Long before oil, this land was already exporting a resource the ancient world coveted: copper. Cuneiform texts from Mesopotamia speak of the land of Magan (or Makkan), the region archaeologists identify with southeastern Arabia —today's Emirates and northern Oman— as the great copper supplier of Sumer and Akkad. Ships from Magan carried ingots, diorite and timber across the Gulf to the cities of the Euphrates as early as the third millennium BCE.
The splendour of that era has an archaeological name: the Umm an-Nar culture, named after the small island off Abu Dhabi where it was first excavated in 1959. Between 2600 and 2000 BC, this Bronze Age society built monumental circular tombs of finely cut stone, some more than twelve metres across, where dozens of people were buried. At Hili, near Al Ain, several of these tombs survive and are now a World Heritage Site. The earlier phase, the Hafit culture (around 3200-2600 BC), had already left thousands of beehive tombs on the slopes of Jebel Hafeet.
These people had mastered copper smelting, long-distance trade with Mesopotamia and with the Indus Valley civilisation, and irrigation systems that made the oases flourish. Later sites such as Tell Abraq or Ed-Dur —the latter from the late pre-Islamic period, with temples and coins from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD— show that this coast was never empty: for millennia, it was a junction of routes between India, Arabia and the Mediterranean.
The region entered the history of Islam very early on. According to tradition, around 630-632, during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad, envoys arrived to preach the new faith and several coastal communities converted. When Muhammad died in 632, some Arab tribes rose up against the authority of Medina: these were the Ridda wars (the wars of apostasy). One of their decisive battles was fought at Dibba, on the east coast of today's Emirates, where the caliphate's forces defeated the rebels led by Laqit bin Malik. The victory sealed the triumph of Islam in southeastern Arabia.
Once part of the Muslim world, the coast lived for centuries off maritime trade. Its great medieval star was Julfar, near today's Ras al-Khaimah, one of the most important ports in the Gulf between the 13th and 16th centuries. Ships sailed from Julfar to trade with India, East Africa and even China, loaded with pearls, dates and horses. According to Arab seafaring tradition, this was the home of Ahmad ibn Majid, the famous 15th-century navigator and cartographer.
The arrival of the Portuguese in the early 16th century changed the game. Seeking to control the spice route, Portugal seized strategic ports in the Gulf and Oman and built fortresses along the coast, including the Julfar area. Portuguese rule was harsh but not eternal: over the course of the 17th century, Omani power and the local tribes gradually drove the Europeans out, and control of the Gulf returned to Arab and Persian hands.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, life on this coast revolved around two things: the tribes and the pearls. Two great confederations dominated the scene. The Bani Yas, an alliance of inland clans whose spiritual capital was the Liwa oasis, on the edge of the great desert; the ruling families of Abu Dhabi (the Al Nahyan) and, later, of Dubai (the Al Maktoum) descend from them. And the Qawasim (Al Qasimi), a powerful maritime dynasty based in Sharjah and Ras al-Khaimah, with a fleet that controlled the Strait of Hormuz and both shores of the Gulf.
The economy rested on the pearl banks. Every summer, thousands of men set out to sea for months during the 'ghaus', the diving season. Divers went down dozens of times a day, with no equipment, a clip on their nose and a stone tied to their foot, to prise oysters from the seabed. It was brutal work built on debt —the diver usually owed the captain, and the captain owed the merchant— but Gulf pearls were famous in India and Europe, and for generations they were the region's main source of wealth. Everything was organised around them: credit, the calendar, work songs, the social hierarchy itself.
Between the sea and the desert there was a second economy, that of the oasis and the Bedouin: dates in Liwa and Al Ain, camel and goat herding, caravans. The tribes moved with the seasons, from the interior to the coast and back. There was still nothing resembling a modern state: there were sheikhs, tribal loyalties, pacts and wars. At the start of the 19th century, the shadow of the British Empire was about to fall over that world.
For the British East India Company, which controlled trade with India, the Qawasim were a problem. Their ships attacked vessels sailing under the British flag, and London branded them pirates: it named this coastline the 'Pirate Coast'. (Historians still debate how far this was piracy and how far a legitimate struggle for control of maritime trade against British expansion; the Qawasim see it as resistance, not banditry.) In 1819, a British punitive expedition razed Ras al-Khaimah and destroyed the Qasimi fleet.
