In 1968 Dubai’s population was about 59,000. Today the emirate holds around 3.7 million people. Photographs of the Creek from the 1950s show a low town of coral houses and wooden boats with nothing behind it.
The usual explanation is oil. That is mostly wrong, and the real story is a better one.
Before
There has been settlement around the Creek for a very long time — the Jumeirah archaeological site has material from the Abbasid period, and there was pre-Islamic occupation. But the modern town dates from 1833, when around 800 members of the Al Bu Falasah section of the Bani Yas tribe left Abu Dhabi under Maktoum bin Butti and settled at the mouth of the Creek.
The Maktoum family has ruled since.
The Trucial Coast
Britain, protecting the route to India and objecting to the region’s maritime raiding, imposed a General Maritime Treaty in 1820 and a Perpetual Truce in 1853. The sheikhdoms became the Trucial States: internally self-governing, with foreign policy in British hands. That arrangement lasted until 1971.
Pearls
The economy was pearls, and it was hard. Divers went down on a breath to fifteen metres or more, dozens of times a day, through a four-month season, held under by a stone and pulled up on a rope. They were paid in shares against advances that left most of them permanently indebted to the boat owner.
At its height the Gulf pearling fleet employed tens of thousands of men.
It collapsed twice in quick succession: the Japanese cultured pearl, perfected in the 1920s, and the Great Depression. By the 1930s Dubai was very poor. Some families emigrated.
The decision that mattered
In 1901 Sheikh Maktoum bin Hasher abolished trade tariffs and offered land and protection to foreign merchants. Persian traders from Lingah, where the Qajar authorities had just raised customs duties, moved across the Gulf in numbers and settled in Al Fahidi and Al Shindagha.
Dubai became a free port and a re-export hub, and that identity — a place that makes money by moving other people’s goods — has never changed. Everything since is an elaboration of 1901.
The Creek
In the 1950s the Creek silted up badly enough to threaten the trade. Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed borrowed from the ruler of Kuwait to dredge it, against advice, and the loan was repaid quickly as larger vessels returned.
He went on to build Port Rashid, then Jebel Ali — at the time the largest man-made harbour in the world, built well beyond any apparent need — the World Trade Centre in 1979, and the airport. Each was criticised as excessive and each filled.
Oil, briefly
Oil was found offshore at Fateh in 1966 and exports began in 1969. Dubai’s reserves were always modest — a fraction of Abu Dhabi’s — and are now nearly exhausted. At their peak they were perhaps half the emirate’s income; today hydrocarbons account for a very small share of Dubai’s GDP.
The oil paid for the infrastructure. It was never the economy.
Federation and after
The British announced withdrawal in 1968; the UAE was founded on 2 December 1971 with six emirates, joined by Ras Al Khaimah in 1972. See the Etihad Museum, built on the spot.
From the 1990s Dubai built on free zones, aviation, property and tourism — Emirates airline, Internet City, freehold property for foreigners from 2002, and the tower boom. The 2008 crash hit hard; Abu Dhabi provided a $10 billion bailout in 2009, and the tower opening the following year was renamed Burj Khalifa accordingly.
What it cost
The building was done overwhelmingly by South Asian migrant labour under the kafala sponsorship system, and conditions have drawn sustained criticism from human rights organisations for decades — recruitment debt, withheld wages, heat exposure, cramped accommodation. Reforms have followed, including a wage protection system and a summer midday work ban, and the criticism has continued.
Any honest account of how this city appeared in fifty years has to include who built it, and it is not something the museums here address.
Where to see this history
Al Shindagha Museum on the Creek is the best of it — around twenty restored houses covering pearling, the Creek trade, perfume and the founding, with a photographic archive of Dubai in the 1940s and 1950s that resets the scale of everything else.
Al Fahidi is the surviving pre-oil quarter, saved from demolition by a narrow margin in 1989.
The Etihad Museum covers the federation, on the spot where it was signed.
The dhow wharfage is not a museum at all — it is the 1901 free-port decision still operating, with the same trade routes and much the same boats.
The counterfactual
It is worth asking why Dubai and not somewhere else. The Gulf has many creeks and several old pearling ports, and most of them are still small towns.
The answers usually given are the 1901 tariff abolition, the willingness to borrow for the Creek dredging in the 1950s, and a consistent institutional bet that infrastructure should be built well ahead of demonstrated demand — Jebel Ali, the airport, Emirates, the free zones. Each looked reckless when commissioned.
That is not the whole story, and geography, British protection and Abu Dhabi’s oil all matter. But it explains why a place with almost no natural advantages ended up as the region’s entrepôt.