Page 17 - The Origins of the United Arab Emirates_Neat

Introduction XV
as it had come into being. Also, and here the repercussions are
only too obvious today, the Arabian peninsula began to be marked
as a great potential oilfield, thus making the shaykhdoms es; ccially
vulnerable to the machinations of governments and big business.
In this book, the first contact of the Trucial Coast with these
new forces is examined in detail, together with the parallel interna
evolution of each shaykhdom. The latter has been disregarded all
too often, in the face of the vast incongruity of the implications
of British imperial history and the limitations of local Arab history.
Another reason has undoubtedly been the paucity of local Arab
historical materials, which appear particularly few and barren when
compared with the remarkably detailed annals that have been pre­
served in Britain and India, through the smoothly operating
machinery of officialdom. This study has taken advantage of the
new regulations regarding access to the official records of British
administrators in the Gulf, which are kept on file in London.
Of these, the most valuable for present purposes are the recently
declassified Persian Gulf Territories Residency Records in the India
Office Records. In the absence of Arab records, they provide the
best source material for any aspect of the local history of the
Arab shores of the Gulf. They include the Bushire Residency Records,
and the Bahrain, Muscat, Kuwait and Sharjah Agency Records,
all of which contain a wealth of information on local events—events
that were often considered irrelevant to imperial considerations and
so not notified to London or Delhi. Many of these records are
in Arabic.1 They include reports on day-to-day events compiled
by the Residency Agent (an Arab stationed at Sharjah, until 1939
the only British representative on the Coast), whose intimate know­
ledge of the area and its people, assiduously cultivated and main-
tained was owing not only to his official position, but also to
his wide financial interests in the shaykhdoms themselves; correspon­
dence addressed to the Political Residents and Agents by the rulers
and leading men of the shaykhdoms, and copies of the answers;
petitions to the British authorities about outstanding debts and
the manumission of slaves; and regular series of reports, compiled
in the form of intelligence summaries and diaries, on all movements,
tribal and otherwise, within the coastal and inland regions of the
shaykhdoms.
No comprehensive conclusion on the history of the area can
be reached without a detailed knowledge of the internal and external
factors that shaped its affairs. The interaction and synthesis of
these factors arc particularly relevant to the finst half of the twentieth
century, for it was this period that provided the vital link between
die mnetcenth century when the Raj was at its zenith, and the
middle of the twentieth century, when the British
government of