The result was the General Maritime Treaty of 1820, signed by the sheikhs of the coast, who pledged to give up 'plunder and piracy by sea'. That first agreement was followed by others of ever wider scope: a truce during the pearling season in 1835, the Perpetual Maritime Truce of 1853 —which banned hostilities at sea forever— and, above all, the Exclusive Agreement of 1892, under which the sheikhs handed Britain control of their foreign relations in exchange for protection. Hence the name by which these seven emirates were known for more than a century: the Trucial States.
It was a protectorate, not a formal colony: the British did not govern the interior or collect taxes, but they controlled the sea, foreign policy and, in practice, who held power. The peace they imposed allowed the pearl trade to flourish, and the coast lived through its golden age of pearls between the late 19th century and the 1920s. No one imagined how close disaster was.
The collapse came suddenly and from two directions. On one side, the global Great Depression of 1929 sank demand for luxury goods such as pearls. On the other, and decisively, the Japanese entrepreneur Kokichi Mikimoto had perfected the cultured pearl: a product almost identical to the natural one, available in quantity and at a fraction of the price. By the early 1930s, the market for natural Gulf pearls had simply crashed. For an economy that depended almost entirely on diving, it was a catastrophe.
The 1930s and 1940s were years of deep hardship on the Trucial Coast. Without pearls, many families went hungry; there was emigration, unpayable debt and a poverty that is hard to imagine today. Against this backdrop of crisis came the promise that would change everything: oil. Western companies had been prospecting for years, but the first commercial find took time. In Abu Dhabi, oil was discovered in 1958 —first in the offshore Umm Shaif field and then in the onshore Bab field— and the first exports left in 1962. Dubai found its own, more modest, oil in 1966.
The impact was immediate and uneven. Abu Dhabi, sitting on one of the largest reserves in the world, went from destitution to immense wealth in just a few years. Its ruler at the time, Sheikh Shakhbut, distrusted easy money and held back spending; in 1966, his brother Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan replaced him with family and British backing, determined to pour oil revenue into development. That change of leadership was the prologue to the founding of the country.
The trigger for unity was a decision taken in London. In January 1968, the British government announced it would withdraw from its positions east of Suez —including the Trucial States— before the end of 1971. The seven small emirates, protected until then, were suddenly exposed: no armies of their own, powerful neighbours such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and border disputes among themselves. Independence was coming, but without a safety net.
The two men who took the initiative were Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi and Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum of Dubai. At a famous meeting on the desert border between their two emirates in February 1968, they sealed an agreement to form a federation. The initial plan was ambitious: nine states, including Bahrain and Qatar. But rivalries and power calculations led both of those to go their own way as independent countries.
Finally, on 2 December 1971, the United Arab Emirates was proclaimed with six members: Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al-Quwain and Fujairah. Zayed was elected the first president and Rashid vice president. The seventh, Ras al-Khaimah, joined in February 1972. The birth had a shadow over it: just a day earlier, on 30 November 1971, Iran had seized by force the islands of Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs, claimed by Sharjah and Ras al-Khaimah; the dispute over those islands remains open half a century later.
Sheikh Zayed led the Emirates from its founding until his death in 2004, and is recognised as the 'father of the nation'. He started almost from nothing: a country had to be built with hardly any prior administration, seven rulers jealous of their autonomy, a small and largely illiterate population, and a national identity that did not yet exist. The tool was Abu Dhabi's oil revenue, which Zayed chose to share out in the form of a welfare state.
In just a few years, free schools and universities, modern hospitals, roads, water and electricity networks, and housing went up. Life expectancy soared and illiteracy plummeted. Emirati citizens —the nationals— were guaranteed education, healthcare, land and public-sector jobs, under an unspoken pact: prosperity and security in exchange for political stability, in a system where power stayed in the hands of the ruling families rather than elected institutions.
Balancing the seven emirates was the other great challenge. The Constitution left each one broad autonomy and a large share of its own resources, but Abu Dhabi, with almost all the oil, provided the bulk of the federal budget and supported the poorer northern emirates. The formula —a real federation, but with Abu Dhabi as the dominant partner and Dubai as the second engine— gave the country remarkable stability in a turbulent region. On that foundation, two cities were about to reinvent themselves completely.
Oil made the country rich, but it was what was done with the money that turned it into a global phenomenon. Dubai, with modest crude reserves and well aware they would run out, bet early on diversification: ports, free zones, an airline, tourism, finance, real estate. The port of Jebel Ali and its free zone, opened in the late 1970s and 1980s, drew thousands of foreign companies. Emirates, the airline founded in 1985, turned the emirate into a global stopover between Europe, Asia and Africa.
