abdul Aziz ibn Saud proclaimed the kingdom of Saudi Arabia in I932-
Only then did Ibn Saud feel free to turn his attention southwards and eastwards
in the direction of the maritime shaikhdoms of the lower Gulf. The resumption
of his interest in the region beyond Hasa coincided with his award of a
petroleum concession in the summer of 1933 to the Standard Oil Company of
California (SOCAL). The concession was restricted to the ‘eastern portion’ of
the Saudi kingdom, which immediately raised the question of where the limits
of Saudi Arabia in the east lay. When the United States embassy in London put
the question, on SOCAL’s behalf, to the Foreign Office early in 1934 it was
informed in reply that the frontier was that laid down in a convention con­
cluded between the British and Ottoman governments in July i9I3s which