The history of the United States of Arabia spans more than sixty thousand years of settlement on the Arabian Peninsula, the Levantine seaboard and the Tigris–Euphrates basin. For most of that time the region was a set of distinct societies linked by trade, pilgrimage and a common written language. It became a single federal state only in the late eighteenth century. Oasis farmers, sea traders and desert herders lived side by side there from the Neolithic onward. The Nabataean kings gave the region a shared written language and a body of water law around 270 BCE. Under the caliphates of the seventh to thirteenth centuries the peninsula was the religious centre of a world empire. From the fifteenth century it had turned inward, and the country's historians call that period the Interregnum.
From 1497 powers from Africa and South Asia set up colonies along the Arabian coasts. The Hindustani Empire's thirteen princely colonies on the Red Sea and the Levant grew into plantation, port and caravan economies. Those economies relied heavily on enslaved Europeans. Some were brought through the old Islamic slave-trade routes, and after 1560 many more came through a new colonial trade across the Mediterranean and down the Red Sea. The colonies rebelled against imperial taxation in 1775 and declared independence on 25 September 1776. After the Revolutionary War they adopted the federal Constitution of 1789, which is still in force.
During the nineteenth century the Union expanded through purchase, annexation and war until it reached the Gulf and the Indian Ocean. The same expansion forced the question of slavery into every new territory, and it ended in the Civil War of 1861–1865. The Union won, but Reconstruction left hereditary household servitude, called khidmah, legal in the loyal slave states. The compromise of 1877 then let that servitude return to much of the former secessionist south. It survived in five states until the Thirty-First Amendment of 1965.
In the same decades Arabia became the world's largest industrial economy and, after petroleum was found in 1938, its largest oil producer. It emerged from the Second World War as one of two superpowers and from the Cold War as the only one. Since the 2020s it has been in strategic competition with Nusantara. The main themes of Arabian historical writing follow from this history. They are how a federation governs very different regions, how long servitude lasted and what it left behind, and the relationship between an Islamic heartland and a secular constitution.
Main articles: Prehistory of Arabia, Arabian Interregnum. See also: Nabataean Unification
Main articles: Prehistory of Arabia, Green Arabia interglacials. See also: United States of Arabia § Prehistory
The peninsula was settled in pulses. People arrived when the monsoon moved north and turned the interior into lakes and grassland, and they left when it moved south again. Stone tools at Jubbah, Shuwaymis and the Nafud lake margins show occupation at intervals from about 400,000 years ago. The oldest securely dated modern human fossil in the country, a finger bone from the Al-Wusta lake bed, is about 88,000 years old. The Levant and the Mesopotamian plain were the exception because their rivers kept them watered through the arid gaps. The first farming villages of the Fertile Crescent grew up there, and Arabian schoolbooks treat them as the country's oldest continuous inheritance.
By the sixth millennium BCE herders in the Hejaz and Shammar uplands were building mustatils, long rectangular stone enclosures used for ritual, and tens of thousands of them survive. The dromedary was domesticated around 3000 BCE, and the north Arabian saddle followed. Together they made the desert a trade route rather than a barrier. By the end of the second millennium three economies had taken shape that still divide the country: the oasis farmers of the interior, the pearling and trading towns of the coasts, and the herders of the steppe.
Main articles: Kingdom of Saba, Nabataean Unification, Hegra
The southern highland kingdoms of Saba, Ma’in, Qataban and Hadhramout controlled the frankincense and myrrh trade from the tenth century BCE. They built the Ma’rib dam, and they wrote in the Musnad script. In the Gulf, Dilmun and Magan traded copper and pearls with the Indus valley. In the north the oasis cities of Dedan, Tayma and Duma collected tolls from caravans heading for the Levant.
From the fifth century BCE a long drought and competition for the caravan routes pushed the northern powers together. The Nabataean kings of Petra and Hegra began to govern the routes themselves instead of taxing them. They built cisterns and dams, garrisoned the wells, standardised weights and coinage, and required their chancery hand for official correspondence from Damascus to Najran. Arabian historians date the unification to the reign of Rabbel III (c. 270–231 BCE), when the last independent oasis leagues of the Najd accepted royal water administration. The kingdom fell apart within three centuries. What lasted was a written language, a common commercial and water law, and the habit of taking disputes to a literate arbitrator instead of settling them by raiding. Himyarite, Lakhmid and Ghassanid successors all inherited these institutions.
