Dubai: From Dusty Port to Desert Metropolis… and Back Again?

this video is brought to you by squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business check out squarespace through the link in the description below more on them in a bit it's one of the biggest boom towns at the last century a hundred years ago dubai was a sleepy ten thousand person trading post surrounded by desert by 1990 it was a mid-sized oil hub just building its very first high rises then suddenly everything exploded within five years a construction spree had started that was so intense that it was unrivaled even in the oil-rich middle east gigantic malls appeared seven star hotels sprouted up indoor ski resorts opened in the middle of the desert by the time the burj khalifa was declared to be the world's tallest structure in 2007 it was clear dubai had transformed out have gone the sand and history inn had come glass steel man's overwhelming wealth but how did this happen how did this minor emirate huddled beside the hulking might of oil-rich abu dhabi and saudi arabia become one of the greatest cities in the world and well has its fall already begun today geographics is digging into both the legendary past of dubai as well as taking a peek into its future to uncover the secrets of the gulf's greatest metropolis when you look at dubai today it's tempting to think this place looks pretty damn new but while most of modern dubai did indeed only appear in the last 30 years its history stretches way way back all the way back into the ancient world in fact it was here on these shores several thousand years ago that the seeds of the emirate were first sown as far back as 10000 bc humans appeared in what we now call the gulf states in those days the region looked a little bit different instead of desert you had sweeping grasslands and coasts ringed by mangrove swamps you wouldn't have guessed it at the time but one of those swamps would eventually become dubai the colonel of the dubai settlement appeared first around 3000 bc as the region got hotter the mangrove swamps they shriveled up initially it was nomadic herders who moved into the site of modern dubai but by 2500 bc a date palm plantation and a small trading center had been established that center is important because the gulf in this era it thrived on trade in ancient oman and bahrain empires had sprung up specializing in copper and luxury goods that they traded with one another part of that trade involved passing through dubai allowing the small settlement to prosper although the two empires collapsed by the second millennium bc the dye had been cast dubai would spend the next four millennia tangled in a trade network covering everything from indian spices to chinese porcelain but it wouldn't be anywhere near the center of this network after its ancient neighbors collapsed dubai just vanished from the history books we know it was still there poodling along thanks to archaeological finds like a 4th century caravan station that suggested the settlement still thrived on passing trade but actual historical records well sadly they just don't exist and this is sad because it must have been a fascinating time for the small merchant settlement in the early 7th century the forces of the prophet muhammad swept across arabia creating a new muslim empire dubai undoubtedly had a front seat to all of the action but we'll never know how this world-changing event affected its people because well no accounts survive all we have to go on are the remains of a mosque from around the time of the end of the first millennium a.d which shows the dramatic way the area transformed dubai's absence from the historical record it finally ended in 1068 a.d with the book of highways and of kingdoms by geographer abu abdullah al-bakri but this was just a small mention and in practical terms dubai would remain lost for several more centuries though sure people occasionally made their way out there and wrote about it we know for example that venetian merchant caspara balbi visited debay around 1590 on a quest to buy pearls where they were reputed to be the best in the world but it's really only in the 19th century that dubai is yanked out of its slumber and thrust back into the global narrative that's because the early 19th century is when one of the world's biggest colonizers and seafaring powers just decided to stop by for a bit of a visit it's time for the british empire to enter the picture [Music] at the turn of the 19th century dubai was a small walled town squatting beside the persian gulf and we mean small there was the alpha hidey fort now the oldest building in dubai a soup for trading a handful of houses and well that was it yet it's amazing even this toy town existed its neighbors were the regional superpowers of kawasim and barney ass tribes either of whom could have gobbled it up like a whale devouring an unfortunate prophet so and let's not forget the pirates in this era the gulf coast was known for good reason as the pirate coast with raids just a constant feature of life until that is the pirates decided to go toe-to-toe with the biggest badasses on the high seas in 1819 the british got fed up with the pirate attacks on their indian vessels and sent the royal navy in guns blazing the pirate ships now just so much driftwood the british promptly made the gulf's many emirates sign a treaty meant to reduce piracy but which basically boiled down to we're in charge now you're gonna have to just deal with it bad as this loss of sovereignty was though the pact's existence would ultimately save dubai in 1833 maktum binboti rode up from abu dhabi took over the port and made the emma at his own but rather than being the end dubai story this was just the beginning maktoum bin buddy wasn't conquering the port for abu dhabi he wanted an independent dubai so he established its royal family the al-makhtum dynasty and