Dubai and the United Arab Emirates: from Trucial Coast to Global Crossroads

Introduction

Few stories in modern history are as dramatic and as improbable as the transformation of the United Arab Emirates. In 1971, when the seven tiny emirates of the Trucial Coast came together to form an independent nation, they comprised some of the most sparsely populated, least developed, and most economically marginal territory in the entire world. There were no universities, few paved roads, almost no hospitals worthy of the name, and an economy that had been devastated by the collapse of its traditional industries. The country that came into being on December 2, 1971 began its national life with a per capita income, outside of the oil-producing emirate of Abu Dhabi, that placed it among the poorest places on earth.

Today, half a century later, the United Arab Emirates is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, home to one of the most visited cities on the planet, possessor of one of the largest sovereign wealth funds ever assembled, the operator of one of the world's great international airlines, and the country that sent the Arab world's first successful mission to another planet. Dubai, the commercial capital and the emirate that has most spectacularly captured the world's imagination, has built the tallest building on earth, constructed an archipelago of artificial islands visible from space, established a port that handles cargo from more than one hundred and fifty countries, and transformed itself from a modest pearl-trading town on a desert creek into a global crossroads where approximately ninety percent of the population was born somewhere else.

This transformation is not merely a story of oil wealth, though petroleum played an essential role in its early stages. It is a story of deliberate strategy, of rulers who recognized that oil revenues were finite and that a different economic foundation had to be constructed before they ran out. It is a story of geographic intelligence, of leaders who understood that their country's most durable asset was not the oil beneath the desert but the desert's location on the map — at the crossroads of air and sea routes connecting Europe, Africa, South Asia, and East Asia. And it is a story of audacity, of a willingness to build on a scale and at a speed that confounded expectations and reshaped what people thought was possible in a single generation.

The story is not without shadows. The speed of development came at a human cost that critics have documented carefully. The migrant workers who built Dubai's towers and ports and infrastructure came from some of the world's poorest countries, bound to their employers under a legal sponsorship system that limited their ability to change jobs or leave the country without permission. Questions of democratic accountability, civil liberties, and the rights of the non-citizen majority have been persistent sources of international concern. These tensions are part of the full portrait of the UAE and cannot be understood separately from the gleaming architecture and ambitious statistics.

This is the story of Dubai and the United Arab Emirates — of the desert and the sea, of pearl divers and oil derricks, of visionary rulers and migrant laborers, of glass towers and gold souks, of a place that reinvented itself so thoroughly and so rapidly that it stands as one of the defining stories of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It is a story of extraordinary ambition, considerable human cost, and undeniable achievement, set against the backdrop of one of the most beautiful and unforgiving environments on earth.

The Trucial Coast: the World Before Oil