Empire: World History - 279. Partition: How Dubai Almost Became Part of India (Part 2)

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

Why have we forgotten that much of the Arabian peninsula was once legally part of India? How were the founding fathers of Yemen influenced by Indian nationalists? Which British spy was a double agent for the CIA and the KGB when he was based in Bahrain?  William and Anita are joined once again by Sam Dalrymple, author of Shattered Lands: Five Partitions And The Making of Modern Asia, to discuss how the Gulf States were once part of the Raj. Become a member of the Empire Club via empirepoduk.com to receive early access to miniseries, ad-free listening, early access to live show tickets, bonus episodes, book discounts, our exclusive newsletter, and access to our members’ chatroom on Discord! Head to empirepoduk.com to sign up. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. Welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnden. And me, William Duremple. And we continue our mini-series with Sam D'Rimple discussing his rather excellent five partitions that reshaped modern Asia. And in this episode, which I think is actually one of the most intriguing of all of the chapters that you've covered in this history, is the history of the Arabian Peninsula,

which honestly you would not put together with the Indian Raj at all. So let's talk about this, because a century ago, a large part, we're talking about Oman, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait were legally part of India. Sam Dharimple discuss, and why don't we know this? Yes, why is this forgotten? How come that none of us knew it? It's been kind of forgotten, and I think each of the nation states involved, be it India, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain has kind of written over this.

And it was really forgotten until this guy called James Onley, this professor and archivist, was hired by the Qatari government to create what's known as the Qatar Digital Library, which is really good. and anyone should go online, anyone who's doing research. It's one of the best archives out there. I got lost four weeks in that archive. It is extraordinary. I was honestly searching for a really obscure name, a British name,

that had served in India and I knew he had been in Muscat. And then suddenly you've got his handwriting, you've got the reports about him. It's replete with these gems that I just had no idea existed until this archive was made open. It was fabulous. So he's basically sent out to try and find any documents on the history. of Qatar before oil, because that's when most Qatari histories tend to begin, really.

He discovers that most of the archives on Qatar are not sitting in Qatar, and they're not sitting in the Arabian Peninsula. They're not sitting in London. They're sitting in Bombay. And that basically the entire swave, this ring from Aden and what's now Yemen, all the way up to Kuwait, basically the whole peninsula bar, north Yemen and Saudi Arabia, had been part of the Bombay presidency. and essentially been ruled as princely states of Bombay.

Just clarify for those who don't know what a princely state was. Crucially, only two-thirds of the Raj was what we call British India, directly conquered and ruled by the Brits. And a third was ruled by some 570-something states that had given up their foreign policy and defense over to the viceroy and the Indian Army, etc. But we're more or less internally independent. Now, anyone who goes to India on holiday

may have been to Jaipur, Jodpur, the Blue City, the Desert City of Jaisalem. These were all princely states. These were all not directly ruled by the British government in the way that, say, Delhi or Kolkata were. Likewise, if you've been to Pakistan, Bahalpur, Kalat, and Chitral are all princely states that joined Pakistan.

But what we forget is that states like Nepal, Bhutan, Dubai, Oman, were all princely states too and were separated off before Indian independence. And that's what happens with the Gulf. So if you look, if you open the Al-Qabanama, which is the list of princely states that are subservient to the Viceroy of India, it opens alphabetically with Abu Dhabi. And on the same page, you can see kind of Bhutan and Lahaj and all these other states that are not part of India today. There's a passport that I managed to find of a yellow.

Jewish woman who wants to migrate to mandate Palestine after the Balfour Declaration declares it a homeland for the Jewish people. And in order to migrate from modern day Yemen to modern day Jerusalem, she has to get an Indian passport because by virtue of being born in Aden, she is an Indian citizen. Extraordinary lost world, none of us realize this. But you say that there's a reason that we're ignorant, that the British actually went out of their way not to emphasize these states were part of India? Well, I mean, not even visualize it. I mean, visualising it was a problem.