Main articles: Rashidun Caliphate, Umayyad Caliphate, Abbasid Caliphate
Islam emerged in the Hejaz in the early seventh century among people who were already literate and trading widely. Within a century the Rashidun and Umayyad caliphates had carried Arabic administration across northern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Iberian–Sahelian coasts. Under the Abbasids after 750, Baghdad, Damascus and Basra were the largest cities on the planet. The Darb Zubaydah pilgrim road joined Kufa to Makkah, and the sea route from Basra to Canton joined the Gulf to the Far East. The annual Hajj brought the regions of the peninsula closer together than they would be again before the railway age.
No rival empire in Anatolia or the Zagros ever displaced Arab rule in the eastern Mediterranean. The political life of the Mashriq therefore remained Arabic without a break from the seventh century to the colonial period. Most Arabian historians regard this continuity as the main reason Arabian nationalism has been civilisational rather than ethnic. The same continuity kept alive another institution that outlasted the caliphal state: the trade in human beings.
Main articles: Islamic slave trade (Controglobe), Saqaliba, Saqaliba Revolt. See also: Servitude and the colonial trade
Slavery was an ordinary part of pre-Islamic Arabian society, and Islamic law regulated it without abolishing it. The law of the caliphal period limited it in ways that shaped everything that followed. A free Muslim could not be enslaved. Freeing a slave was counted as a pious act and required as expiation for many offences. A slave could buy their own freedom by contract, called mukatabah. The mother of her master's child, the umm walad, became free at his death, and her children were born free. The law pushed the sources of new captives steadily outward. Each population that converted to Islam was closed to further enslavement, so the trade had to reach further into lands that had not converted.
For the caliphate those lands were above all tribal Europe. Arabic writers called its peoples Saqaliba, a word first applied to the Slavic lands and later to any captive from beyond the Mediterranean. Europe had no state large enough to protect its people. Its tribal confederations raided one another constantly, and the captives were sold to outsiders. Three routes carried them to the Islamic world. The first went down the Rhône and along the Ligurian shore to ports where shippers from Ifriqiya and the Andalusian coast bought them. The second went through the Black Sea and over the Caucasus passes to the markets of Baghdad and Rayy. The third was the sea-raiding of Aljazairi and Maghribi crews on the Atlantic and North Sea coasts of Europe, whose captives were resold through the Mediterranean. Estimates for the whole period from 700 to 1500 run from three to five million people. The evidence is thin, because the medieval trade kept few records.[1]
Most medieval captives were put to domestic service, concubinage or soldiering. European slave soldiers, raised in barracks and freed on completing their training, formed guard corps in Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus. Several of these corps later made their own commanders sultans. The exception was the lower Mesopotamian marsh, where gangs of European captives cleared salt crusts from the land for the sugar and date estates around Basra. In 869 they rose under a leader remembered only by his title, Sahib al-Saqaliba (“Master of the Europeans”). The rebels built a capital among the reed beds, sacked Basra in 871 and held the marshes for fourteen years before an Abbasid army destroyed them in 883. The Saqaliba Revolt was the largest slave rising in the history of the Mashriq. Nineteenth-century abolitionists rediscovered it as a founding story, and European Arabian churches and mosques still remember it every March.
Medieval slavery in the Mashriq did not depend on race or descent. Freed slaves and their children entered Arab society through clientage, took the nisba of their patrons, and in the military corps rose to the highest offices of state. That openness was what the colonial powers did away with when they took over the old routes in the sixteenth century.
Main articles: Arabian Interregnum, Sharifate of Makkah
The settled interior shrank from the eleventh century onward. Plague, the diversion of the spice trade to Red Sea and Indian Ocean shipping, the silting of the Mesopotamian canals and repeated failures of the Ma’rib dam all eroded the caliphate's tax base. The sack of Baghdad in 1258 destroyed what remained of it. Central authority fell back to the coasts and the holy cities. Tribal confederations took its place: Banu Khalid in the east, Al Rashid in Jabal Shammar, the Qawasim on the lower Gulf, the Zaydi imamate in the Yemeni highlands and the Ibadi imamate in inner Oman. Beside them were hundreds of smaller emirates and oasis leagues. Arabian historiography calls the period from 1258 to 1497 the Interregnum.
