The history of Kuwait

Kuwait is a small desert state at the head of the Persian Gulf, where the silt of the Tigris and Euphrates once built out the coast. Its shores and the island of Failaka were settled by early Gulf seafarers, by the Dilmun culture and by Mesopotamian, Persian and Greek outposts, and the bay later lay on the caravan road from Iraq to Arabia. Modern Kuwait grew from an 18th-century trading town ruled by the Al-Sabah family, which became a British protectorate in 1899 and, after the discovery of oil, one of the richest countries in the world. Independent since 1961, it survived Iraqi invasion and occupation in 1990–91 and has the oldest elected parliament among the Gulf monarchies, though that parliament has been suspended since 2024.

Most of today's Kuwait is young land, formed after the Gulf basin flooded at the end of the last Ice Age and the great rivers of Mesopotamia pushed sediment into the sea. Stone tools show that hunters crossed the area thousands of years before farming. In the Ubaid period, from about the sixth millennium BCE, people at sites such as H3 and Bahra 1 in Subiya, on the northern shore of Kuwait Bay, lived between the farming world of southern Mesopotamia and the herders and fishers of eastern Arabia. They used Ubaid pottery from Iraq, and at H3 archaeologists found remains of reed boats coated with bitumen, among the oldest evidence of seagoing craft anywhere.

From around 2000 BCE Failaka Island, at the mouth of Kuwait Bay, became an outpost of Dilmun, the trading civilisation centred on Bahrain that carried copper, timber and luxury goods between Mesopotamia and the Indus. Merchants from cities such as Ur, the heartland of Sumer, lived there, and the island's temples, seals and buildings show a mix of Dilmun and Mesopotamian styles. Cuneiform texts name it as a sanctuary of the god Inzak. Later the island fell under Kassite and then Neo-Babylonian influence; inscriptions point to building work in the time of Nebuchadnezzar II and a governor under Nabonidus.

After a long gap the bay was resettled under the Achaemenid Empire. Alexander the Great sent ships to explore the Gulf in 324 BCE, and ancient writers say he named Failaka Ikaros after the Aegean island. Under his successors in the Seleucid Empire a fortress and temples were built on Failaka, and a Greek inscription records royal instructions to the settlers. From the second century BCE the area belonged to Characene, a kingdom of southern Mesopotamia that was a vassal of the Parthian Empire, and from the third century CE to the Sasanian Empire. Christians of the Church of the East settled on Failaka and the mainland in late antiquity, and the church at al-Qusur on the island remained in use into the early Islamic centuries.

In 633 a Muslim Arab army under Khalid ibn al-Walid defeated the Sasanian governor at the Battle of Chains near Kazima, on the north shore of Kuwait Bay, one of the opening battles of the Rashidun Caliphate's conquest of Iraq. Kazima grew into a watering and trading station on the route between Basra and the Hejaz, used by caravans and pilgrims, and it was the birthplace of al-Farazdaq, one of the great poets of the Umayyad Caliphate. For most of the following centuries the coast was a thinly peopled margin of Iraq and eastern Arabia, part of the world of Islam governed nominally from Basra and Baghdad. By the 17th century the Bani Khalid, a tribal confederation based in al-Ahsa, controlled the coast and kept a small fort, or kut, at the site of today's Kuwait City, from which the country's name derives.

In the early 18th century clans of the Bani Utbah, who had migrated from central Arabia, settled at the fort. Tradition dates to 1752 the choice of Sabah I bin Jaber as their leader, with the merchant families handling trade and the Sabahs government and relations with the desert tribes. When the Al-Khalifa left for Zubarah in 1766, and later for Bahrain, the Sabahs' position became unchallenged. The town prospered when Persia besieged and occupied Basra in 1775–79 and merchants and trade routes shifted to Kuwait, and in the 1790s the British East India Company briefly moved its Basra agency there.

By the 19th century Kuwait was a walled port of shipbuilders, pearl divers and long-distance traders. Its wooden dhows sailed with the monsoon to India and East Africa, carrying dates, horses and goods for the desert caravans, and its pearling fleet numbered hundreds of boats each summer. The Ottoman Empire claimed the town, and in 1871 Sheikh Abdullah II accepted the title of Ottoman district governor, but no Ottoman official was ever stationed in Kuwait.

In 1896 Mubarak Al-Sabah seized power by killing his half-brothers, the ruler Muhammad and Jarrah. Fearing Ottoman intervention on behalf of his rivals, he turned to Britain, which wanted to keep other powers, especially Germany with its planned Berlin to Baghdad railway, away from the route to India. On 23 January 1899 he signed an agreement promising not to cede territory or receive foreign agents without British consent, which made Kuwait in effect a protectorate of the British Empire, governed from the British Raj's political service in the Gulf. An Anglo-Ottoman convention of 1913 would have recognised Kuwait as an autonomous Ottoman district, but it was never ratified, and on the outbreak of World War I Britain recognised Kuwait as independent under its protection.

