This paper explores the modern history of the construction of welfare states in the Gulf Arab States during the mid-twentieth century. Combining oral history with archival work across US, British, and Arab sources, the study argues that mobilization by political and social movements locally and regionally during the period of 1950 to 1975, in conjunction with the developmentalist outlooks of particular government technocrats, were the prime factors that led to the construction of the extensive welfare states in the Gulf Arab States. Taking a transnational approach that looks at political mobilization and technocrat-led social reforms across Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Oman, the paper argues that the states' attempts to contain these movements and the wider regional revolutionary current pushed regional governments towards providing social welfare services that have become known as some of the most extensive education, healthcare, and social security programs in the world. Crucially, however, the paper details how states relentlessly focused on limiting and outlawing any form of collective organization, imposing a direct individualized relationship between the person versus state and capital, rather than any form of group mobilization. Thus, the emergent welfare state, the economic privileges of citizenship, as well as the severe limitations on formal collective associations were a product of political and labour mobilizations at the national and regional level and the states' reaction to contain these movements.