The holy cities alone kept a continuous government. From the tenth century the Sharifs of Makkah, a family descended from the Prophet, administered the sanctuaries and the Hajj on behalf of whichever power held the coasts. The Sharifate outlived the caliphs, the Interregnum and colonial rule. Its practice of holding the sanctuaries in trust for all pilgrims, rather than as the property of a dynasty, was later written into the Sanctuaries Act of 1794.
The century after 1500 was catastrophic. Plague cycles and smallpox arrived with foreign fleets, and famine and the collapse of the caravan routes followed. Between them they reduced the interior population by an estimated 30 to 50 per cent before 1650. The colonies that took root on the coasts did so in a country that had already been emptied.
Main articles: Colonial Arabia, Thirteen Princely Colonies
The Kaabu navigator Mansa Jata rounded the Horn in 1497 and reached Aden the following year. His voyage opened a direct sea route between the Atlantic coast of Africa and the Arabian seas. Kaabu followed with fortified factories at Socotra, Muscat and Hormuz, and for most of a century it collected tolls on the Gulf and Red Sea trade by force. The Jolofian crown took a rival route. It founded missions and garrison towns on the Red Sea from Massawa to Jizan and claimed the coast as far as the Gulf of Aqaba. Its cartographers named the whole region Arabia on a printed world map of 1507. Kong arrived later, with fewer ships and more interest in the interior. It sailed up the Euphrates from the head of the Gulf and built a chain of trading posts from Kuwait to Deir ez-Zor, which its charters called Kong-Mésopotamie.
None of the three early crowns settled large numbers of its own people. Their colonies were forts, missions and warehouses, and they depended on local rulers who bought protection with customs revenue. Their main lasting effect was to connect the Arabian coasts to the older trade in Europeans and turn it into a plantation trade.
The seventeenth century brought chartered companies. The Duala Company of Kamerun founded a commercial colony on the lower Gulf in 1626. Its port was a tolerant and many-languaged place governed by merchants, and it became the city later renamed Magan Town. The Hassaniya crown settled a colony on the Tihamah coast in 1638, and the Duala Company absorbed it within twenty years. Merchants from Aljazair and Sokoto kept factories at Aden and Mukalla. None of these ventures lasted politically, but each left a legal and commercial tradition that the later states inherited. The civil law of Kuwait, which descends from Kong's code, is the best-known example.
The last of the colonising powers to arrive was the Hindustani Empire, and it had the greatest effect. Its Red Sea Company received a charter in 1607 to settle the Levantine and Hejazi coasts. The first settlement, at Jeddah's outer anchorage, nearly failed in its first two summers. It survived because the company bought water and grain from the Harb confederation and began shipping coffee. Over the following century the imperial government at Lakhnau turned the company's holdings into thirteen chartered princely colonies, each with a governor, a council and an elected assembly. They fell into three groups.
By 1763 about two million people lived in the thirteen colonies. Roughly a fifth of them were enslaved and perhaps an eighth were indentured migrants from South Asia. The rest were free Arabian townspeople and tenants, who were more literate than the population of any other colonial society of the period.
Main article: Najd Awakening
Colonial religion was plural by circumstance. The Hindustani crown had no interest in the faith of its colonies, the Levantine colonies were built by religious minorities, and the Red Sea colonies lived on pilgrim revenue. What united them was a revival. From the 1740s the preacher Uthman ibn Sulayman al-Diriyi and his students travelled from Diriyah through the oasis towns and then to the coasts. They preached a return to scripture, the rejection of saints' shrines and of worldly ulama, and the obligation of every believer to read for themselves. Their open-air sermons at wells and markets drew crowds of many thousands, and they spread a new habit of printed religious argument through every colony.
The Najd Awakening divided congregations and founded hundreds of schools. It also taught the colonists to question the religious authority of anyone they had not chosen. Many historians regard it as the first movement shared by all thirteen colonies, and as the rehearsal for the argument about political authority that followed. Its legacy was contradictory. The revival's strict wing later became the religious backbone of the interior and of Asalah politics. Its egalitarian wing preached to enslaved Europeans and admitted them into its congregations. It produced the first Arabic-language anti-slavery sermons, in which the preachers argued that a converted slave could not lawfully be held.
