Dubai

Dubai, constituent emirate of the United Arab Emirates (formerly Trucial States or Trucial Oman). The second most populous and second largest state of the federation (area 1,510 square miles [3,900 square km]), it is roughly rectangular, with a frontage of about 45 miles (72 km) on the Persian Gulf. The emirate’s capital, also named Dubai, is the largest city of the federation. The city is located on a small creek in the northeast part of the state. More than nine-tenths of the emirate’s population lives in the capital and nearby built-up sections. Dubai is surrounded by Abu Dhabi emirate on the south and west and by Sharjah emirate on the east and northeast. In addition, the small exclave (detached section) of Al-Ḥajarayn in the Wadi Ḥattā, more than 25 miles (40 km) from the nearest territory of Dubai proper, belongs to the state.

The settlement of Dubai town is known from 1799. The sheikh (Arabic: shaykh) of the emirate, then a minor, signed the British-sponsored General Treaty of Peace (1820), but the area was seemingly dependent on Abu Dhabi until 1833. In that year a group of Āl Bū Falāsah clansmen of the Banū Yās confederation, chiefly pearl fishers, left Abu Dhabi in a rivalry dispute and took over Dubai town without resistance. From then on, Dubai became, by local standards, a powerful state. It was frequently at odds with Abu Dhabi’s rulers and the Qawāsim (Āl Qāsimī), who controlled the area just north of Dubai, both of whom tried to take control of it, but Dubai’s new rulers retained their independence by playing the neighbouring sheikhdoms against each other. Together with the rest of the original Trucial States, the emirate signed with Britain a maritime truce in 1835 and the Perpetual Maritime Truce in 1853. Its foreign relations were placed under British control by the Exclusive Agreement of 1892. When Britain finally left the Persian Gulf in 1971, Dubai was a prominent founding member of the United Arab Emirates.

The Maktoum sheikhs of Dubai, unlike most of their neighbours, long fostered trade and commerce; Dubai was an important port by the beginning of the 20th century. Many foreign merchants (chiefly Indians) settled there; until the 1930s it was known for pearl exports. More recently, Dubai has become the region’s chief port for the import of Western manufactures. Most of the United Arab Emirates’ banks and insurance companies are headquartered there. After the devaluation of the gulf rupee (1966), Dubai joined the country of Qatar in setting up a new monetary unit, the riyal. In 1973 Dubai joined the other emirates in the adoption of a national currency, the dirham. The emirate has free trade in gold, and there is a brisk smuggling trade in gold ingots to India, where gold imports are restricted.

In 1966 the offshore oil field of Fatḥ (Fateh) was discovered in the Persian Gulf about 75 miles (120 km) due east of Dubai, in waters where the state had granted an oil concession. By the 1970s three 20-story submarine tanks, each holding 500,000 barrels, were installed on the seabed at the site. Shaped like inverted champagne glasses, they are popularly called the “Three Pyramids of Dubai.” Dubai’s estimated oil reserves are less than one-twentieth those of neighbouring Abu Dhabi, but oil income combined with trading wealth has made Dubai a very prosperous state. A number of industrial plants, including an aluminum smelter and an associated natural gas fractionator, were built in the late 1970s. Since the late 1980s aluminum production has greatly increased through a number of staged expansions of the smelter’s facilities.

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Dubai has concentrated on a wide range of development and construction plans designed to promote tourism, transport, and industry. Port Rashid (a deepwater harbour named for the former emir) was opened there in 1972, and a supertanker dry dock was completed in 1979. In an effort to boost industrial investment, the Jebel Ali port and industrial centre was declared a free-trade zone in the early 1980s; the move was largely successful, and numerous international companies responded favourably by opening facilities there. The project of overseeing Port Rashid and Jebel Ali was taken over in the early 1990s by the Dubai Ports Authority, which was created for the task. The emirate is served by Dubai International airport; Emirate Airlines, the national carrier of the United Arab Emirates, was established by the Dubai government in the mid-1980s. In September 2009 the first portion of a driverless rapid-transit metro line, the first in the gulf region, went into operation in Dubai.

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In the early 21st century a range of transportation and construction projects were under way, including light- and urban-rail systems, a sports complex, luxury hotels, and island developments. Though interrupted by strikes held by the city’s large population of expatriate labourers, construction on the Burj Dubai tower (“Dubai Tower”), as it was then known, was ongoing. Although the building’s interior was not entirely complete, upon its official opening in January 2010—as Burj Khalifa—it was easily the world’s tallest building and its tallest freestanding structure. Investment in the tower and numerous other extravagant projects entailed heavy borrowing, however, and with the escalation of the global financial crisis of the previous years, the emirate’s economy was troubled by massive debt and substantial quantities of real estate that lacked prospective buyers. New reliance upon neighbouring Abu Dhabi—which had recently provided its financially troubled neighbour with a bailout of some $10 billion—explains to some extent the surprise decision to rename the Burj Dubai in honour of Abu Dhabi’s emir, Sheikh Khalifa ibn Zayed Al Nahyan, upon its opening. Pop. (2020 est.) emirate, 3,411,200.