From the 1990s and, above all, the 2000s, Dubai built at a frantic pace: the Burj Al Arab hotel, the artificial Palm Jumeirah islands and, in 2010, the Burj Khalifa, which at 828 metres is the tallest building ever constructed. The city sold itself to the world as a destination for shopping, luxury and business. The growth was not a straight line: the 2009 financial crisis hit a Dubai heavily indebted in property, and Abu Dhabi had to step in with a multibillion-dollar bailout, an episode that made clear who really held the money.
Abu Dhabi, richer and more cautious, took a different path. It built up one of the largest pools of sovereign wealth on the planet through funds such as ADIA, and invested in industry, energy and, increasingly, culture and knowledge: the Louvre's outpost, campuses of foreign universities, renewable energy with the test-bed city of Masdar, and even a space programme that in 2021 put a probe into orbit around Mars. Between them, Dubai and Abu Dhabi made the Emirates a player with far more weight than its size and population would suggest.
The most striking feature of Emirati society is demographic: the country's citizens are a small minority in their own land. Out of a population of around ten million people, about 88% are foreigners, and Emiratis holding a passport make up barely 11 or 12%. In Dubai, the share of expatriates reaches 90%. No other country in the world has such an imbalance between nationals and foreign residents. This mass of workers came mainly from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Egypt and other countries, and it is they who literally built the Emirates and keep them running.
The model rests on the kafala (sponsorship) system, introduced in the 1970s, which ties a migrant's residence and work permit to an employer or 'kafeel'. The system gave the economy an abundant, cheap workforce, but it also produced abuses well documented by international bodies: passport confiscation, withheld wages, debt bondage, harsh living conditions in labour camps and tight limits on the freedom to change jobs or leave the country. Construction workers, who raised the skyscrapers in the Gulf heat, were the most exposed.
Under pressure from international criticism and concerned for its own global image, the country has introduced labour reforms since the 2010s: limits on working in the heat, wage protection, some easing of the rules on changing employers, and new long-term residence visas. Human rights organisations acknowledge progress but argue that the unequal core of kafala is still in place. It is a fundamental tension in the Emirati model: dazzling prosperity built on a workforce that almost never gains citizenship or the full rights enjoyed by nationals.
Half a century after its founding, the Emirates is a country that plays in a league far above its size. After Zayed's death in 2004, he was succeeded by his son Khalifa and, during Khalifa's long absence due to illness, real power passed to another son, Mohammed bin Zayed —known as MBZ—, president since 2022 and architect of an active and at times interventionist foreign policy in Yemen, Libya and the Horn of Africa. In 2020, the Emirates signed the Abraham Accords, normalising relations with Israel, a major diplomatic shift in the region.
The country has worked hard to project an image of modernity, openness and religious tolerance: places of worship for different faiths, a Ministry of Tolerance, the visit of Pope Francis in 2019 —the first by a pope to the Arabian Peninsula—, and Expo 2020 in Dubai. At the same time, it remains a federation of absolute monarchies, with no parties or free elections, tight limits on freedom of expression and of the press, and severe punishment for dissent. That double face —economic and social avant-garde on one side, political authoritarianism on the other— defines the Emirati state.
Looking ahead, the big question is the 'day after oil'. The Emirates is investing heavily in tourism, finance, logistics, solar and nuclear power, artificial intelligence and even space, seeking an economy that does not depend on crude once it stops flowing or stops paying. The fact that Dubai hosted the COP28 climate summit in 2023, in an oil-producing country, neatly sums up both the ambition and the paradox of the project. In just three generations, a handful of tribes of pearl divers and Bedouin built one of the most unusual countries on the planet: the story is still being written.
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Abu Dhabi's history begins inland, at the Liwa oasis, on the edge of the vast Rub' al Khali desert. That was home to the Bani Yas, the tribal confederation from which the Al Nahyan, the family that rules Abu Dhabi, descend. For generations these people lived on dates, herding and the pearling season on the coast, moving between the interior and the sea according to the calendar.
Tradition places the city's founding around 1793, when the Bani Yas moved their base to Abu Dhabi island, drawn by the discovery of fresh water. The name itself, Abu Dhabi, 'father of the gazelle', refers to a legend about hunters who followed a gazelle to the water well on the island. On that anchorage rose the Qasr al-Hosn fort, the oldest building in the city and the seat of its rulers for almost two centuries.