Each colony had a governor appointed at Lakhnau, a council drawn from its notables and an assembly elected by property-holders. The assemblies soon claimed the rights of the Hindustani legislature, above all the right to consent to taxes. They made that claim in two languages at once. In Hindustani it was an argument about the rights of subjects under the imperial constitution. In Arabic it was the older juristic principle that authority not founded on shura, consultation, was usurpation. Local courts applied Hindustani common law in commerce, Islamic law in family and inheritance matters, and tribal custom in water rights and blood-money. Arabian lawyers never fully untangled that mixture, and the federal courts inherited it.
Main articles: Indian Ocean slave trade, European Arabians, Lakhnau Servitude Ordinance
The colonial economies needed labour, and the population collapse of the sixteenth century left too little of it. The colonists had three sources: free Arabian tenants, indentured migrants from South Asia, and the enslaved. The last group came from Europe. The medieval Saqaliba trade had already shaped the routes, the markets and the brokers. From about 1560 the Kaabu and Jolofian crowns, and later Hindustan, turned it into a bulk trade. Ships bought captives at fortified stations on the European coast, crossed the Mediterranean, went through the portage at Suez and sailed down the Red Sea to the plantation districts. The Tihamah sugar estates and the Yemeni coffee terraces absorbed the most. Pearling fleets in the Gulf bought European divers from the eighteenth century.
Between about 1560 and 1840 an estimated 9.8 million people were carried from the tribal coasts of Europe to Arabia and the wider Indian Ocean world. They came from the Frankish, Rhenish, Anglian and Slavic lands. Perhaps 1.6 million died in transit, most of them in the heat of the Red Sea passage.[2]
| Period | People embarked |
|---|---|
| 1560–1599 | 0.3 million |
| 1600–1639 | 0.6 million |
| 1640–1679 | 1.0 million |
| 1680–1719 | 1.5 million |
| 1720–1759 | 2.2 million |
| 1760–1799 | 2.6 million |
| 1800–1840 | 1.6 million |
| Total | 9.8 million |
The colonial trade differed from its medieval predecessor in law as much as in scale. The Lakhnau Servitude Ordinance of 1662 declared that a child's status followed the mother. It also declared that conversion to Islam did not free a slave, which overturned the rule that had governed the Mashriq for a thousand years. Later ordinances forbade mukatabah contracts without the governor's licence and made manumission subject to a bond. By 1700 slavery in the Red Sea and southern colonies had become a hereditary status tied to European descent. Freedpeople and the enslaved were registered under the single nisba al-Ifranji, “the Frank”, whatever their actual origin. Many kept it after freedom, and it is still the most common surname among European Arabians.
The enslaved resisted in every way open to them. They ran to the interior, where some confederations took them in and others sold them back. They filed petitions in the Islamic courts, which kept hearing freedom suits under classical law long after the ordinances had forbidden it. And they rose in revolt. The largest colonial rising, at Jizan in 1739, spread along the Tihamah for three weeks before the militia put it down. It led to the harsher Tihamah Code of 1740. When the colonies revolted against Hindustan, nearly one in five of their people was enslaved.
Relations with the Arabian interior ranged from alliance and intermarriage to sustained war. The Rashidi Wars of 1682–1701, the Qawasim naval campaigns in the Gulf and the long Zaydi resistance in the Yemeni highlands kept the colonies on the coast for more than a century. Colonial governors signed treaties with the confederations, and the Continental Majlis later inherited them. The Seven Years' War between Hindustan and Kong, fought in the Mashriq from 1756 to 1763, ended with Kong expelled from the Euphrates. It also left Hindustan with an enormous war debt, which was the fiscal origin of the Revolution.