I mean, maps showing that line around what was, you know, the Indian part of the empire. I mean, they just didn't really exist, did they? Precisely. So to avoid the ire of Istanbul, basically, the Ottoman Empire had a claim to the whole of the peninsula and to avoid a diplomatic dispute, the Arab states of the Gulf were always left off maps. And there's a Royal Asian Society lecturer who says, as a jealous sheikh, veils his favourite wife, so the British veil their activities in the Arabian Peninsula. Crucially, Sam, you point out that in sense it wasn't the favourite wife, that these places

which today we think of as incredibly rich, I mean, anyone would like to get their hands on the treasuries of Qatar and Dubai. But in large terms, as later as the 1930s and 40s, they were one-gun salutes. They were very minor princely states, or zero gun salutes, as opposed to say Hyderabad, which was what a 21 gun? Exactly. And Jaipur, which had 17 gun salutes. This was something, one of those absurd Raj ceremonial, whereby each ruler had a number of guns that would go off when he arrived somewhere. And there was vast competition between them, are you a 15 or a 17 or a 21, or in the case of Dubai at Abu Dhabi, zero gun salute. No one would salute them when they turned up.

The only one that had a lot was Oman, which was also, I think, a 21 gun salute. So was recognised as a major princely state. But so, you know, bits of Yemen are part of the East India Company from 1830s when the East India Company first annexes aided. Before Lahore. Yeah, exactly. So Yemen was part of the Raj or part of the East India Company before the Lahore, which in a sense is the archetypal sort of Kipling Indian city. It's extraordinary. But the Gulf states, kind of to the east of Yemen, are brought into the Raj a bit later.

There are treaties between these states and the Raj from the early 19th century. But it's only in with Lord Curzon, the viceroy who's most famous for dividing Bengal and later helping to save all sorts of bits of English heritage like Bodium Castle. It's Curzon who has a der Bar, this kind of, you know, a court. holds court in Sharja in the early 20th century and begins integrating them completely as princely states. And he has this quote, Oman should be considered as much a native state of the Indian Empire as Lus Beeler or Kalat, which are two states in modern-day Balochistan. Sam, one of the things you found which would interest, at least the Indian listeners here, is that a lot of these Arabian princes sent their sons to boarding school to the posh

sort of eaten of India, which was Mayo College in Rajasthan, where they would have their own house with their own elephant alongside the son of the Maharaja of Jaipur and Jobpur. Yeah, and crucially, the Sultans of Oman in the early 20s and 30s are more fluent in Urdu, an Indian language than they are in Arabic, which sort of alienates them from their people to some extent. And the language of the Omani army, Urdu remains one of the languages of the Omani army till very, very late. There's all sorts of things. You know, you get all these Yemeni princes showing up at the Delhi Derba. And most importantly, though, I think many of the princes of the region would have considered themselves part of the Indian sphere of influence. But you often get

the question, how much did the average person in what's known as the Arabian Raj actually feel Indian? The answer is not that much. So the average person in Dubai probably wouldn't have known that much that they were considered legally Indian. But in the big cities they were. So Aden, specifically, you have many Arabs considering themselves Indian nationalists. There's a particularly guy called Mohamed Ali Lukman, who's one of the great founding fathers of modern Yemen. And throughout the early 20th century, he's traveling around with the great Dalit leader, Ambedka. He's a massive fan of Gandhi. He's actually Gandhi's Arabic translator whenever he comes to address the Indian national Congress in Aden. And he, whilst critical of the fact that the only history Arabs are taught in

schools across the peninsula is about the Mughals and the reign of Tipu Sultan and the Marathas, and nothing about Arab history, he nonetheless has an intense sense of an Indian identity, this idea that Arabs can be Indians too, just in the same way that a Punjabi or a Bengali cat. We'll come on to Luchman in more detail in a second, but I just want to just go back to Curzon, because we've mentioned this before, you know, this man was the viceroy of India. I mean, even when he was at university, people found him pompous and arrogant. George Nathaniel Curzon is a most superior person. Thank you for taking the words right out of my mouth. Yes. Thank you. But I mean, the thing is,