Throughout the 19th century and much of the 20th, Abu Dhabi was an emirate of pearls and poverty like its neighbours, perhaps even more austere given its inland, desert character. Nothing suggested that this small sheikhdom of fishermen and Bedouin would become one of the most powerful financial capitals in the world. The key lay, quite literally, beneath its feet and under the sea around it.
In the emirate's interior, by the border with Oman, lies Al Ain, the 'garden city' and, along with Liwa, the historic heartland of the Bani Yas. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited areas in the Emirates: desert caravans crossed here and in neighbouring Buraimi, and its palm oases were watered by the 'falaj', the ingenious system of underground channels that brought water down from the mountains, inherited from antiquity.
Al Ain's soil holds the country's prehistory. At Hili there are tombs and settlements of the Hafit and Umm an-Nar cultures from the third millennium BCE, which is why Al Ain became the first site in the Emirates inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in 2011, with its oases, its falaj and its archaeological sites. Above the desert rises Jebel Hafeet, the mountain on whose slopes hundreds of beehive tombs more than five thousand years old have been found.
Al Ain also carries enormous symbolic weight: Sheikh Zayed, the country's founder, was born and raised here and governed the region before coming to power in Abu Dhabi. His experience of the oasis (water, dates, tribal life) shaped his idea of development. That's why Al Ain today is a quiet, green city with no skyscrapers, looked after almost like a shrine to Emirati origins.
Oil changed everything. Abu Dhabi turned out to be sitting on one of the world's largest crude reserves: the commercial find came in 1958 at the offshore Umm Shaif field, with the first exports in 1962. Almost overnight, the most austere emirate became immensely rich. Its ruler at the time, Sheikh Shakhbut, distrusted money and kept it with barely any spending, which frustrated both his family and the British.
In August 1966, Shakhbut was replaced by his brother Zayed bin Sultan, who was determined to pour the oil income into development. Zayed transformed Abu Dhabi within a few years and, above all, became the driving force behind the union of the emirates. When the country was born in 1971, Abu Dhabi was named capital of the United Arab Emirates, a provisional role that eventually became permanent: it is home to the federal government, the presidency and the embassies.
As the source of almost all the oil, Abu Dhabi funded the bulk of the federal budget and supported the poorer emirates. Its wealth was also channelled into gigantic sovereign wealth funds (ADIA is one of the largest in the world) that invest the oil surplus in assets around the globe, with an eye on the day crude is no longer central. That mix of oil, financial prudence and political leadership made Abu Dhabi the undisputed dominant partner in the federation.
With the turn of the century, Abu Dhabi decided its wealth should also buy cultural and spiritual prestige. The boldest symbol is the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, completed in 2007, one of the largest in the world, able to hold tens of thousands of worshippers, with its white marble, its domes and what was once the largest hand-woven carpet on the planet. It bears the name of the country's founder, who is buried beside it.
At the same time, the emirate invested billions on Saadiyat Island to create a world-class cultural district. Its jewel is the Louvre Abu Dhabi, opened in 2017 beneath a spectacular perforated dome designed by Jean Nouvel, the result of an agreement with France that includes the use of the Paris museum's name. Other major museums are planned or under way on the same island, such as a Guggenheim and the Zayed National Museum. The aim is clear: to turn Abu Dhabi into a destination for art and learning, not just business.
This cultural strategy is not free of controversy. International organisations criticised the conditions of the migrant workers who built the Saadiyat museums, in line with the wider criticism of the country's whole labour model. As in Dubai, architectural splendour sits alongside uncomfortable questions about who builds it and under what conditions.
Opposite the capital, Yas Island is Abu Dhabi's bet on large-scale entertainment. The Abu Dhabi Formula 1 Grand Prix has been held there since 2009 at the Yas Marina circuit, which usually closes the world championship season and has become the emirate's sporting showcase. The island adds theme parks from global brands (Ferrari World, with one of the fastest roller coasters in the world, and Warner Bros), hotels, golf courses and resort beaches.
Yas embodies Abu Dhabi's version of diversification: where Dubai bet on trade and mass tourism, Abu Dhabi combines culture, elite sport, luxury tourism and heavy industry, always with the safety net of its huge oil wealth and sovereign funds. The stated goal is a 'post-oil economy': attracting investment, talent and visitors so that, when crude loses weight, the emirate already lives off something else.
