United Arab Emirates

From the Bronze Age oases and pearling dhows of the lower Gulf to the oil-fueled federation of seven emirates.

The United Arab Emirates occupies the southeastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, a coast of desert, oasis and sea whose people built Bronze Age settlements at Hili and Umm an-Nar, dived for pearls, and traded across the Indian Ocean for millennia. In the 19th century a series of treaties with Britain bound the coastal sheikhdoms into the Trucial States, and the collapse of the pearl trade in the 1930s gave way to the discovery of oil in Abu Dhabi from 1958. When Britain announced its withdrawal from the Gulf, the rulers of the emirates joined to proclaim the United Arab Emirates on 2 December 1971 under Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan. Oil wealth and the meteoric rise of Dubai have since transformed the federation into one of the world's most globalized states.