ABSTRACT
The Arabian peninsula includes most of the Near East but in 1920 Arabia was the least modernized and most sparsely populated division of the region. The peninsula was largely desert; cultivation was confined to oases and a few highland regions, notably the Yemen and Oman, where sufficient rain fell to support agriculture. Industry consisted of handicrafts, fishing, pearling and servicing the pilgrim traffic. No-one knows how large the population was: at a guess it was seven million, although it may have been only half this total. Nor do we know how the population was distributed. The nomadic population is thought to have comprised between one-quarter and one-half of the whole, the urban population between 10 and 25 per cent: and settled cultivators to have made up the remainder. Nor do we know which was the largest town among Aden, Ṣan‛ā’, Jidda and Mecca although none had more than 100,000 inhabitants. By 1950 little had changed, including our ignorance, but between 1950 and 1970 the region entered upon a greater transformation than any other region of the Near East.
