Why are the United Arab Emirates united?

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This is the script for my video posted on August 17, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

Dubai is just one of seven emirates in the United Arab Emirates. But why are the emirates united into a single country to begin with, and are they really united?

The story starts in the late 18th century when the Gulf was dominated by a maritime confederation of Arab tribes called the Qawasim, who held ports and other territory on both sides of the Strait of Hormuz.

The British at the time characterized the Qawasim as lawless pirates, but the current ruler of Sharjah, one of the seven emirates in the UAE, actually wrote a PhD dissertation specifically to prove that this claim was manufactured by the British East India Company to undermine Arab trade with India.

The early 19th century saw the British lead expeditions to punish the Qawasim for this alleged piracy, and this resulted in a chain of treaties signed by local rulers to allow the British in.

The General Maritime Treaty of 1820 called for an end to piracy, a maritime truce in 1835 established seasonal peace to protect the pearl industry, and a permanent truce eventually came in 1853, giving the region a new name: the Trucial States.

The 1892 Exclusive Agreements bound local rulers not to cede territory to or even deal with any power other than Britain, effectively making the Trucial States a British protectorate. Britain controlled the region’s foreign relations until 1971.

At the time, the largest tribal grouping on the Trucial Coast was the Bani Yas, which formed a confederation around the Al Nahyan dynasty of Abu Dhabi. In 1833, one section of the Bani Yas called the Al Bu Falasah seceded from the confederation, led by the Al Maktoum family, and they established themselves at Dubai. This is how Abu Dhabi and Dubai became separate emirates.

Before oil became a valuable commodity, the region relied heavily on pearl exports, but these collapsed in the 1920s and 1930s thanks to Japanese cultured pearls hitting the market and the Great Depression destroying luxury demand. The collapse left the ruling families broke rather than powerful. They survived on British subsidies and then on concession payments from the foreign companies that actually controlled the oil, and they only took real control of it themselves after independence.

For much of the 20th century, Saudi Arabia fought with other regional powers for control over territory believed to hold oil, like Buraimi, an oasis now along the Oman-UAE border.

From 1949 on, the Saudis attempted to gain control of Buraimi by influencing tribes and local communities, and in 1952 they occupied part of the oasis outright. British-led forces expelled them in 1955.

The 1974 Treaty of Jeddah finally settled the border, nearly two decades after the fighting stopped, but it ceded to Saudi Arabia a corridor to the Gulf near Qatar and gave them a share of a 14b barrel oil field. The modern UAE disputes the map though and has still never ratified the treaty, even though the Saudis registered it with the UN in 1993.

Meanwhile, in 1968, Britain announced it would withdraw all of its forces east of the Suez by the end of 1971, driven by a crisis of its currency valuation and a collapse of its position in Aden. The rulers of Abu Dhabi and Dubai secretly agreed to join together, and a nine-state Federation of Arab Emirates was proposed in 1968.

This would have included Bahrain and Qatar, but it ultimately collapsed because those countries were worried about where the country’s capital would be and how much weight they’d actually have. Not to mention, they didn’t completely get along to begin with. They opted for separate independence instead.

The UAE formed in 1971 with six emirates, and the last one, Ras al-Khaimah, joined a few months later. Two days before that though, as British forces withdrew, the Imperial Iranian Navy seized the opportunity to take several islands in the Strait of Hormuz that had belonged to the emirates. The UAE took the issue to the UN just days after coming into existence, but the issue is still live because Iran has never lost control of the islands.

So how do the emirates share power? Well, the short answer is that Abu Dhabi holds about 96% of the country’s proven oil reserves and the bulk of the country’s territory. Dubai managed to gain influence by transforming into a hub for trade, logistics, services, and tourism, but its economy is still a fraction the size of Abu Dhabi's, and it holds nowhere near the same sovereign wealth. The five northern emirates, meanwhile, are fiscally dependent on transfers from the federal government, which is to say Abu Dhabi.

Still, the seven emirs form a Supreme Council of Rulers to jointly govern the country. By convention rather than by law, the presidency is held by Abu Dhabi's ruler and the vice presidency by Dubai's ruler. Interestingly, the Qawasim who ruled before the British still rule the emirates of Sharjah and Ras Al Khaimah, and the Al Maktoum branch of the Bani Yas rule Dubai.

There’s also a 40-member Federal National Council that is half elected and half appointed. It reviews federal laws and can question ministers, but the rulers can override it. Much power is actually held at the emirate level. The wealthier emirates run their own sovereign wealth funds and their own oil policy.

The 2009 debt crisis in Dubai demonstrated how things really work though. Dubai's state-linked investment conglomerate Dubai World asked to restructure about 26b dollars of debt it was struggling to pay, part of a total closer to 80b dollars across the emirate. Abu Dhabi and the UAE central bank propped Dubai up with 20b dollars, and weeks later at the opening of the world’s tallest building in Dubai, it was renamed from Burj Dubai to Burj Khalifa in honor of Abu Dhabi’s ruler.

Meanwhile, while the UAE is extremely wealthy on paper, only about 11% of the country’s more than 11m people are actual citizens. Expats from South Asia, the Philippines, Iran, and Egypt make up the vast majority of the population, which means that the country's internal stability relies on a workforce with few political rights and limited protections, despite reforms to the sponsorship system since 2021. It also means the country has to carefully manage its relationships with the states that send that labor.

Domestically, the country is also almost completely dependent on desalination for drinking water, and concerns about food security have led it to acquire land in places like Sudan and Egypt specifically for agriculture.

The country is obviously extremely reliant on the Strait of Hormuz as well, and specifically seaborne oil and gas trade. The UAE’s structural solution is Fujairah, its main port on the Gulf of Oman outside the Strait.

Fujairah is fed by a pipeline from Abu Dhabi built explicitly to bypass the Strait, and the country is also expediting a West-East pipeline to roughly double the country’s exports that can go out even if the Strait is disrupted. Even so, the bypass covers only a fraction of normal Gulf transit, protecting the UAE’s revenue but not the global market.

The UAE faces all kinds of geopolitical issues on top of all this that could have videos of their own, from the war in Yemen to their role in places like Sudan and Somalia. They have to hedge between the US and China while managing Iran next door, and the emirates don't always agree on how. But they broadly agree that political Islam, and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular, is a foundational threat to the country, and that if they’re going to survive they must diversify away from their reliance on fossil fuels. They are also all well aware that while they are united, Abu Dhabi is really in charge.

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