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Many outsiders coveted Kuwait’s prosperity. The city walls
had been rebuilt in 1814, and the British had stopped much of the Gulf piracy, but the Ottomans continued to be a great concern. They laid claim to Kuwait, and in the 1890s made moves to seize more than
nominal control. Amir Mubarak Al Sabah, known as Mubarak the Great, signed a pact with Britain on January 23, 1899 whereby Kuwait became a British protectorate. The British thus gained a stable ally in
the region and handled all of Kuwait’s foreign affairs, while the Kuwaitis were liberated from their fear of Turkish occupation.
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Mubarak also relieved tensions within the Arabian
Peninsula. Abdulaziz ibn Saud, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, lived in Kuwait in the 1890s, and
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the Kuwaitis later cooperated in his campaign to take Najd.
Whenever there were rumblings in the Arab interior, more bedouins flocked to Kuwait, where peace and British protection prevailed.
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The reign of Mubarak the Great heralded the beginning
of government programs to support the welfare of the people. The first public school and first medical services appeared in 1911. The following year, postal and telegraph services began. During the same period,
water purification equipment was imported for the
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American Mission Hospital. And economic
growth continued unabated: According to British surveys of the mid-1910s, Kuwait had 35,000 people, 3000 permanent residences, 500 shops, three schools, nearly 700 pearling boats employing 10,000 men, 40
ocean-going ships, and 300 full-time boat builders constructing ten types of vessel.
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The 1920s and 1930s brought some economic
hardships. The Ikhwan, a paramilitary force of tribesmen from Najd, sought to capture Kuwait. The Kuwaitis held them off in the famous battle of the Red Fort in Jahra, and built a new city wall. The
British eventually warned the Ikhwan to call off their
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attack, and some British marines visited Kuwait City.
The Ikhwan called off the attack, but hostilities cut off trade with Najd for some time. The city, whose population had soared to nearly 60,000, suffered from this.
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More devastatingly, the Japanese began to
flood the international pearl market with cultured pearls. Pearl diving, which had become the staple of the Kuwaiti economy, was suddenly not so lucrative. And this happened on the eve of the Great
Depression that plunged the entire world into poverty.
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At the same time, an event in the 1930s
sealed the eventual fabulous wealth of Kuwait: The Anglo-American Kuwait Oil Company, formed in 1934 but little noticed by locals, brought in a gusher in the Burgan oil field in 1938. World War II
prevented immediate exploitation of the find, but Kuwait made its first international shipment of oil in 1946. The Kuwaiti mind, honed to the finest expertise in finance
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and international trade, was ideally suited to take
advantage of this 20th-century commodity. The rest, as they say, is history.
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