That forward look includes energy and technology. Abu Dhabi built Masdar City as a testbed for sustainable urban planning, developed large solar plants and the Barakah nuclear power station, and funded the space programme that in 2021 put the 'Al-Amal' (Hope) probe into orbit around Mars, a milestone for the Arab world. Between the Formula 1 circuit and the Mars probe, Abu Dhabi sums up its ambition: to use the income from a finite resource to build something that outlasts it.
Dubai's history as a place in its own right begins in 1833. That year, around 800 members of the Al Bu Falasah clan, part of the Bani Yas confederation, broke away from Abu Dhabi and settled on the banks of Dubai Creek (Khor Dubai), the inlet that reaches inland and forms a natural harbour. They were led by Maktoum bin Butti, founder of the Al Maktoum dynasty that still rules Dubai today. They settled on the Bur Dubai bank, across from the trading district of Deira.
That creek was everything. Its calm, deep waters let dhows, the traditional sailing boats, drop anchor, and they made Dubai a safe harbour and a trading post. Like the rest of the coast, the town lived on pearl diving and trade: cloth, spices, gold and pearls changed hands in its souks. The historic Al Fahidi district (or Bastakiya), with its mud-brick houses and wind towers that cooled the air, still keeps the scale and texture of Dubai before oil.
What made Dubai take off was not crude, which was always scarce here, but an early political decision: to turn the emirate into a free port. None of this was a given. At the start of the 20th century, Dubai was a settlement of mud and palm-frond houses. But its trading instinct and the skill of its rulers already put it a step ahead of its neighbours.
In 1894, Dubai's ruler took a step that would shape the emirate's future: he exempted foreign merchants from taxes. The effect was immediate. Persian and Indian merchant families, tired of the duties charged in their home ports, especially the Persian town of Lingeh across the Gulf, moved to Dubai with their businesses and their networks. The Bastakiya district, named after the Iranian region of Bastak, grew directly out of that migration of traders.
Within a few decades, Dubai had become the great entrepôt of the Gulf, the warehouse and re-export hub that handled goods from across the region. Its souks specialised: the spice market, the textile market and, above all, the gold souk, which would make Dubai one of the world's great centres for the precious-metals trade. Much of that gold then travelled on, along informal routes, to India, where demand was huge.
That mindset (low taxes, an open door for foreign traders, business above everything) became Dubai's DNA long before the skyscrapers. When the pearl market collapsed in the 1930s and ruined the coast, Dubai suffered like everyone else, but its trading network and free-port status gave it a base to rebuild on. On a small scale, the city was already what it would later become on a huge one: a trading machine.
If one man embodies Dubai's transformation, it is Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, ruler from 1958 to 1990. Stubborn in his vision and with an almost unlimited faith in infrastructure, Rashid set out to build whatever it took to make Dubai the Gulf's great trading hub, oil or no oil. A phrase attributed to him sums up his philosophy: don't wait to be rich before investing; invest in order to become rich.
His legacy was physical and concrete. He had the creek dredged in the early 1960s so larger ships could come in. He built Port Rashid and later the colossal port of Jebel Ali, one of the largest man-made harbours in the world. He put up the first airport, laid bridges and tunnels across the creek, and drew the lines of the modern city. When oil turned up at the offshore Fateh field in 1966, Rashid finally had the money to speed everything up, but the strategy was already under way.
Rashid was also one of the two pillars of the federation: together with Zayed of Abu Dhabi, he sealed the agreement that created the Emirates in 1971, and he served as vice president and prime minister of the new country. Under his rule, Dubai went from a fading pearling port to a city permanently under construction. His son, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, ruler since 2006, would take that logic of limitless building to the extreme.
Unlike Abu Dhabi, Dubai never swam in oil. Its Fateh field, discovered in 1966, brought in serious income for a while, but the reserves were modest and everyone knew they would run out. Far from being a curse, that scarcity was the best incentive: Dubai understood before anyone else that its future lay not underground but in trade, services and tourism. The watchword was to diversify before it was too late.
The key tool was free zones. The Jebel Ali free zone, set up in 1985 next to the new port, offered foreign companies full ownership, zero taxes and free repatriation of profits. It drew in thousands of firms and made Dubai the logistics base for the whole region, between Europe, Asia and Africa. That formula was followed by free zones specialising in media, technology, finance or gold, each with its own ecosystem.