then he cozied up to the british so hard that it must have felt like he was trying to snuggle in with the entire empire and this was an astute play london wanted a peaceful coast with planned rulers with the magnums on slide they had no interest in seeing anyone else take over their emirate and so began the long era of dubai as a british vassal like the other emirates it was never formally colonized retaining quite a lot of independence but quite a lot isn't the same as total and the british first took over maritime security then foreign policy then forced exclusive trade rights upon it eventually this series of british-led truces would become so central that the gulf nations became known as the trucial states not that this was actually a problem for dubois the emirate was too busy turning itself into a major player to worry the first step came during the reign of a long name haver and excellent facial hair possessor sheikh makhtun bin hasha al-makhtum so good they named him twice it was chic long named double name who made dubai a duty-free port who invited in traders from persia building the alpha hidey historic district for them by the time he died in 1905 the population of his emirate had hit an all-time high of 10 000 while its economy now rivaled that of abu dhabi's this is the dubai we met in the introduction a pearl trading port that was small yes but already would have been unrecognizable to anyone from the pre-british era but if people thought this new dubai was booming they wouldn't believe the boom that came next first though everyone was going to have to live through a bit of a major bust in 1930 a bunch of japanese scientists declared success in their totally dickish mission to culture pearls and the dubai pearl industry collapsed overnight if that wasn't bad enough the effects of the 1929 wall street crash almost simultaneously hit the region and dubai was plunged into well two whole decades of misery it also didn't help that world war ii saw the town's last lifeline trade with british india cut off by the fighting by the time hitler finally did the decent thing and shot hitler dubai was stagnant depressed and in desperate need of change but make no mistake change was coming and it would be summed up with three sweet little letters o i and l [Music] the post-war era got off to a bit of a bad start in 1947 a border skirmish between dubai and abu dhabi threatened to erupt into a full-on regional catastrophe until good old britain intervened but then just as the emirate was at its lowest luck suddenly changed the first boost dubai got was when britain decided to locate its trucial state headquarters there now basically playing host to a bunch of colonial overlords may not sound like super fun times but it was actually surprisingly advantageous being the british empire and all london poured infrastructure money into dubai buildings worked up to electricity telephone cables were installed and even an airport was built it was dubai's first facelift since the pearl industry collapsed and it was not going to stop there the second boost the emirate got came in 1958 with abu dhabi's discovery of oil again this might sound counter-intuitive you can easily imagine people in dubai being like oh man our big aggressive neighbor got oil that blows but make no mistake this was actually really really good news over the next few years dubai cashed in on abu dhabi's oil boom with all the ingenuity of a guy in a gold rush selling shovels sheikh rashid dredged dubai creek to allow modern tankers through meaning all the oil industry goods bound for portless abu dhabi went through his emirate first he helped his neighbors procure steel and concrete made sure dubai was always there and always willing to help its old rival exploit its new resource as the oil fields grew so did the dubai economy getting fat off its neighbor's success this alone would have constituted a boom but good luck comes in threes and dubai's third piece of fortune would be the biggest yet and of course there's discovery of its own oil reserves uncovered in 1966 the oil fields of dubai were exporting by 1969 by 1970 the town was drowning in petrodollars and sheikh rashid was determined to reinvest all of it even today the jebele port remains one of the largest on earth back in the 1970s it was an absolute monster and this was a monster surrounded by a tax and duty-free zone that would spark a massive influx of foreign cash but before work could begin dubai would have to survive a major change back in october 1964 two years before dubai's oil reserves were discovered an election in britain had returned the first labor government in 13 years by now the british empire was in its twilight from 700 million at the dawn of 1947 its foreign subjects now totaled a mere five million then in 1966 the labor government's defense review revealed a bit of a horrible fact britain was absolutely broke post-world war ii posed the many nations that had fled the island's rainy embrace and well there was just no money left and the government had a choice it could commit to maintaining troops across the remnants of the empire or it could spend that money at home and just like that the fate of the trucial states and newly prosperous dubai were sealed and if you'd like to become newly prosperous well start a business get a website build that website with squarespace and you're all good not a guarantee two simple things though maybe you've got an idea for a website or a business or a youtube channel or a podcast or something else up there in your mind and you're like i should try that but i don't know if i can because i just don't have the skills to put together a website well the second thing is the only way to find out whether that idea is any good is to get it out there to the world and the good news is you can build a website with squarespace it's insanely easy indeed i've