From Pearls to Oil
By David Heard, Motivate Publishing, 624 pages, $65
The forgotten story of how the oil companies first came to Abu Dhabi is told in the fascinating book, “From Pearls to Oil”, in which long-term Abu Dhabi resident and oil industry professional David Heard uses his special access to oil company archives to shed new light on this hitherto obscure part of the history of oil.
But after decades of living and working in Abu Dhabi, Heard uses his deep knowledge of the area to open up a whole new strand of Emirati history, as recorded by the tireless note takers in the oil companies. The comments and analyses of many meetings with rulers such as Shaikh Shakhbout Bin Sultan Al Nahyan, Ruler of Abu Dhabi from 1928, and Shaikh Saeed Bin Maktoum Al Maktoum, Ruler of Dubai from 1912, as well as many other notables and leaders of the region, make the book both a vital source for anyone who wants to know about the genesis of the UAE’s oil, but also a must-read for anyone interested in the history of Abu Dhabi and the future UAE.
For example, in the chapter rather dauntingly headed “Geological Progress in 1937” there is a fascinating review of the limits of the powers of the various rulers over their less accommodating tribes. One of the examples was the inability of the Ruler of Sharjah, Shaikh Sultan Bin Saqr, to exercise any control over the Shaikh of the Bani Kitab who controlled access to Jebel Faiyah, which in theory was under the overview of Sharjah. This is only one of many such intriguing nuggets of UAE history that are woven throughout the fabric of the book and encourage the non-oil specialists to keep reading.
Oil companies
From the 1910s up to the 1930s, the oil companies were busy with their successes in Iran and Iraq and did not spend much time thinking about Abu Dhabi or anywhere else in the Trucial Coast, which was very remote from their area of operations, and of whose rulers they were largely unaware. When they did look for new fields, they preferred to look for concessions in the much closer territories of the northern Gulf.
So in the 1920s and 1930s the two major oil companies in the Middle East, Anglo Persian Oil Company, APOC, and Iraq Petroleum Company, IPC, remained very much focused on the rich oil reserves in Iraq and Iran. And even if by 1922 there was an established interest in concessions in Bahrain and Kuwait, and there was still very little interest in what was then the Trucial Coast.
One of the great benefits in “From Pearls to Oil” is Heard’s own experience of working in the oil business for many years, and his personal access to many of the figures involved. For example, he directly quotes Ian Macpherson, a senior figure for many years in IPC and latterly chairman, who confirmed to Heard that in the early years IPC was not particularly interested in the distant, difficult, unknown and low-rated Trucial Coast, preferring to pay more attention to the astonishing 1908 find in Persia, and look for concessions in the more approachable Eastern Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Neutral Zone and Bahrain.
But despite the oil companies’ reluctance to look at the Trucial Coast in these early years, today’s readers know that Abu Dhabi is one of world’s largest oil producers, so much of the enjoyment of the book is that the reader knows that oil will be found, although for much of the story it is a real puzzle that it ever happened.
Despite the oil companies’ lack of enthusiasm, Heard points out that the British authorities had made sure that the rulers in the Trucial Coast, which included Sharjah, Ras Al Khaimah, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Ajman and Umm Al Quwain, had all agreed to give any oil concessions only to companies agreed upon by the British government.
The main story
The bulk of “From Pearls to Oil” is the blow-by-blow story of exactly how the oil companies approached what is now the UAE. This required the companies to exhibit sound awareness of local politics as both the rulers and the companies sought to make the best deal, and “From Pearls to Oil” is good telling the story from both sides.
But the companies also had to carry out their technical evaluations before any concession was signed, requiring their geologists to go into some remote parts of the UAE which were only very tenuously under any ruler’s control. A large part to the enjoyment of From Pearls to Oil is that Heard combines both the political and technical stories as they move through the decades from the 1920s to the 1930s.
“From Pearls to Oil” ends in 1939, when the onset of the Second World War led Britain to encourage the rulers and the companies to sign agreements that would hold the situation until the war ended. In 1939, Shaikh Shakhbout finally came to terms and signed the 75-year Abu Dhabi Concession Agreement that only expired in 2014.
