This paper examines the British Persian Gulf Administration's policy of granting manumission certificates to fugitive slaves in the Gulf in the early twentieth century. Today, nearly a thousand manumission testimonies are preserved in the records of the British Persian Gulf Administration. These testimonies reveal details about slave origins and slave life. They also reflect the contradictory nature of British manumission policy in the Gulf. According to official policy, beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century, slaves could obtain legal manumission from slavery and receive a manumission certificate issued in English and Arabic from the British Political Resident at Bushire or one of the offices of the political agents or residency agents at Bahrain, Muscat, or Sharjah. This formal manumission was modeled on a mixture of Islamic manumission law from the Gulf, British manumission policy in the West Indies, and the legal tradition of British-occupied Egypt. In reality, fugitive slaves faced different circumstances at the varying locations. The agent at Sharjah, for example, was notorious for aiding fugitive Baluchi and Persian slaves but siding with masters in cases of African slaves. In the 1920s enslaved Africans from Abu Dhabi and Dubai would willingly walk more than 200 miles to Muscat rather than face the agent in nearby Sharjah. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how the conflicting projects of liberal economics and liberal politics created a confused policy among British administrators toward manumission in the Gulf as reflected in the manumission documents from the early twentieth century. Torn between, on one hand, ending the slave trade and, on the other hand, maintaining the political status quo and Britain's generally weak control over coastal Eastern Arabia in the midst of the growing imperial ambitions of Russia, the Ottoman Empire, France and Germany, by maintaining the fragile economy that depended on slave labor, the British administration's policy wavered between half-hearted abolitionism and willful ignorance of slavery. The thesis of this paper is that the conflicted nature of British manumission policy in the Gulf resulted from the conflicting goals of the administration. For enslaved people in the Gulf, this conflicted policy presented challenging legal conditions which they managed to negotiate. This paper's methodology involves the documentary analysis of archival materials. The sources for this paper come in the form of documents in English and Arabic from the R/15 section of the India Office Records in the British Library, London, UK.