Word: bahrein
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Firing off a reply, Belgrave discovered that the post was that of adviser to Sheik Hamed bin Issa al Khalifah of Bahrein, a 213-square-mile British protectorate composed of five islands lying off the coast of Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf. Charles Belgrave had never heard of Bahrein, but the pay was enough to get married...
Belgrave and his bride arrived in March 1926, found Bahrein a feudal and impoverished place. Manama, the crumbling mud capital, did not even have its own water supply. (Water brought from the mainland by ship was hawked through filthy streets in goatskin bags.) The populace, illiterate, diseased and unruly, was forever trying to overthrow the Sheik. The police, imported from Muscat on the Arabian coast, were, if anything, even less law-abiding...
Belgrave's wife, to the horror of Bahrein's purdah-loving elders but with a behind-the-scenes assist from Sheik Hamed's No. i wife, won permission to open a school for girls. In a series of bitter struggles with the usurers and dhow owners, who had long run the Bahrein waterfront, Belgrave reorganized the pearl-diving industry and gradually won Bahrein a lucrative reputation as the only honest transshipment port in the Middle East...
...turning point came in 1932, when Standard Oil of California hit oil on Bahrein. Belgrave persuaded the Sheik to take a step unprecedented for an Arab ruler: to split Bahrein's oil income ($8,500,000 in 1955) three ways−one-third to the Sheik, one-third to "the people" and one-third to a national reserve fund. The consequence is that while the oil wealth of neighboring Arab countries has often been squandered on Cadillacs, harems and princely pub-crawls, Bahrein's oil has helped to propel a whole people into the 20th century...
Today six hospitals provide free medical service to all of the sheikdom's 140,000 citizens, and malaria, once the scourge of Bahrein, is gone. Water from artesian wells flows into many Bahrein homes, and a dial telephone system links the archipelago's principal towns. And, at Belgrave's insistence, the accumulated reserve funds have been carefully invested abroad so that even when Bahrein's oil finally dries up−her proven reserves are only 200 million barrels v. Saudi Arabia's 35 billion barrels−Bahreinis should still enjoy a fair degree of prosperity...