got another channel called mega projects i just put together the whole 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stuff mailing lists social integrations all of that stuff it's all very good and 24 7 customer support in case you get stuck so what do you need to do just go to squarespace.com you get a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com forward slash geographics and you'll save 10 of your first purchase of a website or a domain and let's get back to it oh and plug within a plug check out the other channel mega projects [Music] the first warning sign of the major geopolitical shift underway came from the south of arabia since 1963 the aden emergency in what is now yemen had seen attacks of british troops stationed in the protectorate but in 1967 those attacks suddenly went a bit supernova faced with unrest in a colony they couldn't hold on to and no longer really wanted the british abandoned it in november of that year up in the trucial state everyone started nervously glancing side long at one another no one daring to say it allowed but everyone's sort of thinking the same thing if the british could just ditch aiden like a tinder date gone bad what was to stop them doing the same to them sat here in the 21st century you might be thinking that they were thinking well hooray no more drunk brits who just endlessly talk about brexits or whatever they talked about back then but well no one in dubai was actually happy they were actually rather scared just six years earlier britain's slow distancing of itself from kuwait had very nearly led to an iraqi invasion if a power vacuum in tiny kuwait had nearly sparked a war imagine what could happen in a british-less gulf initially london tried to allay these fears redeploying aidan troops to the trucel states but then november the 18th 1967 rolled around and all hell broke loose that day prime minister harold wilson made the shock decision to sharply devalue the pound suddenly whitehall was looking at foreign defense bills that it just could no longer pay the message to the truce or states was clear it was over dubai and the others they were soon going to be on their own this wasn't a happy casting off of the british yoke dubai and abu dhabi actually offered to pay the costs of keeping british soldiers stationed on their soil but they were rather snively told that britain didn't very much like the idea of being a sort of white slaver for the arab sheiks and that was that still the withdrawal wasn't instant the trucel states were given three years before their security guarantee vanished in a haze of tea fumes on february 18 1968 sheikh rashid and his abu dhabi counterpart sheikh zayed met in the desert to discuss what to do it was at this meeting xayah proposed merging their two emirates into a single federation from this one suggestion the modern gulf would be born as the clock ticked down to britain's withdrawal dubai and abu dhabi tried to convince their fellow crucial states to form a single country at one point it even looked like bahrain and qatar might come on board ultimately they decided to go it alone but that still left five other emirates sat at the table on december 1st 1971 the union jack was lowered over the crucial states for the last time the next morning dubai abu dhabi for jira ajman shahar and um al-kuwain joined into the united arab emirates or uae just two months later the emirate of ras al-qaima would join them bringing the total number up to seven it was an unlikely federation still the only one of its kind in the middle east but it was also necessary if you look at a map of the uae you see it's riddled with enclaves and messy borders dubai for example includes a seemingly random chunk of land called hatter that's 134 kilometers away and requires crossing at least two other emirates to reach it had the emirates not succeeded in banding together it's all too easy to see how it could have led to well a spot of war naturally the head of this new federation was abu dhabi by far the biggest emirate accounting for a staggering 87 percent of the uae's territory but while abu dhabi had the size dubai still had the economic power even as the five other emirates were drawn into an increasingly federal structure dubai was left to do effectively whatever it wanted and what dubai wanted to do was build like crazy [Music] by the time sheik rashid died in 1990 dubai was starting to get something of its modern flavor the first high-rises were going up money was pouring in and vast immigrant communities were toiling away to make the city great yet it still wasn't quite there it still wasn't quite the dubai that we know today to create that dubai it would take two visionary people sheikh mahtum the new ruler and his brother sheikh mohammed together they would turn this bustling port town into a miracle of glass and steel makhtum hoped to wean dubai's economy off oil and on to the next big craze tourism to that end he gave muhammad permission to utterly transform the city and transform it he utterly did it was from sheikh muhammad that dubai took its ethos of build it and they will come emphasis very much on the build it part there under his watch dubai blitzed on luxury accommodation on western friendly places like bars and restaurants massive malls were erected with world-class shopping facilities and over a million dollars in giveaways in no time at all the first tourists were not just showing up but raving about what they had found in response dubai just kept on building in 1999 the gigantic burj al-arab opened supposedly the only seven star hotel in the world three years later in 2002 dubai threw its doors open to property investors and the gulf's biggest ever construction boom began it's dizzying to just list some of the things that appeared in dubai overnight golf courses rating tracks vast swimming pools luxury restaurants ice rinks