The increasing number of archaeological excavations in the Persian Gulf littoral have revealed a “Long Eighth Century” representing a significant high point in settlement extension and economic prosperity, a development parallel to that of the more well-studied Red Sea during this period (Power 2012). Its characteristics included the growth of urban areas, a shift from pastoral nomadism to permanent settlement, and the increasing exploitation of environmental resources for reasons linked to trade as well as the subsistence of local populations. This paper is primarily an analysis of the origins of these developments, origins which stem both from the policies of the increasingly centralized caliphate and the strategies of Gulf communities in taking advantage of new opportunities. It relies on two sets of primary sources. One is the increasingly abundant archaeological data, especially that from Kazima in Kuwait (Kennet, at al 2012), Tawwaj on the Bushehr Peninsula (Carter et al 2006) and Kush in Ras al-Khaimah (Kennet 2004). The other is the corpus of texts used for early Islamic history, but with a particular approach. Historians have come to recognize that these texts from the Abbasid period present a vision of history characterized by anachronistic or ideology-driven assumptions, one of which is a high degree of wise, centralized command by the Rightly Guided Caliphs (Noth/Conrad 1994). This paper dismisses sources which display this centralizing tendency and privileges less-used material such as that found in ‘Awtabi’s Ansab al-Arab and recently edited volumes of Baladhuri’s Ansab al-Ashraf, as well as information in poetry and geographic texts which are occasionally relevant. The resulting picture is an expansion of the Arab population zone which preceded rather than was caused by the coming of state control. This not only complements archaeological data, but matches the reconstruction of Hoyland based entirely on non-Muslim sources (2015). The caliphate did not found the garrison towns of Basra and Tawwaj in empty land as traditionally thought, but gained influence and then the ability to administer existing populations, including by pursuing a policy of Bedouin settlement. At the same time, Gulf populations increased their prosperity by tapping local products and probably transit trade for the markets of the increasingly prosperous empire of the caliphs.

Changes stemming from industrialization and the new oil economy of the twentieth century have fundamentally altered the relationship between people and the environment in the Persian/Arabian Gulf. While the lives of most Gulf coast residents of the nineteenth century were intricately connected to the desert and the sea, this has changed in recent decades as new job opportunities, modernized cities, widespread air-conditioning, and other changes have distanced local residents from their landscape and climate. This paper explores the shifting relationship between the Gulf’s coastal dwellers and the sea by examining various forms of cultural production including poetry, stories, fiction, memoirs, and songs. Using a combination of historical and literary analysis, this paper examines a variety of texts to assess the way in which local Gulf communities related to the sea. For instance, in medieval literature Richard van Leeuwen argues that literary reference to the sea suggest that Arabs “retained an uneasy relationship to the sea” (2006, 13), though in more contemporary Gulf poetry the sea is often hailed as a balm for modern woes. My paper contextualizes such literary reflections through historical analysis of the changing political, technological, and physical setting that altered that relationship, and thus a particular focus on cultural production from before and after the discovery and exploitation of oil. Though Arabic literature specialist Roger Allen argues that “the seas of the Middle East do not appear to have roused the interest of Arab litterateurs to any great extent” (2000, 9), the sea is essential in works that are not recognized as literature in the classic sense. Laith Ulaiby’s Performing the Past: Sea Music in the Arab Gulf States and Music in Bahrain: Traditional Music of the Arabian Gulf by Poul Rovsing Olsen provide a strong foundation for discussion of the Gulf’s oral tradition. In addition, in the last decade or so a number of anthologies of Gulf literature have emerged, including Beyond the Dunes (ed. Jayyusi, 2006), Folktales from the Arabian Gulf (ed. al-Hamdan, 2003), Gathering the Tide (ed. Paine, 2011), and The Donkey Lady (ed. Paine, 2013). I will interpreting these literary sources (as well as others in Arabic and in English translation) in conversation with archival sources from the British colonial office archives gathered at the British National Archive and British National Library.

