The history of the United Arab Emirates

The United Arab Emirates is a federation of seven monarchies on the south-eastern coast of the Persian Gulf: Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al-Quwain, Ras al-Khaimah and Fujairah. Its desert, mountains and coast have been inhabited for well over 100,000 years, and in the Bronze Age the region was Magan, a source of copper for the cities of Mesopotamia. For most of its later history it was a land of Bedouin herders, oasis farmers, fishermen and pearl divers, ruled by tribal sheikhs and drawn into the trade of the Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Britain dominated the coast from 1820 through treaties that gave the "Trucial States" their name. When the British left in 1971, the sheikhdoms joined together just as oil revenues began to transform them, and within two generations the UAE grew into one of the richest states in the world and a global hub of trade, finance and travel.

Stone tools found at Jebel Faya in Sharjah, dated to about 125,000 years ago, resemble those made by early modern humans in East Africa, and they are some of the earliest evidence of Homo sapiens outside Africa. Even older flint tools have been found at Jebel Barakah in Abu Dhabi. After the last Ice Age, when the climate of Arabia was wetter, Neolithic communities lived along the coast and on the islands from the seventh millennium BCE, fishing, gathering shellfish, hunting dugongs and already diving for pearls. Pottery of the Ubaid culture of southern Mesopotamia found at coastal sites shows contacts across the Gulf. A drier climate in the fourth millennium BCE thinned out settlement.

From about 3200 BCE the people of the Hafit period buried their dead in beehive-shaped stone tombs on the slopes of Jebel Hafit near Al Ain. The Umm an-Nar culture that followed, from about 2600 to 2000 BCE, built large circular communal tombs and stone towers, raised dates and cereals, and smelted copper from the Hajar mountains. Texts from Sumer and Akkad name this land Magan, a source of copper and diorite, and its traders also dealt with the Indus Valley Civilisation. In the Wadi Suq period, from about 2000 to 1300 BCE, long-distance trade declined, but the camel was domesticated, making the interior easier to cross.

In the Iron Age, from about 1200 BCE, the people of the region dug falaj channels, underground and surface water courses that brought groundwater from the mountains to oases, and the earliest known examples, around Al Ain, may be older than the similar qanats of Iran. Fortified villages, towers and columned halls were built to protect water and crops. At Saruq al-Hadid, in the desert south of Dubai, archaeologists have recovered more than 12,000 objects of copper, iron, gold and stone from a long-lived metalworking centre.

The region lay on the fringe of the great empires of Iran. It seems to have been under the influence of the Achaemenid Empire in the sixth to fourth centuries BCE, and later of the Parthians and the Sasanian Empire, which kept outposts on the Omani coast. After about 300 BCE the inland town of Mleiha and the port of ed-Dur in Umm al-Quwain prospered from trade linking India, Arabia and the Mediterranean world; they minted coins copying those of the Hellenistic kings, and inscriptions mention a kingdom of Oman. In late antiquity some coastal people were Christians of the Church of the East, and the remains of monasteries have been excavated on Sir Bani Yas island off Abu Dhabi and on Siniyah island in Umm al-Quwain.

In 632, the year of Muhammad's death, envoys from Medina brought Islam to the Azd tribes of south-eastern Arabia, who expelled the Sasanian governor. After the Prophet's death many tribes renounced their allegiance, and one of the final battles of the Ridda wars, in which the first caliph Abu Bakr reimposed Muslim authority, was fought at Dibba on the east coast. Under the Rashidun, Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs the region remained largely in the hands of local tribes and of Oman's rulers, though Abbasid armies invaded several times, most destructively in the 890s.

The coast took part in the busy trade of the medieval Indian Ocean. From the fourteenth century the port of Julfar, near modern Ras al-Khaimah, rose to prominence as a supplier of pearls, dates and water to the trading kingdom of Hormuz, which controlled the mouth of the Gulf. Pearls from the Gulf's oyster beds were exported to India and beyond, and Julfar's sailors were famed navigators.