expensive spas and designer stores they all popped up in just months new hotels also blossomed adding 7 000 new rooms a year and that was just down the normal end of the scale at the other end things were going crazy one of the craziest was likely ski dubai a gigantic resort with man-made snow multiple slopes and different trails all somehow existing in the heart of a burning desert forget the hanging gardens of babylon where an ancient writer yanked forward in time and deposited in dubai ski slopes they would declare it the greatest wonder of the world yet compared to what else dubai was up to in the early 21st century a magic desert snow house was positively restrained offshore the property developer nakhil was undertaking a land reclamation project so ostentatious it seemed like fantasy huge islands were built that looked like palm trees further offshore nekkil created an entire chain of islands designed to look like a map of the world in short it was a crazy time but also a highly lucrative one in 2005 the dubai international financial exchange opened the first international stock exchange in the middle east a year and a half later halliburton upped styx from texas and headquartered itself in dubai by the time the unfinished burj khalifa was awarded the title of world's tallest structure in 2007 it must have seemed like the good times were never going to end but while dubai would very much remain a byword for glitz and glamour storm clouds were already gathering when the rains finally came they would risk washing the entire emirate away [Music] on september 15 2008 u.s banking giant lehman brothers collapsed under the weight of its own hubris it was the start of the financial crisis and it would upend absolutely everything the shock of the crisis blew through dubai like a siberian wind construction projects froze never to be completed vast building sites were abandoned even the world archipelago that ultimate symbol of the dubai boom was scuppered today 12 years later its islands remain woefully unused as the crisis peaked in 2009 dubai did the only thing it could on the brink of a default it called in the cavalry abu dhabi bailed out its little brother but the humiliation had stung pretty bad it took until 2011 for dubai to finally escape the crisis even then though things never returned to their crazy pre-crash hides still by 2014 normal service was resuming real estate prices had reached an all-time high and the city could continue to rely on tourism to generate massive piles of cash in fact this video been made around 2015 would likely have written off the financial crisis as a mere blip in dubai's history a painful pause in its ever continuing success story but events of the last five years have made that hypothetical ending impossible in that short span of time dubai suffered three potentially devastating crises the first came in 2014 as oil prices entered a profound slump that they've still not recovered from the second was a near simultaneous drop in real estate prices which tumbled 30 from their 2014 highs effectively ending dubai's build it and they will come ethos come late 2019 dubai was posting its lowest growth since the financial crisis experts were already warning that the city was vulnerable to a shock but still there were some rays of sunshine expo 2020 was guaranteed to bring millions of visitors to the city all of them splashing around bundles of cash i mean it's not like 2020 was going to be the year international tourism became suddenly impossible right the disaster began on january 29th 2020. that day the uae recorded its first case of covid19 and well you can probably guess what happened next the pandemic shut down a devastated dubai for a hyper-social city built on tourism trade retail and construction the coronavirus was like kryptonite whereas abu dhabi's heavy industry and huge reserves saw it mostly unaffected dubai slashed salaries by 75 laid off over a quarter of a million and faced a mass exodus of immigrants that could see its population shrink by as much as 10 percent despite the city now reopening the economic hit is expected to be enormous of course since we're making this last section as this is actually happening something we normally try to avoid we can't say how things are going to shake out but it seems likely that abu dhabi will have to ride to the rescue of its old rival again the second time in 12 years only this time the concession's big brother demands could knock dubai off its perch for good so well that's the story of dubai then a story in which the final chapter is still being written and the ending remains very uncertain it could be that the emirate bounces back from this like it did after the collapse of the pearl industry or after the financial crisis or it could be that dubai's dizzying rise properly ended back in 2008 and we're still now just witnessing its drawn-out fall whatever the truth it seems unlikely that dubai is destined to slip into obscurity any time soon here is a city that's a monument to capitalism an impossible dream gleaming in the desert a modern boom town yes but also one with a deep and fascinating history dubai and 2020 may be on the ropes but if our story today has taught us anything it's that this place this one little chunk of coast on the edge of a desert is a survivor if anywhere can beat the odds to once again rise from the ashes it's here so i really hope you found this video interesting if you did smash that like button don't forget to subscribe support this show by supporting our fantastic sponsor squarespace link below thank you for watching you

Channel: Geographics

Views: 387,281

Keywords: Geographics, Middle East, West Asia, UAE, Geography Profiles, Simon Whistler, Dubai, City of Dubai, Desert Oasis, Persian Gulf, Dubai Facts

Id: 9Q1iDHozcLc

Length: 25min 17sec (1517 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020