United Arab Emirates

The territory of the modern United Arab Emirates has been inhabited since the Neolithic, with archaeological sites at Jebel Faya, Marawah, and Umm an-Nar showing continuous human presence from at least the sixth millennium BCE. During the third millennium BCE the Umm an-Nar culture flourished along the coast of what is now Abu Dhabi, trading copper from the Hajar Mountains with Mesopotamia, where the region was known as Magan. Iron Age sites such as Tell Abraq and Rumailah document advanced falaj irrigation systems, and the area later passed under the cultural orbit of the Achaemenid Persians, the Seleucids, and the Parthians. The pre-Islamic centuries saw the rise of the trading port of Julfar in the north, while the territory was nominally contested between the Sasanian Empire and various Arab tribal confederations until the arrival of Islam.

Islam reached the region in 630 CE through emissaries of the Prophet Muhammad, and the inhabitants converted following the Battle of Dibba in 633, which suppressed an apostasy revolt and bound the coast to the Rashidun Caliphate. Over the following centuries the area was ruled in succession by the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Qarmatians, and local Arab dynasties, while the port of Julfar grew into a regional hub under the Kingdom of Hormuz. Portuguese forces seized the coast in 1507 and held it for over a century, building forts at Julfar, Khor Fakkan, and Dibba, before being expelled by an alliance of Omani and Persian forces in the mid-seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century the Qawasim confederation dominated the northern coast and the Bani Yas tribal federation, ancestral to the ruling families of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, controlled the interior and the southern shore.

British naval campaigns against the Qawasim in 1809 and 1819 led to the General Treaty of Peace of 1820, followed by the Perpetual Maritime Truce of 1853, which gave the region the colonial designation Trucial States or Trucial Oman. Under the Exclusive Agreement of 1892 the sheikhdoms ceded their foreign relations to Britain in return for protection, a status that persisted for nearly eighty years. Pearling sustained the economy until the global market collapsed in the 1930s, and the discovery of oil in commercial quantities in Abu Dhabi in 1958 and Dubai in 1966 transformed the social and political landscape under Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan and Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum.

When Britain announced its withdrawal from east of Suez in 1968, the rulers of the seven Trucial States, together with Bahrain and Qatar, opened federation talks. Bahrain and Qatar ultimately chose separate independence, and on 2 December 1971 six emirates, namely Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al-Quwain, and Fujairah, proclaimed the United Arab Emirates, with Ras al-Khaimah acceding in February 1972. Sheikh Zayed served as the country's first president until his death in 2004 and is regarded as the founding father of the federation.

In subsequent decades the federation pursued rapid economic diversification, hosted United States forces during and after the 1990 to 1991 Gulf War, joined the Gulf Cooperation Council from its inception in 1981, and signed the Abraham Accords with Israel in 2020. The United Arab Emirates is today a federal absolute monarchy composed of seven hereditary emirates, governed by a Federal Supreme Council of rulers, a presidency traditionally held by the ruler of Abu Dhabi, and a partly elected Federal National Council.