The other great pillar was connectivity. Emirates airline, founded in 1985 with two leased planes, grew into one of the biggest in the world, and Dubai's airport became one of the busiest on the planet for international traffic. The idea was simple and brilliant: if half the world is a few hours' flight away, Dubai can be where everyone stops over, does business and goes on holiday. Today oil makes up only a tiny share of the emirate's economy.
From the late 1990s, Dubai launched into a race for superlatives that made it famous worldwide. The Burj Al Arab hotel, shaped like a sail over the sea, opened in 1999 and was marketed as the most luxurious on the planet. The Palm Jumeirah, a palm-shaped artificial island reclaimed from the Gulf, was built in the first decade of the 2000s. And in 2010 the Burj Khalifa opened: at 828 metres, the tallest building ever constructed, at the heart of a district of skyscrapers, giant malls and dancing fountains.
That breakneck growth had its crises. In 2009, the bursting of the global property bubble caught Dubai up to its neck in debt from grandiose projects; several were frozen, and the emirate only avoided default thanks to a bailout from Abu Dhabi of around 20 billion dollars. In gratitude, the tallest tower, which was meant to be called Burj Dubai, was renamed Burj Khalifa in honour of the president and ruler of Abu Dhabi. It was a reminder of the real pecking order within the federation.
Behind the glitter lies a harsher reality: that of the people who built it all. The city of records was raised by the labour of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers from South Asia, housed in camps on the outskirts, working gruelling shifts in extreme heat and bound by the sponsorship system. That Dubai, of scaffolding and workers' buses at dawn, is as real as the Dubai of malls and towers, and you can't tell the story of one without the other.
In the south of the country lies one of the most extreme landscapes on Earth: the Rub' al Khali, the 'Empty Quarter', the largest continuous sand desert on the planet, shared by Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen and the Emirates. Its dunes can rise more than a hundred metres high and its summer temperatures are among the highest ever recorded. For millennia it was an almost impassable frontier, crossed only by Bedouin who knew its wells and its routes.
On the Emirati edge of that desert sits the Liwa Oasis, a string of villages and palm groves that was the cradle of the Bani Yas, the confederation that produced the ruling families of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Liwa was the refuge of the interior: dates were grown and livestock kept there in summer, while many men went down to the coast for the pearling season. It is, in a sense, the ancestral heart of the country, long before the coastal cities existed.
Today Liwa and its desert are also a destination: giant dunes such as Moreeb, one of the highest in the world and a venue for motorsport competitions, and camps where you can sleep under the stars draw travellers and Emiratis themselves, who see in the desert their identity and their origins. Every winter, camel, falconry and date festivals celebrate that Bedouin heritage on the very edge of the great emptiness.
Before oil, before the cities and even before pearls, there was the Bedouin. Much of the inland population lived as nomads or semi-nomads, raising camels, goats and sheep and moving through the desert in search of grazing and water. It was a hard life, ruled by the climate, the well and the tribe, with a strict code of hospitality, honour and loyalty that still runs through Emirati culture.
That world gave the country its best-loved symbols: the camel, once transport, food and wealth, now the star of races and beauty contests; the falcon, a hunting companion turned national emblem that even appears on the state's coat of arms; coffee with dates as a ritual of welcome; Nabati poetry, recited from memory. Far from disappearing, falconry and camel breeding are cultivated today as heritage and a source of pride, with institutions dedicated to preserving them.
That nomadic past explains a great deal about the present. The country's founders, Zayed first among them, were men of the desert and the oasis, not of the big city, and their idea of community came from the tribe. The speed with which the Emirates went from the goat-hair tent to the glass skyscraper did not erase that background: beneath the ultramodern surface there still beats a Bedouin culture barely two or three generations away.
In the east of the country, the desert runs into the Hajar Mountains, an arid, rocky range that stretches mainly across Oman and reaches into the Emirates in the north and east. Carved by ancient rivers, these mountains created a landscape of wadis (dry riverbeds that fill when it rains), gorges and farming terraces clinging to the rock, where for centuries small communities lived off mountain agriculture and water from the falaj.
Hatta is the best-known mountain corner: an enclave of Dubai set right in the heart of the Hajar, cut off from the rest of the emirate and surrounded by Omani territory and other emirates. Cooled by its altitude, Hatta is a complete contrast to the coast: a reservoir of turquoise water for kayaking, trails through the mountains, a heritage village with restored houses and towers, and dry, fresh air that is especially appealing in winter. For a long time it was a stop for caravans travelling between the coast and the interior.
