Page 49 - Truncal States to UAE_Neat
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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 certainly 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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