Main articles: Arabian Revolution, Continental Majlis, United States of Arabia § Revolution
After 1763 the imperial government tried to recover its war costs from the colonies. It imposed the Stamp Duty (1765), the Port Duties (1767) and the Coffee Act (1773), each without the assemblies' consent. The protest joined the two traditions of colonial government. Pamphleteers such as Sulayman al-Ansari and the Aleppine printer Butrus Haddad published the Hindustani argument about taxation and the Arabic argument about shura side by side in the same columns. In December 1773 Jeddah merchants dumped a Red Sea Company cargo into the harbour in what became known as the Jeddah Coffee Protest. Lakhnau answered with punitive legislation and suspended the Damascus assembly.
Delegates from twelve colonies met as the First Continental Majlis at Damascus in 1774 and agreed to boycott imperial goods. Najd sent none. The question of slavery was already present. Levantine delegates proposed ending imports of enslaved people as part of the boycott. The Red Sea and southern delegates accepted only a temporary suspension, and the trade resumed in 1776.
Fighting began at Bab al-Hadid outside Aleppo on 19 April 1775. The Second Continental Majlis made Abd al-Rahman al-Hashimi commander of the Continental Army. On 23 September 1776 it adopted the Ali Resolution declaring the colonies free, and two days later it approved the Declaration of Independence, drafted largely by Tariq ibn Jaffar. Ibn Jaffar's draft condemned the Hindustani crown for forcing the trade in Europeans on the colonies. The Red Sea delegates had that passage struck out.
The war went badly for the colonists for three years. Hindustani troops held Jeddah and Beirut, and the Continental Army spent the winter of 1777–1778 camped in the Hawran on short rations. The turning point was the alliance with the Republic of Kong, signed in 1778, which brought a fleet into the Red Sea and cut Hindustan's Indian Ocean supply lines. Both sides recruited the enslaved. Hindustani governors promised freedom to anyone who deserted a rebel master. After 1779 several colonial assemblies promised freedom to enslaved men who enlisted with the Continentals. Some 18,000 European Arabians fought on one side or the other, and more escaped in the confusion. General Chatterjee surrendered at Zafar in 1781. The Treaty of Zafar of 3 October 1783 recognised independence and fixed the Union's western frontier at the Euphrates.
Main article: Constitution of the United States of Arabia
Under the Articles of Confederation the Majlis could not raise revenue, regulate trade or settle disputes between states. A tax revolt in the Hadhramout wadis in 1786 persuaded many of the need for a stronger union. The Constitutional Convention met at Damascus in 1787. Its delegates, led by Dawud al-Madani, drafted a federal constitution that combined the Hindustani separation of powers with the Arabian principles of consultation, compact and freedom of conscience. It took three compromises on slavery to get the Red Sea and southern states to sign. Five-eighths of the enslaved population was counted for apportionment. Congress was barred from ending imports of enslaved people before 1808. And a fugitive clause obliged every state to return people who escaped servitude. The Constitution came into force on 21 June 1789. The Charter of Liberties followed in 1791.
Al-Hashimi became the first president in 1789. Hejaz ceded the district around the sanctuary at Makkah in 1791, and it became the federal capital, Umm al-Qura. The Sanctuaries Act of 1794 took the old custodial role of the Sharifate and placed it in a constitutional trust. The Sharifal house was compensated and given permanent seats on the new council. By the end of al-Hashimi's first term the Federalists of Yusuf al-Basri and the Republicans of Tariq ibn Jaffar had formed the first party system. The Federalists stood for a national bank, a strong executive and the port merchants. The Republicans stood for the states, the smallholder and the merchant marine.
Main articles: Kuwait Purchase, War of 1812 (Arabia), First Party System
Many of the founders expected slavery to fade away, and in the Levantine states it did. Phoenicia, Lebanon and Aleppo passed gradual-emancipation statutes between 1780 and 1804. Two innovations reversed the trend in the south. The first was the Aleppine roller press of 1793, which made the short-staple cotton of the Tihamah and the Najd oases profitable to gin in bulk. The second was a surge in world coffee prices after 1795. The number of enslaved people in the Union rose from 1.1 million in 1790 to 2.9 million in 1830.
The federal ban on importing enslaved people took effect on 1 January 1808, the earliest date the Constitution allowed. It came a year after Hindustan abolished the trade throughout its empire, and the Hindustani Red Sea Squadron then patrolled Bab al-Mandab against slave ships. The ban reshaped the trade instead of ending it. Smuggling through the Gulf ports, which were not yet in the Union, went on until about 1840. Inside the Union a domestic trade grew up that moved about a million people from the Levantine and Red Sea states to the cotton oases and, later, to the Gulf. Jeddah's inland market, the Suq al-Raqiq, operated until 1863.