After Mubarak's death in 1915, the rise of Abdulaziz ibn Saud in Najd brought danger from the desert. Saudi Ikhwan fighters raided Kuwaiti territory in 1919–20 and on 10 October 1920 besieged the Red Fort at Jahra, where Kuwaitis held out until British ships and aircraft arrived. At the Uqair conference of 1922, where Kuwait was not represented, the British envoy Percy Cox gave Najd about two-thirds of the lands Kuwait claimed and created a neutral zone, and a letter of 1923 fixed the northern border with Iraq. A Saudi trade blockade from 1923 to 1937, the world depression and the Japanese cultured pearl ruined the old economy, and many Kuwaitis lived in poverty. In 1938 merchants pressed the ruler, Sheikh Ahmad al-Jaber, into accepting an elected Legislative Council, which he dissolved within months.

The Kuwait Oil Company, owned jointly by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and the American Gulf Oil, struck oil at Burgan in February 1938. The Second World War delayed production, but exports began in 1946 and by the early 1950s Kuwait was the largest oil exporter in the Gulf. Under Sheikh Abdullah al-Salim (ruled 1950–65) the revenues paid for a planned modern city, free schools and hospitals, housing and jobs for citizens, while hundreds of thousands of workers came from Palestine, Egypt, Iran and South Asia. In 1953 Kuwait set up an investment office in London that is regarded as the world's first sovereign wealth fund.

The protectorate ended on 19 June 1961. Within days Iraq's leader Abd al-Karim Qasim claimed Kuwait as part of Iraq, and British troops were landed until an Arab League force replaced them later that year. A constitution was adopted in 1962 and the first National Assembly was elected in January 1963, the first of its kind in the Gulf; in October 1963 Iraq recognised Kuwait's independence. The 1960s and 1970s are remembered as a cultural golden age of theatre, a lively press and the magazine Al-Arabi, though power remained with the ruling family and citizenship was limited to a minority of residents, and many long-term stateless residents, the bidun, were left without it. Emirs suspended the assembly in 1976 and again in 1986, and the Kuwait Investment Authority spread oil wealth into holdings across the world.

During the Iran–Iraq War of 1980–88 Kuwait backed Iraq with loans and transit, and suffered bombings, hijackings and an attempt on the life of Emir Jaber al-Ahmad in 1985 by groups linked to Iran. After the war Saddam Hussein's Iraq demanded that its debts be forgiven, accused Kuwait of overproducing oil and drilling into the Rumaila field, and revived old claims to the whole country. On 2 August 1990 Iraqi forces invaded; the emir and government fled to Saudi Arabia, and Iraq annexed Kuwait as a province. The seven-month occupation brought looting, torture and executions of members of the resistance and others, the flight of about half the population, and hundreds of Kuwaitis who disappeared in Iraqi custody.

The United Nations Security Council demanded Iraq's withdrawal and authorised force. A coalition of more than 30 countries led by the United States began an air campaign on 17 January 1991 and a ground offensive on 24 February; Kuwait City was liberated within days, and 26 February is celebrated as Liberation Day. Retreating Iraqi troops set more than 600 oil wells on fire, and the fires burned for months, while deliberate oil spills fouled the Gulf. In the aftermath most of Kuwait's roughly 400,000 Palestinians left or were forced out, because the PLO leadership had sided with Iraq, and many bidun were expelled or barred from returning. A UN commission demarcated the border, which Iraq accepted in 1994.

Parliament was restored in 1992 and became the most assertive elected body in the Gulf, questioning ministers and challenging the cabinet controlled by the Al-Sabah. Kuwait served as the main staging ground for the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and in 2005 women gained the right to vote and stand for office, and the first women entered parliament in 2009. In January 2006 the ailing Emir Saad was removed by parliament after nine days and Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad took the throne, ruling until 2020. His reign saw repeated dissolutions of parliament and cabinet resignations, protests in 2011–12 inspired by the Arab uprisings, and in June 2015 a suicide bombing claimed by the Islamic State group at a Shia mosque that killed 27 people. Political deadlock slowed reforms and kept the economy dependent on oil, and the oil price collapse and the COVID-19 pandemic brought large budget deficits.

Sheikh Nawaf al-Ahmad succeeded in 2020, and on his death in December 2023 his half-brother Mishal al-Ahmad became emir. On 10 May 2024 Mishal dissolved the National Assembly and suspended parts of the constitution, and since then the government has stripped tens of thousands of people of citizenship. When the United States and Israel went to war with Iran in February 2026, Iran struck US bases and civilian targets across the Gulf; in Kuwait missiles and drones hit Kuwait International Airport, oil facilities, government buildings and desalination plants, and six US soldiers were killed at the port of Shuaiba on 1 March. Attacks recurred over the following months despite successive ceasefires.