though, he believed in pomp and ceremony. You mentioned the gun salutes. But there is also a visual image of what he thought of the peninsula states, because, you know, he may have wanted them to be included, but this photograph that exists in the British Library, it shows Kersen, he liked to sort of sit in the middle of all of this to show his grandeur, and all of the Nawabs and all of the, you know, the Rajas and Maharajas would have to come and bow before him as a sequence to show that the, you know, British Empire is supreme. You may be a princely state, you may have jewels and diamonds, but you bow to us. In India, they were given quite a lot of respect. In the photograph that was taken at Sharja, they don't even have chairs, some of them. They're sitting on the ground around

him or kneeling before him. So although he wanted them present in this sort of great India of his, he didn't want them to forget their place and their place was very low to the ground. So the Gulf states are he views as particularly small, essentially. So I think several of the states of modern day Yemen, as well as the state of Oman, were very important in his eyes and were given massive respect. But as far as he was concerned with the sheikhs of Dubai and and Doha and Sharjah. They were right at the bottom of the imperial pecking order. And one of the great stories that has emerged from this book is the fact that there is this complete reversal. So today, Indians go to the Gulf and are often treated quite badly in as servants. As housekeepers, yeah,

or taxis in Dubai. And 100 years ago today, the reverse was true. You had Arabs from Dubai moving to Bombay, etc. as servants. There's this wonderful quote that I managed to find of a Kithari man who was very pleased that the tables had turned. And whilst he was once hit for stealing an Indian official's apple and was kind of, you know, basically beaten, now the Indians come to Qatar as servants and he can do the same to them. Slightly dark, but strange reversal. So let's go back to this fascinating guy, Mohammed Ali Lukman, because he is from an Arab family in Aden as you say, but he feels Indian. I mean, not only feels Indian, but he speaks Indian languages as well, doesn't he? I mean, it's what? Gujarati is one of his languages. Hindi is one of

his languages. He writes a short story about life in Gujarat. He's got cousins in Gujarat. And he writes that for many years after becoming Gandhi's translator, I eulogise the aims of the Indian Congress. And it's only in the kind of 1930s that he begins propagating Arab solidarity and disseminating Arab aspirations instead. So there's this reversal that just as Burma that we discussed in the last episode. Just as Burmese people are beginning to feel alienated from India, you get people like Gandhi saying you're not really Indian, though, are you? Because, you know, you weren't featured in the great Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. At exactly the same moment, the same sort of attitude is being applied to Arabs like Lukman. He's being told, well,

you're not really Indian. Aidan's a part of the Indian empire, but you're not really Indian. Sam, how similar was this to the way that many Arabs would have felt Turkish being under Ottoman rule? Was it a parallel to that? So it's rather interesting. So, yes, it's definitely similar. One of the things, interestingly, that really alienates Arabs like Lekman from this kind of pan-Indian identity is the fact that most Indian Muslims support the Ottoman Caliphate and really, you know, think that the downfall of the Caliphate in World War I and the independence of the Arab states, I think Lawrence of Arabia time.

Many Indian Muslims think this is an awful thing, that the Caliphate is the leader of the world's Sunni Muslims and should be propped back up, whereas Arabs like Lukman begin to feel like why are you supporting a colonial power that's dominating Arabs? And so a wedge begins to form even between Arab Muslims and Indian Muslims in a sense. It's so extraordinary. We never have this image of Arabia divided between the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire. But it is a cleavage and it's a very important one. Let's cast our eye on Aden more closely because on the same day, in the last episode, we talked about the partition of Burma, on the same day, April 1st, 1937, you have the decision to separate Aden from India.

