The plans of Rabat
Hugh Boustead wanted the plans of Rabat.
In December 1961, the British political agent in Abu Dhabi wrote to his country's embassy in Morocco with a request that seemed to connect two places with almost nothing in common. Rabat was an established capital, its modern avenues and administrative buildings set beside an older architectural inheritance. Abu Dhabi was a settlement on a low island in the Gulf, where the outlines of a future capital remained more visible in surveyors' drawings than on the ground.
The request originated with Sheikh Shakhbut bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi. Having visited the United States, he had developed an interest in a kind of urban modernity that did not require his town to surrender its Arab appearance. Boustead's correspondence described the wish to avoid a “hideous American emporium.” The expression belongs to the British officer's account, not to a verified verbatim statement by Shakhbut. Yet the underlying preference was specific. The ruler was thinking about architecture, appearance and the character of a place whose oil wealth was about to alter it beyond recognition.
It was an unexpected glimpse of a man whom later histories would often define by his reluctance to spend.
The town around Qasr Al Hosn had survived for generations without the machinery of a modern municipal government. The fort was both a physical landmark and a reminder of the ruling family's place in the settlement. Around it lay a coastal community shaped by fishing, maritime trade, pearling and the routes connecting island and hinterland. Buildings of palm frond and more durable local materials belonged to a climate in which shade and water mattered more immediately than boulevards. The sea was a means of livelihood and movement, but the shallow approaches also constrained the town's connections. On the mainland, distances were measured through a landscape that had not yet been reorganised by a network of modern roads.
This was not an empty place awaiting civilisation. It had its own economy, social hierarchy, skills and patterns of movement. But it lacked many of the facilities that oil-company officials, foreign engineers and British advisers increasingly considered indispensable. Modern schools, hospitals, housing, water systems, electricity and roads required more than a ruler's approval. They required institutions capable of specifying works, awarding contracts, supervising performance and paying bills.
The money was beginning to arrive before that administrative machinery had been fully built.
That mismatch would shape the last years of Shakhbut's reign.
A ruler formed by scarcity
Shakhbut had ruled since 1928, through a period when the collapse of the Gulf's pearling economy brought severe hardship to coastal communities. Before petroleum, wealth had been uncertain, and authority could not be separated from the obligations that a ruler was expected to meet. Payments to dependants and allies, assistance in times of need and the maintenance of political relationships all depended on resources that were limited and uneven.
It would be too simple to say that this experience made Shakhbut cautious and that caution alone explains everything he later did. The surviving evidence cannot turn decades of economic hardship into a single psychological diagnosis. But the conditions of his early reign are essential to understanding the setting in which he made decisions. He had not inherited a treasury overflowing with revenue. He had governed in an economy that could fail.
Oil changed the scale of the choices. It did not remove the need to make them.
Commercial exports began in 1962. Foreign firms and advisers were already positioning themselves for the works that would follow. Each proposal arrived with a promise of improvement and a claim on the emirate's future income. A road could be described as essential; so could a jetty, a power station, an administrative building or a new housing district. Yet the ruler still had to decide whose plans he trusted, which works should come first and how much authority to delegate to people whose commercial interests were not necessarily identical to his own.
Shakhbut was neither a modern finance minister nor merely a relic of an earlier age. He was a ruler confronting a transition in which familiar forms of personal authority met an unfamiliar scale of technical and contractual obligation.
His interest in Rabat showed that he could imagine change. His dealings with the people hired to produce it showed how difficult that change could become.
The city on paper
British architect John R. Harris was among those engaged in the early effort to give Abu Dhabi an urban plan. His proposals considered the older town, including its market, mosques and fort, alongside the roads, neighbourhoods and public facilities required for expansion. The work did not begin with the assumption that every existing landmark should disappear. It attempted, at least in conception, to relate a modern town to the place already inhabited.
Other firms would produce broader development schemes. In July 1962, Shakhbut approved arrangements involving Sir William Halcrow & Partners and Scott Wilson Kirkpatrick & Partners. The firms worked together as Abu Dhabi Consultants. Their remit belonged to a world of drawings, surveys, construction programmes and professional supervision. They could describe the sequence by which a settlement might acquire modern infrastructure. Whether that sequence would be funded and carried out was another matter.
The consultants were not alone. The Contracting and Trading Company, commonly known as CAT, was among the firms involved in early works. Its association with the Lebanese businessman Emile Bustani placed it within a wider network of regional commercial interests. Other contractors sought access to the same emerging market. The German firm Siebert, together with the intermediary Victor Hashem, appeared in British correspondence concerning a major development arrangement.
