The Battle of Dubai: Firearms on Britain's Arabian Frontier, 1906–1915

The ‘Arabian frontier’ was a nexus for the global small arms trade in the years immediately before the First World War. Arms left four great ports in Europe: London, Hamburg, Antwerp and Marseilles. There were alternative land routes, via Russia, and through Turkey to Baghdad, but these routes were sometimes ‘not practicable’ for the large-scale supply of advanced weapons. ¹ Ships passed through the Mediterranean and into the Red Sea, via the Suez Canal. The frontier began at the Indian outpost of Aden. The particular technology of the period meant that it was on leaving Aden that a ship entered a new zone. Ship-to-ship wireless telegraphy was ‘generally possible’, ‘to ships at the head of the Persian Gulf from the entrance to the Gulf of Aden – that is to say, across the whole extent of the Arabian plateau, a distance of over a thousand miles’. ²