And this is the telegram that George the 6th reads out. Aidan has been an integral part of British Indian administration for nearly 100 years. The political association with my Indian empire will now be broken and Aden will take its place in my colonial empire. Why do they decide to do this and why do they decide to do it now? So there's multiple things going on here at once. You've got an increasing sense that India might be independent in the future. You know, it's the express aim of the Congress. And frankly, separating off these bits that Indian nationalists don't want

mean that we can potentially keep them in the future. There's this guy Bernard Riley, who's one of the governors in Aden. And he's constantly going on about how much reforms in the Arabian Peninsula are always bogged down by the vast Indian bureaucracy. that's always more focused on events in Bengal and Punjab than it is on events in Aden. And so he definitely was pushing separation just for the sake of economic reforms. And then there's a growing sense that in the wake of World War I, there's more of a sense of Arab nationalism that's growing,

and a sense that maybe these regions should be looking more to Cairo and Beirut than they should be looking to Bombay. Bombay and Calcutta, right. I mean, so I get that reasoning. What you said during the Burmese episode, and if anyone hasn't heard that yet, I urge you to go back, it is mind-blownly interesting. That separation, and you likened it to sort of Brexit when you're separated from the mothership, if you like, you know, the bigger economy, it sort of is a prelude to economic disaster. Is the same true for Aiden, which is separated on the same day, or are there more myths to catch it? I think there's less, because its economy was always less tied to India, I think, than Burma that literally shares a massive land border.

And Aden really has its heyday in the 60s, actually after, decades later. Throughout much of this time, it's essentially a point where if you're taking a boat from London to Bombay, you stop off at Aden on the way to refuel. That's how most people experienced it. Evelyn Waugh writes about it, doesn't he, in one of his travel books arriving at that time, exactly in that matter. Exactly. And actually, Evelyn War is a fascinating source on all this because he writes about the growing dispute, the sense amongst Arabs in the city that they're never going to get as good loans as Indians from the Indian national banks. But crucially, what's bizarre is that the Arabian Peninsula is separated from the Raj in bits and pieces. So you get Aidan separated on April Fool's Day, 1937. But the Gulf states remain, like Dubai, remains a part of the Indian Empire until much later, until basically early 1940. So just as Indian independence is looming, you get all these conversations about, well, we should quickly separate them off now before we hand over the reins to the Gulf. And so there's all these bizarre telegrams that I managed to find in the archives.

There's British officials discussed whether India or Pakistan would be allowed to run the Persian Gulf after independence. Yet a member of the British legation in Tehran writes of his surprise at the apparent use. unanimity of officials in Delhi that the Persian Gulf was of little interest to the government of India. So the Indians are essentially offered the Gulf and turn it down. And as the Gulf resident William Haye puts it, it would clearly have been inappropriate to hand over responsibility for dealing with the Gulf Arabs to Indians or Pakistanis. There is very, very almost a world in which the entire United Oil wealth of the Gulf is handed over to either India or Pakistan. And it would have changed global geopolitics entirely. And it's one of the most consequential decisions in a

sense. Imagine Pakistan as an oil state or India as an oil state. It's extraordinary. But oil hasn't really been discovered yet. And it wouldn't have just been an oil state. It would have had, you know, think of what Dubai, Qatar, Bahrain each have and put it all together. I wonder if the decision, you know, taken by India, no thanks, but no thanks. Thanks very much. Nice of you to think of us, but no, we don't want it, is informed by, you. the fact that there are growing fissures within the independence movement as well between the Indian Congress and groups like the Kila'ath movement, who identify themselves as being primarily Muslim.