For the British officials, the arrival of competing firms presented more than a question of engineering competence. British businesses had opportunities to win or lose. Correspondence in the archives records efforts to coordinate British commercial approaches and inquiries into rival arrangements. The officials advising the ruler were operating in an environment in which strategic influence and business prospects overlapped.
This matters because the dispute was not between a visionary team of disinterested engineers and a ruler who rejected progress. It was a contest over plans, contracts, payments and authority, conducted among people with different responsibilities and different interests.
The road and causeway works revealed the problem early. A permanent link between Abu Dhabi Island and the mainland promised to alter the movement of people, supplies and commerce. For engineers, it was a project with quantities, specifications, costs and a programme. For the ruler, it remained a contract he could question or redirect. Archival descriptions record disputes over work and payment, including his decision to halt causeway construction and consider proceeding without CAT's assistance.
An instruction to stop work could be interpreted as obstruction. It could also be part of a negotiation over performance or price. To determine which, a historian needs the relevant contract, the invoices, the correspondence and the chronology of decisions. The British reports reveal their authors' frustration clearly. They do not automatically establish Shakhbut's private motives.
One summer in particular allows us to move beyond general characterisations and watch a disagreement unfold.
The contractor in the majlis
In July 1963, Abdulla Khoury, the new managing director of CAT, came to Abu Dhabi. The company had a practical problem: as existing road work approached completion, it faced the prospect of too little new business to justify the people and equipment it maintained in the emirate.
Khoury needed work. He also needed to preserve a relationship.
He visited the ruler on 18 and 19 July. D. Slater, a British political officer, reported the encounter in a letter dated 22 July. After a private discussion, Khoury and Shakhbut entered the majlis hand in hand. At lunch, Slater heard the ruler refer to the visitor as “My friend Abdullah.”
The detail is small, but it is among the most revealing in the surviving record. A man who could be formidable in contractual disputes was also capable of conspicuous personal warmth toward a contractor seeking his favour. The encounter belonged to a political and commercial culture in which relationships mattered alongside written agreements.
Khoury told Slater that he had expressed disappointment about business being placed elsewhere. Shakhbut had offered reassurance that CAT might receive further work when an opportunity arose. Slater doubted the practical value of the assurance. A cordial lunch was not a purchase order. The company's immediate commercial position remained uncertain.
Neither man needed to be acting insincerely for the encounter to end that way. Shakhbut could value the relationship without promising a specific contract. Khoury could be encouraged by the reception while recognising that he had secured no firm commitment.
The British correspondence preserves the moment because it mattered to the company's prospects. For the historian it matters for another reason: it prevents Shakhbut from becoming merely the sum of other people's complaints about him.
A month later, the contrast was sharper.
Five per cent
Sheikh Shakhbut was prepared to place the supervision of Abu Dhabi's development in the hands of British engineers.
He would pay them five per cent.
The engineers wanted more.
The dispute can be followed through Slater's confidential letter of 19 August 1963. It records a sequence of meetings, interventions and departures precise enough to make the disagreement something more than a general assertion that the ruler was difficult.
Harry Ridehalgh and his colleague Spencer represented the firms making up Abu Dhabi Consultants. Their position had become uncertain as Shakhbut dealt with other contractors. They arrived in Abu Dhabi on 13 August, later than expected. When they met the ruler on 14 August, he was preoccupied with criticism of him in the press. He suspected the consultants of encouraging hostile coverage. They denied the allegation, but the meeting ended without the commercial question being resolved.
Slater went to see Shakhbut. He urged the ruler to renew the consultants' engagement, warning that without professional coordination development risked becoming disorganised. Shakhbut agreed to another meeting.
On 18 August, Ridehalgh and Spencer returned. The offer they received was larger than they might have expected. Shakhbut wanted them to supervise design, town planning and construction across his development programme. He did not wish to establish a government public works department to undertake that role. Instead, the consultants could provide the supervision for a flat fee of five per cent of the value of contracts.
The engineers initially emerged encouraged. The scope was considerable. But when they calculated the costs, they concluded that the percentage would cover the work of their London offices without adequately financing their establishment in Abu Dhabi. They wanted five per cent plus site costs.
On 19 August they returned to argue their case.
The disagreement lasted more than an hour. Shakhbut refused the additional allowance. Ridehalgh and Spencer maintained that they could not carry out the work on the proposed terms. Neither side yielded. The consultants left that afternoon, one bound for Doha and the other for Dubai.
