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, complicated by the discovery of substantial oil deposits that have made questions of territorial sovereignty more urgent. The oil revenues are recent enough that functioning institutions have not yet developed around them, and the protectorate remains a patchwork of rival sheikhs with overlapping claims, British political officers maintaining the arrangement 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 to prevent 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. The British garrison has discouraged more aggressive assertions of those claims, and periodic debates in London about imperial overstretch and defence spending are followed closely in Abu Dhabi. The protectorate’s oil wealth has arrived without the institutional capacity to manage it, and the sheikhdoms remain dependent on British military presence to maintain their borders.