Part II: From Rags to Riches, BZ (BZ= Before Zayed), by Christine

Prior to oil and Zayed, the Bedouin tribes living on the southern coast of the Arabian Gulf continued on much as they had in the preceding hundreds and thousands of years. Life was extraordinarily harsh: little food or water, no medicine or education. Subsistence living was carried on at its most basic level. Women were in charge of cooking, cleaning, children, camels and goats. Walking many kilometers a day to collect firewood for cooking and to collect the brackish water were also female duties. Men protected their families and maintained tribal relations. Along the coast, men fished in the winter and went pearl-diving in the summers. Clothing was minimal; shoes were unknown. Bartering and a nomadic lifestyle were required to find the things that made life possible. This began to change only in the 1950s and 60s.
The British had slight interest in what they would later term “The Trucial States” for transport and trading purposes. Dubai became an important port and the incredibly harsh pearling industry off the coast of Abu Dhabi created seasonal trade with India and other nearby countries. Generations of sheikhs signed numerous treaties with the British (thus the Trucial States), the most important being the Treaty of Protectorate that was enforced from 1892 until 1971. This role allowed the British absolute power over whom the peoples of the states could interact with while providing occasional, biased peace-keeping services.
The British influence ranged from mercenary to benign at best. In 1819, after the Qawasim tribe tried to conduct some of its own business dealings, the British fleet raided and destroyed every ship in the Ras Al Khaimah port, thus neatly sealing the demise of the Qawasim and setting up the Bani Yas as the dominate tribe in the region. (The current royal family, the Al Nahyans, descend from the Bani Yas tribe.) Throughout the entire “relationship,” no hospital, school or mosque was ever built. The highlight of British involvement came in the protection of Al Ain from Saudi takeover.
Before and after the world wars, oil exploration extended into the area. Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait signed deals with the American, British and French oil companies as part of the region’s first key concessions. The sheikhs of the Trucial States were limited by the treaty to have discussions with the British only. Sheikh Shakhbut, the ruler at that time, was in the terminal phase of the Sheikh-British relationship cycle: optimism, doubt and ultimately complete distrust.
Unfortunately, Shakhbut’s wariness was extreme. His decisions held back modernization, and continued a harsh existence for everyone, even after oil money started flowing into the coffers. For several years in the early 60s, he enforced a ban of any construction. He only permitted electrification of the palace after being urged repeatedly by his own family, and then did not expand electrical use in Abu Dhabi until he had time to ensure that it worked safely in his own compound. No new business venture was allowed without his personal approval. And he was always suspicious of anything in writing, as it had been used against him before. Thus in a time of rapid regional growth, the Trucial States stayed, for the most part, in their medieval existence. The populations’ frustration was reaching new limits as contact with the outer world, via battery-powered radio and with workers coming in for the oil industry, increasingly proved that their lives could be so very different.
Trucial States BZ (into the 1960s):
no electricity
little “piped” water
palm-frond huts (called barasti)
donkeys and camels were still primary means of transport
no post office
no hospital (the pieces for one had been sitting in boxes along the beach for years)
a 3-classroom, barely-functioning school
desalinization systems that lacked the proper equipment, pipes to reach the ocean or both
an airport that used the sabkah (salt flats) as a runway- and required camels for to pullout stuck planes on occasion
telegraphs for oil companies only

Al, Fahim. Rags to Riches: A Story of Abu Dhabi. Published by The London Centre of
Arab Studies Ltd. 1995, London, England. Reprinted in 1996, 1998, 2001.