Slater visited Shakhbut again that evening. He argued that the consultants' terms reflected accepted international practice and that the job could not be performed for the fee the ruler proposed. Shakhbut did not change his position.
The ruler said he wanted the consultants to stay. He also said he could not afford to pay more than five per cent. Slater disputed Shakhbut's understanding of what he had paid under the previous arrangement. Even the financial history of the relationship was contested.
It was a remarkably revealing stalemate. The ruler was not refusing the services of professional engineers. He was offering them an extensive supervisory mandate. The consultants were not refusing to develop Abu Dhabi. They were rejecting a fee structure they considered commercially inadequate. The British officer was not simply describing events. He was intervening to secure a particular outcome and judging the ruler's refusal unreasonable.
The surviving letter tells us what was offered, what was requested and what happened when neither side accepted the other's terms. It does not tell us that Shakhbut secretly wished development to fail, or that the consultants were uniquely qualified to direct every project, or that five per cent was objectively the correct or incorrect price. Those are different claims requiring different evidence.
Yet the consequences were visible. Abu Dhabi still needed roads, buildings and utilities. The consultants still needed a contract. Shakhbut still controlled the expenditure. The negotiation had ended without an agreement.
It would be tempting to write this episode as a miniature explanation of the ruler's downfall. That would be too neat. The succession three years later involved family relationships, British policy, regional security and the wider performance of government. No single consultancy dispute caused it. What the episode reveals is the daily friction produced when a ruler accustomed to personal financial control confronted a development programme requiring extensive delegation.
The five-per-cent argument was not the whole crisis. It was the crisis made legible.
The brother inland
More than a hundred kilometres inland, Shakhbut's younger brother exercised authority in a different landscape.
Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan had served as the ruler's representative in the Eastern Region since 1946. Al Ain was a place of oases, irrigation channels and cultivated ground surrounded by harsher terrain. Water determined where people could live and what they could grow. Local authority required attention to land, wells, routes and relationships among communities whose livelihoods were tied to the oasis.
The difference from the coast was not merely visual. In Abu Dhabi town, petroleum revenue was creating the possibility of rapid capital expenditure. In Al Ain, much of the work of government remained bound to practical questions of access, cultivation and local administration. Zayed's later reputation for accessibility and public works grew partly from his experience there.
Official histories celebrate improvements to irrigation, schooling, healthcare and markets during his years in the Eastern Region. Such accounts preserve an important strand of public memory, but they were written with knowledge of what Zayed later became. The historian must ask which initiatives are independently documented, which were completed, and which were attempted but delayed.
One proposal illustrates both his interest in infrastructure and the obstacles he faced. In 1963, Zayed pursued the possibility of a civilian airfield in the Buraimi area. British archival descriptions identify contacts with Costain and Frederick Snow & Partners, as well as difficulties surrounding an intermediary. The proposed visits and negotiations did not simply proceed to a completed airfield. The record is one of initiative, uncertainty and impediment.
That makes the contrast with Shakhbut more credible. Zayed was not a miraculous administrator who could summon infrastructure by force of personality. He too depended on contractors, intermediaries and political circumstances. He also lacked the authority over Abu Dhabi's central oil revenues possessed by his elder brother.
But British observers increasingly saw in him an alternative way of governing. They contrasted the reputation he had developed in the interior with the frustrations of development at the coast. Their judgment mattered, although it was not the only judgment that mattered.
A protected ruler, an impatient protector
Britain's relationship with Abu Dhabi was older than oil. Agreements with the rulers of the Trucial Coast had given Britain extensive influence over external relations and protection. The rulers retained internal authority, but they operated within a political system in which British representatives advised, negotiated, reported and sometimes intervened.
The arrangement created a persistent ambiguity. Britain was responsible for security and external relationships, yet its officials could not always direct how a ruler administered his own territory. The wealth of Abu Dhabi made that ambiguity more difficult. The emirate was becoming strategically and commercially important at the same moment that its internal government appeared, to British officials, inadequate for the scale of the changes ahead.
Shakhbut had reason to be wary of outside advice. Foreign firms wanted contracts. Political officers wanted orderly administration and reliable partners. Oil companies had their own operational requirements. Other rulers and regional governments watched the changing balance of power. These interests overlapped but were not identical.
British frustration became political. By 1963, officials were contemplating Shakhbut's replacement by Zayed. The proposal did not proceed. Accounts of the period indicate that sufficient agreement within the ruling family could not then be secured. Further discussion of change followed in subsequent years.