And there is this sort of like building picture in India itself in the 1930s and early 40s, of we can't have any more tipping the balance out of our favour. To answer your question, Anita, I think that it's much more the fact that the Indian government just sees this as a money drain. oil hasn't really been discovered and these are tiny villages on the other side of the Arabian Sea. They will have to fund a huge

navy to protect. One of the reasons that all of these states were never brought into modern Saudi Arabia when Ibn Saud unifies all the Arabian tribes in the 1920s is because they were under the protection of the Indian Army. And the question was do they really want to have to

continue funding the protection of these small villages that were a crucial link in the Indian Empire. But, you know, how relevant are they really to Indians today? That's so, that's so brilliant. So they just said they can't afford to look after Dubai and Qatar, because it's such a drain. Isn't it reminiscent of when the Russians sold back that the West Coast of the United States before the gold was found in the gold rush? Dole! Just before. And Alaska before the oil. Well, let's take a break here at another dole moment where India said,

No thanks, thanks, but no thanks. We don't want these bits. You can keep them before oil is discovered. Join us after the break where we introduce you to a really fascinating man. His name is David Holden, and only this year has he been exposed as a CIA KGB double agent. See you in a moment. Welcome back. Okay, well, that was a tease and a half before we went into the break.

Sam DeRumple, tell us all about this man, David Holden. So David Holden's a really fascinating figure. He shows up in my book because his writings as correspondent for various newspapers in the 1950s across the Arabian Peninsula is one of the best visualizations for the lingering Indian influence across the region. He writes amazingly about the fact that he looked forward to his Arabian posting, but he hadn't been expecting to be attending a Gardner Bar in honor of Queen Victoria's appointment as Empress of India in the 1950s, kind of Bahrain. and he writes that the Raj maintains here a slightly phantasmal sway, a situation rich in an anomaly in anachronism. The servants are all bearers, the laundromen adobe, and the watchman are Chokidhar. And on Sundays, the guests are confronted with the ancient and agreeable Anglo-Indian ritual

of a mountainous curry lunch. So he writes gorge about the lingering impact of the Raj on this region. But as you said, what's extraordinary is that he has entered the news this year, as one of the big double agents of the Cold War. Working for the KGB against the CIA. Well, working for kind of both. His former editor at the Sunday Times remembers him as a small neat man,

not a hair out of place, who with his bush jacket and debonair manner managed to bring a touch of Bojess to our newsroom Habub. He was generous in providing contacts and very well aware of the dangers of practicing journalism in tense exotic places. And if you look at a photo of him, he's a kind of smug and confident young man

in a cotton suit with combed black hair and a sort of penetrating gaze. He looks like he works for the tax office, and he's just landed me with an enormous bill, and he's very happy with it. That's what he looks like. That's exactly what he looks like. Some kind of administrator who's got the cream.

But yeah, so what is he doing at this time, and how is he sort of playing both sides off each other? One of the great mysteries of the Sunday Times' history that the editor Harold Evans spent years trying to solve and never managed to solve was why was Holden Mustard? mysteriously murdered in Cairo. And he's found, I think, in a parking lot or something, some way. His bodies just found kind of dumped on the side of the road.

When is the murder? What is he found in 1977, so just six years after my book ends. And, yeah, it's one of the great mysteries of the Sunday Times as history. And there was all sorts of stuff coming out when I was researching the book about his mysterious meetings with a known Soviet block agent. And it was recently discovered just in the last year of my research. that he'd had a passionate romantic affair with ex-communist and spy Leo Silberman, who turns out later to have been a KGB recruiter. There's a letter that he writes to his brother,

that in such a conservative environment as Arabia, what is a fellow to do except turn queer? So news investigations recently have concluded that his relationship with Leo Silberman eventually evolved into him working for the KGB himself, and that he was working for the CIA at the same time and that it was one of the big scandals, basically, of the Sunday Times' history. But what the hell is he doing in the Gulf States?