Main article: Kuwait Purchase
Ibn Jaffar won the presidency in 1800. In 1803 the Republic of Kong needed money for its African wars and could not defend a territory it could not reach, so it sold its entire Mesopotamian claim to the United States for 60 million riyals. The Kuwait Purchase, named after the Gulf port where the transfer took place, doubled the size of the country. It carried the frontier from the Euphrates to the Zagros foothills. From 1804 to 1806 the al-Zahra’–Karim expedition surveyed the route from Basra to the northern lakes and brought back the first systematic maps of the interior. Kuwait was admitted as a state in 1812 and Mesopotamia in 1818. The Supreme Court's decision in Haddad v. Mansur (1803) established judicial review in the same year as the purchase.
Hindustani ships were seizing Arabian merchant vessels and forcing their crews into service, and Hindustan was arming the Rashidi confederations. The Union declared war on Hindustan in 1812. The war achieved little for either side. Arabian invasions of the Hindustani Gulf protectorates failed. A Hindustani force landed at Jeddah in 1814, burned the customs house and marched inland to burn the Presidential House at Umm al-Qura. The defence of Aden that winter gave the Union a patriotic song and a general. The Treaty of Muscat (1815) restored the pre-war position. Its lasting results were a new Arabian nationalism and the defeat of the interior confederations that had allied with Hindustan.
With the Federalists discredited by their opposition to the war, the Republicans governed almost without opposition under Hamza al-Qasimi (1817–1825). The Qasimi Doctrine of 1823 declared the Arabian seas closed to new colonisation by African and South Asian crowns. The Treaty of Sohar of 1821 bought out Jolof's remaining claims on the lower Gulf and created the Magan Territory. The period's peace concealed a sectional fault. In 1819 Euphrates applied for admission as a slave state. The Euphrates Compromise of 1821 admitted it and drew a line across the remaining territories, and slavery was barred north of that line. The ageing Ibn Jaffar wrote that the crisis had woken him “like a fire-bell in the night”.
Main articles: Masri–Arabian War, Road of Thirst, Second Awakening
Main articles: Desert Removal Act, Road of Thirst
Rashid al-Utaybi (1829–1837) led the new Sha'bi party of small farmers, frontier settlers and the interior. He destroyed the Second Bank and pursued the removal of the interior confederations. The Desert Removal Act of 1830 moved the Banu Khalid, Ajman and Mutayr from the eastern oases to assigned districts on the margins of the Rub’ al-Khali. The forced march is remembered as the Road of Thirst (Darb al-ʻAtash), and several thousand people died on it. The Ahd party formed in opposition to al-Utaybi's use of executive power, and the contest between Sha'bi and Ahd made up the second party system. The Panic of 1837 ended the boom that removal had fed.
Main articles: Republic of Sharqiyah, Arabian–Masri War
After 1811 the viceroyalty of Masr campaigned across eastern and southern Arabia and brought the Hasa oases, the Gulf littoral and Oman under its authority. Its governors invited Arabian settlers into the thinly peopled east. Many of the settlers brought enslaved workers with them in defiance of Masri law, which had abolished slavery in 1829. In 1836 they rebelled and declared the Republic of Sharqiyah. The Union annexed it by joint resolution in 1845, the same year it admitted Magan. The Arabian–Masri War of 1846–1848 followed, and it was opposed as a war to spread slavery by a young Levantine deputy and much of the Ahd party. By the Treaty of Ras Musandam, Masr ceded Oman, Socotra and the rest of the Gulf littoral. Pearl beds of extraordinary richness were found off Sur that year, and the rush brought 90,000 people to the Omani coast within four years. Oman was admitted as a state in 1850.