That momentous change in the oil business led to the decorous present stampede of senior oilmen, presidents and prime ministers to the majlises in modern Abu Dhabi, desperately seeking to retain or gain access for their companies to the new concessions in one what has become one of the world’s largest oil producers.
One suspects that much of their knowledge of Abu Dhabi’s oil only goes back to the last few decades of plenty, and their hopes are pinned on future decades of continuing plenty. They will not have the institutional memory that goes back to the early beginnings laid out in “From Pearls to Oil”.
More coming
It is frustrating that this volume of “From Pearls to Oil” ends in 1939, but it is very good news that a further volume is already completed, which will take the story forward into the period when oil was discovered, leading to the profound changes and opportunities that the oil find brought to the UAE.
It is also important that the challenging task of translating “From Pearls to Oil” into Arabic is being done, as the information in the book is not only a story for the oil industry and English langue readers of UAE history, but it is also an important asset for Emirati historians who deserve to have access to these stories and their backing documents in their own language.
To this end, an invaluable asset in “From Pearls to Oil” is the massive set of 80 oil company documents reproduced in the appendices. This will be a treasure trove for future historians and is a major contribution to opening up knowledge of this largely unrecorded part of the UAE’s history and the oil industry which might easily have been lost if the documents had just stayed in a corporate archive.
Haji Williamson, the forgotten hero
Every book needs a hero, and Heard’s “From Pearls to Oil” has found one in the Gulf’s more glorious expatriate figures, Haji Williamson, the Bristol boy who attended Clifton College but left in 1885 when he was 13, sailed to San Francisco, took part in the gold rush, sailed the world again passing through the Bering Strait before ending up in the Philippines where he was arrested by the Spanish government for selling arms to rebels.
He sailed the world again, passing through Bombay before taking ship to the British colony of Aden, where he became a policeman while still not yet 20 years old. While serving in the constabulary he studied Islam and formally converted to Islam, taking the name of Abdullah. The authorities did not approve of his change and sent him back to India where he was dismissed.
In Bombay he sneaked aboard a ship to Basra where he set himself up as a merchant, and for the rest of his life he worked up and down the Gulf, trading and getting to know the people and rulers long before the rest of the world took much interest in their affairs.
By 1924 when he was appointed by Anglo Persian Oil Company as its principle agent in the Gulf he had been roaming the area for more than 30 years, selling horses to the British Army in Iraq, and gun running (or trading) in the Gulf, with the proviso, as Heard reports in his book, that “Haji Williamson said he only supplied guns to those he thought deserved them, an attitude that the British authorities and the Royal Navy did not share”.
He spent more than 30 years trading in the Gulf before the oil story started, frequently visiting the Arab side of the Gulf and the Trucial States where he became well-known and trusted by the people and rulers over many years.
So when APOC appointed him as their representative in 1924 they were getting a man who knew his way around the Gulf, and negotiated the first option agreements with several of the rulers even if he later failed to win their complete trust because he had “gone native”. He retired from APOC/AIOC in 1937 and then moved to live in Basra, and was largely written out of the history of the region.
Heard uses his meticulous research to debunk several well established myths, such as the one that has Major Frank Holmes as the prime broker between the groups of oil companies and the rulers. Heard drily points out that along with several other historians of the Gulf oil industry, Daniel Yergin in his book “The Prize” got carried away with enthusiasm for Holmes, when he said that Holmes went up and down the Gulf promising wealth to impoverished rulers and Heard points out that there is no evidence that Holmes went as far south as Qatar or the Trucial Coast before 1936.
One of the more interesting threads of Heard’s complex narrative is how Haji Williamson was unjustly treated by his employers and later oil historians, yet “From Pearls to Oil” makes clear much of the later success of the oil companies depended on the start made by this colourful character who helped forge the vital relationships that the rulers of Abu Dhabi and other emirates developed with the oil companies which last till this day.