I mean, what do they want of him? I mean, why, is he working for them? Who is he there for? And is he doing this for money, or is he a communist? I mean, his description of the absurdity of British rituals in the Gulf would indicate that he's a lefty, sort of laughing at the pompous Brits, which would imply a more left-leaning

politics. He's definitely that. I think that it's still unclear what's going on. I think that he is covering the whole of this region, including Egypt after the Suez Crisis. He's covering Israel, Palestine. There's all sorts of major politics blowing up at the time that he's basically just being sent out by the Sunday Times to cover. But obviously, there's all sorts of murky dealings in terms of the US versus the USSR throughout this region at exactly the same time. And I think this is such new story that it's still unclear precisely what he was doing when. But I think as more research

has done, it'll become clearer and this will soon be regarded as one of the great kind of Kim Filby stories of the Cold War. It's just an extraordinary thing, an extraordinary thing. I mean, we did mention just before the break that India had said no thank you to all of these Gulf's days because oil had not been discovered.

I mean, at what point is oil discovered where India can really kick itself in the shin and Pakistan can as well by saying no thank you to this. this great gift. And when Holden is there, is it the start of money starting to pour in, pour out of this region? Precisely. So there was oil discovered in the region shortly before separation and before the partition of Arabia from India. But it was discovered in small quantities. The thing that changes everything is when Iran tries to nationalize the Anglo-Persian oil

company in the early 50s. Which I think I'm right in saying is part of Burma oil, which we discussed in the last episode. It's a subsidiary. Subsidiary, that's right. So you've got these kind of funny connections. And crucially, this bit of Iran, where oil is, Muhammad was very almost recognized as a independent princely state of the Raj.

And the Brits try to get the local Sheikh to basically declare independence of Iran and be recognized alongside Kuwait and Qatar, etc. as a princely ruler. But when Holden's arriving, it's just beginning. You're just suddenly getting this new investment in all the oil reserves of Bahrain and I think Abu Dhabi's just discovered some, but it's not yet discovered in places like Dubai. And when he's going around, he's shocked the crucial thing that he's seeing everywhere is this lingering Indian influence. He's finding that the soldiers of Kiyati State in what's now eastern Yemen were marching in around in defunct Hyderabad-I-Army uniforms, because the Sultan was actually a relation of the Nizam of Hyderabad in central India.

One of the figures you bring into your account at this point are the Ambani family, who Indians will know as the richest people in India, one of the richest people in the world now. What's their part of the story? So, again, they're just eyewitnesses to all of this. This is a time when Indian influence is still rife across the region, and there's still a memory. It's essentially viewed as the last vestige of the Indian Empire, having been separated off now that India, Pakistan and Burma are all independent.

There's one scholar Paul Rich who talks about the Gulf essentially being the Indian Empire's last redoubt, just as Goa was Portuguese India's last solitary vestige, or Ponder Cherry was the tag end of French India. And the Ambani's, along with hundreds of thousands of other Indian trading families, continued to ply trade between Gujarat, Maharashtra, Sindh, and the Gulf states, just as they always had. To this day in Bombay, you see people selling sort of Arabian cans of cola and odd jobs on the seafront in Mumbai, on Apollo Banda and a marine drive. There's still Arabs selling things there, but coming in on Daos to this day. Precisely. And Ambani, Derebai Ambani, whose son, Mukesh, is now one of the richest men in the world with one of India's biggest businesses, is one of the Indians who's going out there to continue to making a fortune there.

You know, like Aden is increasingly in the 50s, you know, one of the British Empire's last great shipping centres. Aden is what Dubai will later become. It's the big business center of the Arabian Peninsula. And Ambani goes there to basically work for an oil company. A lot of the eulogies of his life of this rags to Rich's story like to talk about him as a petrol pump owner. But he's actually kind of basically organizing one of the biggest refueling massive ships to the, you know, like huge cruise ships twice the size of the Titanic. You know, he's organizing this massive sort of refueling station. Is he rich? Is he rich by Aiden standards at this point? I mean, you know.

No, but he's part of this growing middle class that's able to get a job in this booming city and go. home relatively rich enough to start his own big business, which will be called Reliance, one of the big businesses of India today. Crucially, his wife, Kukhla Ben, has an amazing memoir, and she writes very explicitly about the disappearance of this Indian world of the region, the fact that when they arrive, they arrive in Aden and within a day they've met six relatives who are living there, and that Gujarat is still so tied to Aden that everyone is Gujarati. They didn't have to speak a word of Arabic to live there in what's now Yemen. And yet, by the late 1950s, they leave because of growing Arab nationalism and a growing campaign that Indians don't belong.

