Pre-Oil Urbanism

The Settlement of Kuwait

Kuwait was established in 1716 as a predominantly urban society. During the "tribal outbreak" of the eighteenth century, tribes from central and southern Arabia migrated toward the northeast coast of the peninsula to escape severe drought and famine. One group of families who migrated together, known collectively as the Bani 'Utub, came from the Najd-based Anizah tribal confederation and had been settled cultivators prior to their migration to the coast. When they reached the head of the Persian Gulf around 1716, they found a spacious bay with a nearby freshwater supply. There was no existing town or significant community settled in the area; aside from a few fishermen's huts, the only physical structure of significance was a fort (kut) of the Bani Khalid tribe, which had seized control of eastern Arabia from the Ottomans in the 1660s. The 'Utub set up their new settlement on a small hill known as Tell Bhaiteh, which faced the Bani Khalid's kut (for which Kuwait is a diminutive meaning "small fort").

Within less than a hundred years this cluster of families grew into "a thriving commercial settlement" whose residents engaged in fishing, pearling, shipping, shipbuilding, and trade. Kuwait's auspicious location in the northwest corner of the Gulf and its enviable natural properties fostered its growth into a vibrant port and regional entrepôt. The area around the town was "of the most barren and inhospitable description, without a tree or shrub visible as far as the eye can reach, except a few bushes which mark the wells, of which the water is particularly salty and bad." The place would have been uninhabitable without its large natural harbor, "capable of containing the navy of Great Britain," which allowed the townspeople to import everything they needed. Kuwaiti merchants imported grain and wheat from Basra, Iraq; piece goods, rice, sugar, spices, and teak for shipbuilding from India; mangrove poles for house-building from east Africa; coffee from the Red Sea region; tobacco and dried fruits from Iran; and fresh water from the Shatt al-Arab river in southern Iraq. Because of the importance of trade, Kuwait Town was established as a free port and no customs duties were levied on sea imports until the beginning of the twentieth century. Its strategic position between the Gulf and the deserts of northeastern Arabia made it an important gateway between the sea and the hinterland. The town grew into a chief center of the transit trade linking the transnational Indian Ocean maritime network with the caravan trade extending inland as far as Damascus. The town's proximity to the Shatt al-Arab also gave Kuwaitis access to the fertile river channels of Iraq, and dates from this region became the principal export cargo of Kuwait's long-distance traders.

According to local tradition, for the first forty years the settlers had no leader but paid tribute to the shaykh, or chief, of the Bani Khalid. When their population increased due to the town's economic prosperity, the heads of the main families decided that a leader must be chosen to settle all problems and disputes and to protect the town from external attack. Many leading 'Utbi families turned down the job because governing the town would interfere with their maritime trades. The Al Sabah, however — "the poorest of the important families" — agreed to provide a ruler for the town "both for the honor of it and because the opportunity costs for them were very low." Therefore, in 1752 Sabah I was selected for this position.

In 1760 Sabah I built a wall around his small settlement, signaling the moment when Kuwait became an independent, viable, and self-sufficient town. Over the next two centuries Kuwait developed from a small coastal settlement enclosed within a dilapidated boundary wall into a city-state with territorial boundaries that, when finally locked in place in 1922, extended well beyond the town's limits to incorporate expanses of desert. The coastline enclosed within the 1760 wall was approximately six hundred meters long, with an inland depth of around three hundred meters. This small area was unable to accommodate the substantial demographic growth that occurred at the turn of the century, so a second wall was built in 1811 that reflected the extent of the town's achieved and anticipated spatial expansion. The new wall had a semi-circular shape similar to the first wall, but the length of the town's shoreline from one end of the new wall to the other was now approximately sixteen hundred meters, and the town had expanded an additional four hundred meters inland. Kuwait experienced a period of unprecedented economic and demographic growth from the 1890s until around 1920 due to a pearling and trading boom throughout the region. This growth may explain why sometime after 1887, when J. R. Povah made the last recorded reference to its existence, the second wall was removed and urban expansion became unbounded. Kuwait Town's population grew substantially during this period. The demand for buildings to accommodate new immigrants increased, leading to a peak in the house-building industry. The British Political Agent reported in 1916 that "building operations are in evidence in all quarters of the town, which is rapidly extending." By the time the third wall went up in 1920, it was much longer than the earlier walls and encompassed a significantly larger area. The urban coastline within the new wall had reached 5,600 meters. The total area inside the second wall before it was demolished, after nearly 170 years of settlement, was .724 square kilometers; the area incorporated within the third wall was 7.5 square kilometers — a spatial increase of more than 900 percent within only thirty to forty additional years of settlement (Figure 1).

In 1899 Mubarak I signed a protection agreement with Great Britain, although Kuwait still had tenuous ties with the Ottoman Empire. Mubarak pledged not to receive the representative of any other power, nor to cede any portion of his territory to any foreign government or subject without the previous consent of the British government. This treaty and those signed with other Gulf rulers "protected the position of local dynasties" because they were signed directly in the names of individual rulers and their successors. Unlike in other parts of the Gulf, the British rarely interfered in Kuwait's internal affairs. But they did largely take control over Kuwait's external affairs, including establishing its boundaries. In 1913 the British and Ottoman Empires met to settle, among other existing disputes in the region, "the status and limits" of Kuwait. They identified the undisputed territory of the Al Sabah as having Kuwait Town at its center and including all areas inside a radius of forty miles in all directions. The tribes in this area were considered loyal to Mubarak because he...