Early in the sixteenth century the Portuguese Empire, seeking to control the spice trade after Vasco da Gama's voyage to India, sent Afonso de Albuquerque to seize the choke points of Arab commerce. In 1507 he sacked Khor Fakkan on the east coast and other ports before capturing Hormuz. The Portuguese built forts along the coast, including at Julfar, Dibba and Kalba, and taxed shipping and pearling, but in 1622 a Persian army of the Safavid Empire, helped by the English East India Company, took Hormuz, and in 1650 the Ya'ariba imams of Oman drove the Portuguese from Muscat. Dutch, English and French companies then competed for the Gulf trade, while Persia, Oman and the Arab tribes fought for local power.

In the eighteenth century two tribal powers emerged that still rule today. On the northern coast the Qawasim, with their capital at Ras al-Khaimah and later also Sharjah, built a maritime power with ports and fleets on both sides of the Gulf. In the south the Bani Yas confederation of the Liwa oases moved its centre to Abu Dhabi island after fresh water was found there in 1761, and the ruling Al Nahyan family built a watchtower that grew into the Qasr al-Hosn fort. In 1833 a branch of the Bani Yas led by the Al Maktoum family left Abu Dhabi and settled at Dubai.

The Qawasim clashed repeatedly with the shipping of the British East India Company, and the British came to call this the "Pirate Coast". Historians, including Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, the ruler of Sharjah, have argued that the label disguised commercial and imperial rivalry, while the influence of the Wahhabi First Saudi State on the Qawasim added to British alarm. After a first expedition in 1809, a British force from India destroyed Ras al-Khaimah and the fleets of the coast in 1819, and in 1820 the sheikhs signed the General Maritime Treaty. Annual truces followed, and in 1853 the Perpetual Maritime Truce banned warfare at sea, giving the sheikhdoms the name Trucial States and the coast the name Trucial Oman. The Exclusive Agreement of 1892 bound the rulers to deal with no foreign power except Britain, which in return protected them; as part of the British Empire's system in the Gulf, they were overseen by political agents answering to the British government in India.

The British left internal affairs to the rulers, who frequently fought one another over land, tribes and wells. Sheikh Zayed bin Khalifa, known as Zayed the Great, ruler of Abu Dhabi from 1855 to 1909, made his emirate the most powerful on the coast.

Pearling was the backbone of the coastal economy. Every summer, thousands of boats sailed for the oyster beds, and divers weighed down with stones went down repeatedly on a single breath, often in debt to boat owners and merchants; some of the divers were enslaved Africans. At its peak, in the early twentieth century, the Gulf pearl fleet numbered about 4,500 boats. In the 1920s and 1930s the trade collapsed under the combined effect of the Japanese cultured pearl, the Great Depression, overfishing and debt, bringing hardship and hunger to the coast.

New links with the outside world arrived in the 1930s. Imperial Airways opened a staging post at Sharjah in 1932 on its route to India, and an RAF base followed. Oil companies began to survey the land, and in 1939 the rulers granted an onshore concession to a British-led consortium. During World War II Allied aircraft flew from Sharjah, and rationing and shortages hit the coast hard. After Indian independence in 1947 responsibility for the Trucial States passed to the Foreign Office in London. In the early 1950s Britain set up the Trucial Oman Scouts as a local force and a Trucial States Council of rulers, and recognised Fujairah as a separate emirate in 1952. A dispute with Saudi Arabia over the Buraimi oasis, which Saudi forces occupied in part in 1952, was ended by British-led troops in 1955.

Oil was found offshore at Umm Shaif in 1958 and onshore at Murban in 1960, and Abu Dhabi exported its first crude in 1962. Its cautious ruler, Sheikh Shakhbut, was reluctant to spend the new wealth, and in 1966 his family, with British support, replaced him with his brother Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, who began building schools, hospitals, housing and roads. In Dubai, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, ruler from 1958, dredged the creek and built a port and airport, and Dubai's own oil exports began in 1969.