So tell us about this growth of Arab nationalism. This is the era of NASA. Everyone's looking to this sort of new leader who's uniting the Arabs against the West. How does it affect people like the Abanis and the remaining Indians in the Gulf? Well, so there's slogans like Arabia for the Arabs. And as far as Arab nationalist rhetoric goes, a lot of the Indians and Pakistanis now working in Aden are essentially collaborators with British imperialists. And in quick succession in the mid-1950s, citizenship of the Gulf states is tied to a fair knowledge of Arabic and to basically being Arab. I think this is one of the most fascinating aspects when you're looking from the long distance back at the Raj. Today, many of us write. about the Raj as something exploitative and which looted and robbed India. And I've spent a lot of

of my working life sort of working on that theme. But one of the plus points of the Raj, which is often not understood in modern India, is that the Raj, because of its share size, and because of its links to other British colonies, like the ones in East Africa, allowed Indians who were entrepreneurial, like the Chetayas going to Burma, like the Gujarati's going to Aden, like all the Ismaili's going to East Africa, it allows amazing business opportunities for entrepreneurial Indians to set up their businesses around the outskirts on the periphery of British India, which leads to these vast Gujarati communities in East Africa

or Punjabi communities in East Africa and the Chetias. And in 1947, when those links are cut, those communities are cut off. So the East African Gujaratis end up in Britain, the Chetayas have to return back to Tamil Nad or go to Singapore, and the Aden Indians come back to Bombay. I mean, maybe, maybe there's another parallel to be drawn that, as Sam was saying, you know, you've got Ma Ambani, who in her memoir talks about bumping into six people she's related to on the first day of being there. The Indians were clannish wherever they went.

And so, you know, just like you have in East Africa, the complaints from, you know, the indigenous people of Kenya and Uganda, that, you know, they're sort of living, amongst us, but not of us, that there is, I mean, I do get that sense that, you know, even in Aden, where you've got this Gujarati population, or you've got, you know, the others in places that William just mentioned, that there is not a cultural meld that has gone on, but you get little Indians in these places, which fuels that Arab nationalism. And crucially, in the 1950s, it's after the Suez Crisis. British imperialism is kind of dying out, and there's increasing protest for, you know,

independence for everywhere in the British Empire at this point. And so Britain begins as a point of policy to try and transform this region into viable states that it can hand over independence to, but who will remain kind of friendly with the British so that they continue to have British businesses operating there who they can hand power over to. And the first that they give independence to is Kuwait. 1961. Kuwait is granted independence. The protectorate over Kuwait is removed. And yet almost immediately the Iraqi government begins referring to Kuwait as a lost province of Iraq, whose independence from Iraq was only an artificial creation of the sort of viceroys of India, essentially,

and it was only thanks to the Indian Army's protection that it was independent of Iraq. That's an argument that's used almost immediately, and one that will be used by Saddam Hussein three decades later to justify his invasion of Kuwait. And so you get the origins of the Gulf War. How amazing. Sam, you have your character, David Holstein. turning up at this point and pointing out the irony that while Kuwait was one of Britain's dependent shakedom's, no significant British land force had ever been summoned to its defence. Now, in the first month of its independence, nearly 6,000 British troops pour into the country

to defend it against Iraqi ambitions. Exactly. Sam, there's an absolutely fascinating an eye-opening account of Kuwait being granted independence. What happens to the rest? So there's an increasing push to try and federate basically all of these little shakdoms that exist across the Arab Raj, as it's called. And so, for example, you get the first inklings of the United Arab Emirates trying to federate states like Abu Dhabi and Dubai together. At the same time as you have an attempt to try and federate all the states that will later become Yemen, basically. So states like Lahij and Qayati state. In the course of the 1960s, you have increased. increasing protests and then revolution to try and push Britain out of the region.

