Dubai turned a creek pearling town into a free-port giant
Dubai is the UAE’s most populous city and capital of its namesake emirate, set on a Persian Gulf creek. Pearlers and fishers settled the site in the early 1700s; free-port status in 1901 and a 1961 Creek extension helped it become a regional trade magnet before the oil-era skyline boom.
Explanations of the name range from a market in Ba to a word for money, two brothers meaning Deira and Bur Dubai, or baby locusts, once plentiful here. Finds at Saruq Al Hadid and other sites trace settlement back through the Umm Al Nar period and the Iron Ages, and pre-Islamic people worshipped a deity called Bajir. The geographer al-Bakri mentions the place in 1095, and the Venetian pearl dealer Gasparo Balbi recorded Dibei in 1580. By 1822 a British surveyor found about a thousand people inside a mud wall, subject to Abu Dhabi, until the Al Bu Falasah seceded in 1833 and Maktoum bin Butti founded the ruling dynasty.
Treaties with Britain in 1820, 1853 and 1892 handed security to the British. Smallpox in 1841 pushed residents across the creek to Deira, and an 1896 fire burned half of Bur Dubai’s palm-frond houses. In 1901 Maktoum bin Hasher abolished import and export duties and offered land to merchants, drawing traders from Lingeh. The Great Storm of 1908 sank a dozen pearling boats and killed over 100 men, HMS Hyacinth shelled the town in 1910, killing 37, and the pearl market’s later collapse brought deep poverty.
Oil rights were signed in 1937, but oil was not struck until 1966. Sheikh Rashid, ruler from 1958, borrowed from merchants and Kuwait to build infrastructure: an airport terminal opened in September 1960, John Harris drew up a town plan the same year, power and telephone networks were running by 1961, and piped water from Awir flowed by 1968. In April 1961 the MV Dara exploded off Umm al-Quwain, killing 238 of the 819 people aboard.
Today about 92 percent of its 4 million residents are expatriates, oil supplies less than 1 percent of output, and land reclamation has added more than 300 kilometres of artificial coast around the Burj Khalifa’s skyline.
Source: Dubai