These mountains also hold chapters of the country's deep history. In their wadis and on the eastern coast that opens up behind them, around Fujairah and Dibba, early battles of Islam were fought and old forts and mosques were built. Water, always scarce, was the decisive resource: whoever controlled the mountain springs controlled the life of the oasis. Today the Hajar are the destination for those looking for something in the Emirates they did not expect: height, coolness and rock instead of sand and sea.
Emirati nature is not just desert and mountains: it is also sea. The coast hides extensive mangroves, especially around Abu Dhabi and in Umm Al Quwain, which act as fish nurseries and bird refuges, and shallow waters that are home to one of the largest dugong ('sea cow') populations in the world after Australia. Dozens of islands are scattered off the coast, many of them former pearl banks and now nature reserves.
For millennia that sea was the country's larder and source of wealth. It provided the pearls that sustained the economy until the 1930s, and after the pearling collapse fishermen all along the coast went on making their living from it. The relationship with the Gulf, at once a dangerous frontier and a livelihood, shaped the culture of these communities as much as the desert shaped that of the interior. The wooden dhow, with its triangular sail, is the other great national symbol alongside the camel and the falcon.
Today that marine heritage is under pressure from development. Building artificial islands, ports and entire cities on reclaimed land has transformed whole stretches of coastline, with an impact on mangroves, reefs and fish stocks. Aware of the problem and of its image, the country has created marine reserves and protection programmes, but the clash between breakneck growth and the conservation of fragile nature is one of the open tensions in the Emirates today.
Environmental awareness in the Emirates has a recognised father: Sheikh Zayed, remembered as a pioneer of conservation in the region. Worried about the disappearance of desert wildlife, he championed the protection of the Arabian oryx, the white antelope that had been hunted almost to extinction, and its reintroduction to the country. He also turned Sir Bani Yas Island, off the coast of Abu Dhabi, into a wildlife reserve where thousands of animals now graze.
Today that legacy is combined with large-scale projects. The country has reintroduced species that had vanished, created national parks and mangrove reserves, and set up falcon breeding programmes and schemes to reintroduce birds of prey. In the mountains, Jebel Jais in Ras Al Khaimah has become an adventure and nature destination, with viewpoints and activities aimed at a different kind of tourism from beaches and malls. The image of a country that also looks after its environment has become part of the national brand.
But the contradiction is huge, and the country carries it in plain sight. The Emirates have one of the highest per-capita ecological footprints in the world, enormous water and energy consumption in the middle of the desert, and an economy born of oil. The fact that Dubai hosted the UN climate summit, COP28, in 2023, presided over by the head of the state oil company himself, summed up that paradox. The country's environmental future, caught between green ambition and dependence on crude, is perhaps the greatest of its unfinished challenges.
For centuries, the north of the Emirates was the most populous and powerful part of the coast. Its historic centre was Julfar, near today's Ras al-Khaimah, one of the great ports of the Gulf between the 13th and 16th centuries, from which ships sailed to India, East Africa and China loaded with pearls, horses and dates. On that seafaring tradition, in the 18th century, rose the power of the Qawasim (Al Qasimi), the dynasty that ruled Sharjah and Ras al-Khaimah.
The Qawasim built a genuine naval power, with a large fleet and control over both shores of the Strait of Hormuz. That power clashed head-on with the interests of Britain, which accused them of piracy and dubbed the coastline the 'Pirate Coast'. Historians dispute the label: to the British it was piracy; to the Qawasim, it was defending their trade against a power that wanted a monopoly over the Gulf.
The clash ended badly for the north. In 1819, a British expedition razed Ras al-Khaimah and destroyed the Qasimi fleet, and the following year the sheikhs signed the General Maritime Treaty of 1820. That defeat marked the decline of the north's naval might and, over time, the rise of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The northern emirates kept their pride and their history, but in terms of wealth they fell behind their southern neighbours.
Sharjah, the country's third city and seat of one branch of the Qawasim, chose a different path from its neighbours: instead of competing on skyscrapers and nightlife, it positioned itself as the cultural and religious capital of the Emirates. Under Sheikh Sultan bin Muhammad al-Qasimi, a historian by training who has ruled since 1972, the city restored its souks and old quarters, opened a remarkable network of museums of Islamic art, archaeology, calligraphy and science, and cultivated its image as guardian of the country's heritage.