The failed proposals are important because they remove the sense of inevitability from the story. Shakhbut was not a ruler whose removal was already certain once the British lost patience. Zayed was not a successor who could simply be installed whenever London wished. Family support, legitimacy and the circumstances of the emirate imposed constraints on the people considering a transfer of power.
Nor should the British be reduced to a single will. Political agents in Abu Dhabi, officials in Bahrain and policymakers in London worked with different degrees of proximity to events. Commercial representatives and engineering firms had still other priorities. The surviving records must be read for disagreement within this network, not only for a common British position against Shakhbut.
The documents also have an asymmetry. British officers wrote extensively, often confidentially, about what they saw. Their words survive in organised archives. Shakhbut's own explanations are less easily recovered in the same form. It would be an error to mistake the volume of British testimony for a complete account of the ruler's reasoning.
Yet the pressure was real. By the middle of the decade, Abu Dhabi's oil income was rising and expectations of development were rising with it. The question of who should govern was no longer confined to family succession in the abstract. It was connected to the expenditure of wealth, the performance of administration and Britain's strategic calculations.
The transfer
On 6 August 1966, Shakhbut ceased to rule Abu Dhabi. Zayed succeeded him in a transfer backed by members of the ruling family and supported by British authorities.
That sentence records an outcome. It cannot substitute for a reconstruction of the final days. The precise order of family deliberations, British communications, military arrangements and Shakhbut's response belongs to the succession files, including FO 371/185526–185528 and related correspondence. Until those pages have been examined directly, the responsible narrative must resist invented private conversations, unverified quotations and theatrical details about the moment of removal.
The transfer was consequential enough without embellishment.
For nearly four decades, Shakhbut had held authority through poverty, the decline of pearling, the discovery of oil and the first attempts to plan a modern city. He had commissioned designs and contested their execution. He had negotiated with contractors and resisted demands for payment that he considered excessive. His rule had become the focus of criticism from British officials and others who believed the emirate's wealth was not being translated quickly enough into public improvements.
Zayed inherited both the resources and the unresolved obligations. He did not begin with a blank sheet. Plans existed. Contracts existed. Contractors, officials and advisers had been working in the emirate for years. The people of Abu Dhabi had already been living through the first uneven stages of an oil economy. What changed was the political authority deciding how quickly the work should proceed and how the state's administrative capacity should develop.
The official record identifies the establishment of an Abu Dhabi Planning Council in September 1966. The new ruler increased development activity and contributed to the Trucial States Development Fund. These early decisions signalled a different relationship between the government and the uses of petroleum income.
But the judgment of history cannot rest solely on the speed of construction. A building programme may improve lives while also concentrating power, displacing existing communities or privileging some groups over others. A government may become more capable while remaining highly personal. The gains of development need to be measured against their distribution and their costs.
The price of progress was never just the fee paid to an engineer.
It was the money committed, the authority transferred, the social world altered and, in Shakhbut's case, the throne lost.
The inheritance
In the years after 1966, the roads and public buildings that had been debated on paper became increasingly visible on the ground. Abu Dhabi's transformation accelerated. Schools, hospitals, housing and government departments began to change the practical relationship between rulers and residents. The physical town expanded beyond the forms that had defined it at the start of the decade.
It would later be easy to look backward from the towers, highways and institutions of the modern capital and imagine that this outcome had been waiting inside the oil discovery all along. The archival record suggests something less comfortable. Petroleum created an opportunity, not an administrative solution. Plans could be approved and then delayed. Engineers could be invited to supervise a city and then depart over their fees. Contractors could be welcomed as friends and leave without new work. British officials could favour a change of ruler and find themselves unable to bring it about.
Nothing about the transformation was automatic.
The brothers' contrasting reputations were formed in this uncertain period. Shakhbut was remembered for caution and resistance; Zayed for initiative and construction. There is evidence behind both descriptions, but each becomes misleading when turned into a complete personality. The elder brother had ideas about the city and the younger brother encountered practical failures. Both worked in circumstances shaped by outsiders, limited institutions and the unpredictable arrival of extraordinary wealth.
The central difference after August 1966 was not that Abu Dhabi suddenly discovered the concept of progress. It was that a new ruler acquired the means to determine its pace.
And almost immediately, the scale of his task expanded beyond the city.
Britain's protective order in the Gulf was approaching a reckoning. The rulers of the coast would soon have to decide whether their separate territories could survive as independent states, whether they could join together, and how the new wealth of Abu Dhabi would alter the balance among them.
Shakhbut had argued over the price of development.
Zayed would have to negotiate the price of a country.