ABSTRACT
I have mildly the same sort of feeling that I had when I faced the prospect of frontier settlement for the first time, with many of my questions about how to start and make progress unanswered. In the present circumstances I have decided to play safe and not to deal with the problems of straight-line frontiers, stretching between aseries of co-ordinates, of the sort that straddle the Arabian peninsula, and which have produced many of their own difficulties, even if the task of delineating them may, at first sight, have been comparatively simple. Instead I intend to deal with the frontiers that I know best, the squiggly tribai frontiers that separate the shaikhdoms of what was the Trucial Coast and that has now become the United Arab Emirates, and the similar lines that divide the UAE from the Sultanate of Oman. These frontiers were settled, if you can call them settled, by a process of arbitration between the Emirates and of mediation between the Emirates and the Sultanate. The first line, that running southeast from the coast at Ras Hasian between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, was laid down by the British Political Agent in the Trucial States, John Wilton, soon after the end of the war between Abu Dhabi and Dubai in the late 1940s. But it caused Shaikh Shakhbut of Abu Dhabi so much indignation that he refused to have anything more to do with frontier arbitrations by the British.