The development of land became an important marker of newly independent countries’ development and modernization in the 20th century (Scott 1999). This development required that land be labeled as productive or unproductive based upon its applicability to the development schemes (Cronon 1995). In the emirate of Abu Dhabi, this tension between land use and land non-use was further complicated by the presence of vast stretches of desert, traditionally described as useless by foreign development experts, but defined as useful to the inhabitants of the region. This paper will explore how the emirate’s government conceptualized landscape rhetorically and physically as empty (barren) in the United Arab Emirates and how this conception was critical to constructing Abu Dhabi’s environmental and development policies, particularly during the reign of Shaikh Zayed b. Sultan (1968-2004). The notion of the barren landscape is developed and expanded within Abu Dhabi rhetoric as an important antipode to the modern state, in much the same way that the notion of tabula rasa is applied to the historical narrative. It provides a convenient starting point through which to reinforce the “rags to riches” concept that typifies Abu Dhabi history. This rhetoric maintains that technology and state intervention can remedy the barrenness. In this narrative, the environment represents a significant lack in productivity and utility that requires the –scape to be reimagined, technologically, metaphorically, and physically (Appadurai 1990). Environmental infrastructural development schemes including: Al Ain water transport schemes, cloud seeding, the institution of Masdar City, help to start the rehabilitation of the barren landscape. Despite the steadfast assertions that nature can be conquered, this narrative simultaneously valorizes specific ideas of conservation and preservation of land and landscapes that serve more often to fix these -scapes to a time/space relationship that never existed: nature parks, Green Mubazzarah, Sir Bani Yas nature preserve. These interventions and their identification with nature and the environment serve in turn to reinforce the nationalist conception of Abu Dhabi emirate as closer to Bedouin heritage and therefore more legitimate than its less traditional neighbors. Using popular and promotional materials published by the Emirates Environmental Agency—Abu Dhabi, as well as British documents for the early years of federation, this paper will explore how these schemes helped to reframe and reclaim the notion of barrenness, by putting the so-called barren landscapes into the service of the national narrative.

Digdagga is located on a large plain south of Ras al-Khaimah city in the northern UAE, between rolling dunes and the foothills of the Hajjar mountains. Today Digdagga is a decidedly peripheral mix of unassuming homes, farms, and small businesses, perhaps best-known as the location of a camel racetrack and underutilized airport. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, Digdagga was central to British plans to transform the seven Trucial States into a federation that could secure the Gulf against growing Arab nationalist influence. These plans came to fruition with the foundation of the United Arab Emirates in 1971. Literature on state-building in the UAE has mostly emphasized political integration and oil. This presentation describes a British project to build a national market space based on non-oil resources. As the location of an Agricultural Trials Station which brought mechanical pumps, fertilizers, and Western techniques to local farmers, Digdagga was key to British efforts at modernization. The British military base in Sharjah purchased fruit and vegetables from the Trials Station at inflated prices, resulting in expansion of the land under cultivation in Digdagga. As the British prepared plans for withdrawal from the Gulf in the late 1960s, efforts to mechanize agricultural production and marketing intensified. Experts with backgrounds in colonial agricultural development surveyed the Trucial States. Their extremely detailed reports document great variation in price, transportation, marketing, and sales practices across the Trucial States, which in their view needed to be rationalized and standardized through the establishment of producers’ cooperatives, radio broadcasts of prices, loans to buy water pumps and other equipment, and common weights and measures. The Agricultural Trials Station was the key institutional location for realizing the report’s recommendations, some of which are still a feature of Emirati life today. However, the British focus on marketing and commercial agricultural development neglected almost the complex social relations, non-market economy, subsistence agriculture, and seasonal migration patterns that characterized life in Digdagga and the surrounding region. Much information on these subjects is available through published oral histories of UAE nationals from Digdagga. By comparing and integrating data and narratives from fieldwork, oral histories, and the British archives, the presentation will shed light on the material and discursive structures that underpinned development plans in a quasi-colonial context, and provide a much richer picture of socioeconomic transformation based on non-oil resources.