That profile earned it international recognition: UNESCO named it Cultural Capital of the Arab World in 1998 and World Book Capital in 2019. Sharjah keeps a more traditional and conservative atmosphere than Dubai, with which it shares a border and forms a huge conurbation that thousands of people commute across every day. That closeness has turned the cheaper Sharjah into a commuter town for many of those who work in Dubai.
Its conservative character has one visible sign: Sharjah is the only emirate where alcohol is completely banned, with no exceptions or licences for hotels, unlike the rest of the country. The city claims a strict Muslim identity that is at the same time open to learning and art, a combination that sets it apart from both cosmopolitan Dubai and the other northern emirates.
Between Sharjah and the rest of the north sit the country's two smallest emirates. Ajman is the smallest of the seven by area: just a handful of square kilometres on the coast, plus two enclaves inland. It traditionally lived off fishing and dhow building (its wooden boatyards are still at work) and today depends heavily on the economies of neighbouring Sharjah and Dubai. Its old fort, now a museum, keeps the memory of that modest, seafaring past.
Umm al-Quwain is the country's least populated and quietest emirate, with just a few tens of thousands of residents. Ruled by the Al Mualla dynasty, it has a feel of time standing still: lagoons, mangroves, an old town by the sea and an economy that never took off at its neighbours' pace, partly because it had no oil. Its coast and islands, rich in birdlife, appeal to those looking for the calmest, least developed side of the Emirates.
Both emirates illustrate the country's huge internal inequality. With no significant oil of their own, they depend on transfers from the federal budget (that is, from Abu Dhabi) and on being part of the great northern conurbation. Theirs is the story of fishing and pearling communities that, after the pearl collapse, climbed aboard as best they could onto the prosperity train pulled by their powerful southern neighbours.
Ras Al Khaimah is the emirate of nature and of the deepest history: heir to Julfar, it stretches from beaches and mangroves up to the Hajar Mountains, where Jebel Jais rises, the highest peak in the country at nearly 1,900 metres and now famous for the longest zipline in the world. It was the last to join the federation, in February 1972, after some initial reluctance, and it still carries the grievance of Iran's occupation of its Tunb islands in 1971.
Fujairah is the only one of the seven emirates that does not face the Persian Gulf but the Gulf of Oman, on the other side of the Hajar Mountains. That geography long kept it somewhat isolated from the rest and tied to Oman; it was only recognised as a full emirate in the 20th century. Its diving coast, its wadis between the mountains and its heritage set it apart: this is home to Al Bidya Mosque, considered the oldest in the Emirates, built in the 15th century from mud brick and stone and topped by four domes. Nearby, at Dibba, one of the decisive battles of the Ridda wars was fought in the 7th century.
Both emirates share one trait: their wealth lies not in oil but in location and landscape. Fujairah, on the Gulf of Oman and outside the Strait of Hormuz, has become a strategic port for fuel shipments that avoid that bottleneck. Ras Al Khaimah works quarries and cement and is betting heavily on mountain and adventure tourism. Together they represent the wildest, least urban face of the country, the face of the mountains and the two seas.
The five northern emirates (Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al Quwain, Ras Al Khaimah and Fujairah) are in a similar position: they are the junior partners in a federation dominated by Abu Dhabi and Dubai. None has oil reserves comparable to those of the south, and all of them depend to varying degrees on transfers from the federal budget, which Abu Dhabi funds, and on economic integration with Dubai and Sharjah. That dependence means less real autonomy within the system.
The founding of the country in 1971 was not a smooth process for the north. Ras Al Khaimah only joined in 1972, after hesitating and negotiating, and was also stung by Iran's occupation of its Tunb islands a few days before independence. The internal borders between the emirates were left tangled, with enclaves of one emirate inside another, a reflection of an old tribal map that the federation inherited without fully erasing.
Even so, the union worked. In exchange for giving up sovereignty over foreign policy, defence and currency, the northern emirates gained access to the infrastructure, services and stability that the south's wealth brought. Today they are looking for their own place in the country: Sharjah as the cultural capital, Ras Al Khaimah and Fujairah as destinations for nature and logistics, Ajman and Umm Al Quwain as quieter, more affordable havens. The story of the north is one of a glorious past at sea and a present in the shadow of its neighbours, but a secure one.
Hardly anything that happened to United Arab Emirates happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
