Part of the country series of articles.
TRAVEL ADVISORY: EXERCISE HEIGHTENED CAUTIONPARSTATE advises travellers to exercise heightened caution in the Trucial Coast. The political situation between the constituent sheikhdoms remains volatile and the security guarantee provided by British forces is uneven across the territory. Travellers should monitor local conditions closely and avoid travel outside major settlements.
| Trucial Coast Protectorate | |
|---|---|
| British Protectorate | |
 |
|
| Capital | Abu Dhabi |
| Languages | Arabic, English, and many migrant worker languages |
| Population | 680,000 |
The Trucial Coast Protectorate is a collection of sheikhdoms on the Persian Gulf under British protection, recently complicated by the discovery of substantial oil deposits that have made the question of who controls what more urgent. The oil finds are recent enough that the revenues have not yet produced functioning institutions, and the protectorate remains a patchwork of rival sheikhs with overlapping claims, British political officers trying to hold the arrangement together and a growing population of foreign workers who outnumber the local population in some areas and have no political standing in any of them.
Britain maintains the protectorate primarily because the alternative is Saudi absorption, which neither London nor the sheikhs want. Saudi Arabia regards the Trucial sheikhdoms as historically within its sphere and has pressed territorial claims against several of them with varying degrees of subtlety. The British garrison is the main reason these claims have not been pressed harder, and everyone involved understands this, which makes the periodic London debates about imperial overstretch and defence spending a source of considerable anxiety in Abu Dhabi. The protectorate is dysfunctional, suddenly wealthy in ways it does not yet know how to manage, and entirely dependent on an imperial patron that is not certain it wants the responsibility.