The Gulf Before Oil

Before the wealth of oil transformed it, the Arabian Gulf coast lived by the sea. The small towns of the lower Gulf, the Trucial Coast and its neighbours, were settlements of coral-stone and mud houses and palm-frond huts crowded along shallow tidal creeks, cooled in the fierce heat by the square wind-towers (barjeel) that rose above their flat roofs and funnelled the breeze down into the rooms. Their life turned on pearling above all: each summer the men sailed out in wooden dhows to the pearl banks and dived, without breathing apparatus, with a nose-clip and a weighted rope and a basket, for the oysters whose pearls were traded across the world; the rest of the year went to fishing, to the dhow trade across the Gulf and to the Indian Ocean, and to a little date cultivation. It was a hard and largely poor existence, and by the middle of the twentieth century it had grown harder still, for the pearling economy had been broken a generation earlier by the rise of cultured pearls and the world depression, and the old trade was in steep decline. Around 1960 these coasts were on the very eve of their transformation: the first oil was being found and exported, and within a single generation the creek towns would be remade into some of the wealthiest and tallest cities on earth, while the small states of the coast moved toward federation and independence. This scene depicts the old Gulf at that threshold: a pearling dhow town on its creek, the wind-towers and mud houses, the moored dhows and the heaps of oyster shells and diving gear on the shore. It is representative of the Trucial Coast around 1960, the counterpart to the transformed megacity of the present age.