In January 1968 the British government announced that it would withdraw its forces from the Gulf by the end of 1971. On 18 February 1968 Zayed and Rashid met at a desert spot between their emirates and agreed to form a union, and they invited the other Trucial States, together with Bahrain and Qatar, to join. The planned federation of nine broke down over rivalries, and Bahrain and Qatar chose separate independence in 1971.

On 30 November 1971, the day before the British treaties lapsed, Iran occupied the islands of Greater and Lesser Tunb, claimed by Ras al-Khaimah, and landed on Abu Musa under an arrangement with Sharjah; Ras al-Khaimah policemen and Iranian soldiers were killed on Greater Tunb. The UAE still claims all three islands. On 2 December 1971 six emirates proclaimed the United Arab Emirates, with Zayed as president and Rashid as vice-president, and Ras al-Khaimah joined on 10 February 1972. The constitution created a Supreme Council of the seven rulers, a cabinet and an appointed consultative assembly, the Federal National Council, while leaving each emirate in control of its own oil and much of its own government. Abu Dhabi, by far the largest and richest, provides most of the federal budget.

The new state had almost no national institutions, but oil revenues, sharply increased by the price rises of the 1970s, paid for rapid development. Zayed, who ruled until his death in 2004, used Abu Dhabi's wealth to bind the federation together and to give aid across the Arab world. Dubai, with little oil of its own, built the Jebel Ali port and free zone, the airline Emirates, founded in 1985, and later tourism, property and finance, becoming one of the world's busiest transport hubs. The population grew from a few hundred thousand to more than nine million, the great majority of them foreign workers, especially from South Asia; only about one resident in nine is an Emirati citizen. Migrant labourers have long faced harsh conditions and restrictions under the sponsorship system, and trade unions and strikes are banned.

In foreign policy the UAE joined the Gulf Cooperation Council, founded in Abu Dhabi in 1981, and kept close defence ties with the United States, Britain and France. It was on high alert during the Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s and supported the coalition that expelled Iraq from Kuwait in 1991. Zayed's son Khalifa succeeded him in 2004, and in 2006 limited elections were held for half the seats of the Federal National Council, with a small, selected electorate. A debt crisis in Dubai in 2009 was eased by support from Abu Dhabi, and in 2010 Dubai opened the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building.

The Arab Spring of 2011 brought little unrest to the UAE, but the government responded with arrests of activists and Islamists and, in 2013, a mass trial that rights groups condemned as unfair; Freedom House has rated the country "not free" every year since 1999. Under Mohamed bin Zayed, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto leader after his half-brother Khalifa suffered a stroke in 2014, the UAE became a far more assertive military power. From 2015 it was a leading member of the Saudi-led coalition in the war in Yemen, where 52 Emirati soldiers were killed in a single missile strike that September. In 2017 it joined Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt in cutting ties with Qatar, a rift that lasted until 2021.

In September 2020 the UAE became the first Gulf state to establish diplomatic relations with Israel, under the Abraham Accords. The Hope probe, launched in 2020, entered orbit around Mars in February 2021, making the UAE the first Arab country to reach the planet. Social and legal reforms in the early 2020s relaxed laws on alcohol, cohabitation and personal status for non-Muslims, and moved the weekend to Saturday and Sunday. Mohamed bin Zayed became president in May 2022 after Khalifa's death, and Dubai hosted the COP28 climate conference in 2023.

The UAE's foreign role has also brought accusations. In the civil war in Sudan, many reports accused it of supplying weapons to the Rapid Support Forces, which are accused of mass atrocities in Darfur. In March 2025 Sudan filed a case at the International Court of Justice accusing the UAE of complicity in genocide; the UAE denied the claims and challenged the court's jurisdiction, and in May 2025 the court dismissed the case for lack of jurisdiction. After the United States and Israel attacked Iran on 28 February 2026, Iranian missiles and drones struck targets in the UAE, including an air base, Dubai's airport and hotels, and Israel sent air-defence systems to help protect the country. The UAE was among the Gulf states that struck back at Iran. In April 2026 it announced that it would leave OPEC, which it did on 1 May, in order to raise its oil production.