So it goes from being something that the Brits are going to pursuing sort of, to something that revolutionaries are shooting Brits in the streets of Aden and saying, go away. And Aden, which was one of the great port cities of the British Empire, becomes the centre of a massive battle between rival revolutionary groups, who are all pushing for Britain to get the hell out. Things are calmer, though, elsewhere. So whilst it's eventually a group called the NLF, who's essentially communists, take over South Yemen and create a country called South Yemen, but it's not allies who Britain is able to

hand over power to. It's a group called the National Liberation Front, who is very much pro-USSR, etc. In the rest of the Gulf states, they are able to hand over power to the loyal sheikhs and sultans. And David Holden writes in July 1971 that for the first time, since the Hayden, of Britain's East India Company, all the territories around the Gulf will be at liberty to seek their own salvation without the threat of British intervention or the comfort of British protection. This final remnant of the British Raj, for that in effect is what it is, has been for some years now an obvious, if somewhat charming, anachronism, but its day is over. He writes that, you know, Arabia's changed extraordinarily in the intervening years between kind of, you know, 1950s when he first

arrives in 1970s when he leaves. And when he arrived, it was one of the poorest regions of the world. But now, Abu Dhabi, I think by the time he leaves, was per capita the richest state bar none, even though just 10 years earlier, it was sunk in the traditional penury of desert isolation. And he says that Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi's forefathers ruled the desert from the back of a camel, but Zayyad rides it in a limousine. So it's changed in extraordinary ways.

But in July, 1971, a new. Union called the United Arab Emirates is formed out of small sheikhdoms such as Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Fajira, Kalba, Um al-Kuayn, and later Rasal Khayma joins it as a seventh shakdom. And so you get the origin of the UAE out of the small remnants of the British Raj. And finally, in December 1971, the final British ships pull out of the port of Bahrain and leave, and the protectorates that had been placed over the region is finally taken away, so that the Gulf states emerge in 71, the same week as an independent Bangladesh will, which is what we'll discuss in a few episodes of time, they are finally recognized as independent

nation states rather than just as British protectors. Sam, this whole idea of founding a confederation of what had been princely states creates one of the great, What ifs of history? What if Jodhpur, Jaipo, Hyderabad, Kashmir and so on, had founded an Indian Federation? Would we see them today as a sort of UAE living alongside India? Yes. And there's a lot of talk about that. I think in episode four of this mini-series, we'll be discussing exactly that possibility. So do stay around and listen in to that episode. Look at you doing your plugs for us. That's so amazing. Look at you. Honestly, I don't know why I'm working with him. You're very good.

Seriously, he always forgets to plug ahead. Listen, you've just got a little taste of what is to come. These stories and so many more are contained with it, Shattered Lands, five partitions in the making of modern Asia by Sam Derrimple. If you want to hear the next episode, we're going to be exploring the partition that most of us think about when we talk about partition, and that is the partition of India and Pakistan.

But from a slightly different angle, because I know we have covered partition on this podcast before, because we're going to be focusing on the creation of eastern Pakistan, now Bangladesh. So, I mean, it's going to inform a lot of what's going on in the world at the moment. If you can't wait, you don't have to. You can listen to it straight away, just become a member of the Empire Club. That's Empirepoduk.com. Empirepod UK.com.

I always say this. A price of a fancy coffee per month. That's all it is. And you get early access to, you know, our miniseries, all in one go. Listen at your convenience. weekly newsletters which are brilliant and stuff full of extra information and reading suggestions. Well, you become part of our team and you also get our love, our love forever because you're becoming a member of a club. Let's us do what we do.

And we're very, very grateful for those of you sign up. Keeps the whole pod going. So it's EmpirePod UK.com. Keeps the wheels on. Keeps the wheels on. It does. Anyway, till the next time we meet, it is goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Droompool.