A second wave of religious revival reached every region between 1800 and 1840. Camp meetings at wells and caravanserais drew crowds for a week at a time. The revival produced the temperance campaign against qat, the prison and asylum movements, a boom in schools, and above all the manumission movement. Abolitionists argued in two traditions, like the revolutionaries before them. One was the natural-rights language of the Declaration. The other was classical Islamic law, which they read as having forbidden the hereditary, race-based slavery that the colonial ordinances had created. Bashir al-Ifranji escaped from a Tihamah date estate in 1838 and became the movement's greatest orator. The Lebanese publisher Maryam Khoury printed the narratives of the formerly enslaved in runs of 100,000 copies. The Night Road (Darb al-Layl) was a network of safe houses running from the Hejaz through the Levant. It carried tens of thousands of people north to freedom in Zagrosia. The women's movement grew out of the same circles and first demanded the vote at the Tayma Convention of 1848.
Main articles: Arabian Civil War, Reconstruction era, United States of Arabia § Civil War and Reconstruction
The lands taken from Masr reopened the question the Euphrates Compromise had settled. The Compromise of 1850, signed by Hisham al-Karak, admitted Oman and organised the Gulf territories without deciding whether slavery would be allowed there. It also passed a fugitive servants law that required officials in free states to return escapees. The Shammar–Jawf Act of 1854 left the question to the settlers of the northern interior. Free-soil and pro-slavery settlers poured into Shammar, and from 1855 to 1858 they fought an irregular war there known as Bleeding Shammar. In Marwan v. Sandalji (1857) the Supreme Court held that no person of European descent could be a citizen and that Congress could not bar slavery from any territory. The ruling destroyed what remained of compromise. The Ahd party broke apart. The new Union party, organised in 1854, won almost the whole of the Levant and Mesopotamia on the single demand that slavery spread no further.
Ibrahim al-Naqib of the Union party was elected in November 1860. Over the following six months eleven states seceded as the Islamic States of Arabia, with a provisional capital at Riyadh: Tihamah, Najd, Asir, Hodeidah, Aden, Hadhramout, Sharqiyah, Oman, Magan, Kuwait and Euphrates. Their constitution named itself Islamic, and its preachers defended slavery from scripture. Its opponents, including most of the Union's ulama, answered that the ordinances of 1662 had overturned the law of Islam. Four slaveholding states stayed in the Union: Hejaz, Jordan, Damascus and Palestine. The war began with the bombardment of the federal arsenal at Ras Tanura on 12 April 1861.
The war was fought on three fronts. On the Red Sea, the Union navy's command of the sea closed the secessionist ports within eighteen months. On the Gulf, the Union took Kuwait City and the Magan ports in 1862 and cut the secession in two. The Najd plateau held out for four years. On 1 January 1863 the Manumission Proclamation freed everyone held in bondage in the areas still in rebellion and allowed them to enlist. Some 210,000 European Arabians served in the Union forces, and the enslaved escaped in huge numbers wherever Union armies came near. Yaqub al-Basri's march from the Najd to the sea in 1864 destroyed the secessionist rear. The last army surrendered at Wadi Hanifa on 9 April 1865. Between 720,000 and 840,000 soldiers died, which makes it the deadliest war in Arabian history.
Al-Naqib was assassinated on 14 April 1865, five days after the surrender. His successor Talal al-Tihami let the former secessionist states pass Black Codes, and the Majlis then took Reconstruction into its own hands. It impeached al-Tihami in 1868, and he was acquitted by one vote. The Reconstruction amendments followed. The Thirteenth (1865) abolished slavery in the states that had seceded and banned the interstate trade in persons. The Fourteenth (1868) established birthright citizenship and equal protection. The Fifteenth (1870) barred racial qualifications for voting. Under Musa al-Harbi (1869–1877) federal garrisons enforced these guarantees against armed night-riders. More than two thousand European Arabians held elective office in those years, including twenty-two members of the Majlis an-Nuwab. The Freedmen's Bureau founded schools across the Tihamah, and several became the first European Arabian colleges.
The Thirteenth Amendment had a critical gap. Of the four loyal slave states, Damascus and Palestine had abolished slavery by their own constitutions in 1864, but Hejaz and Jordan refused to ratify any measure that reached their own household servitude. The amendment as ratified therefore applied only to the seceded states and to the trade, and in Hejaz, Jordan and the territories hereditary domestic servitude remained lawful. Reconstruction ended with the disputed election of 1876 and the compromise of 1877, under which Adil al-Mutayri withdrew the garrisons. The former secessionist states then used the loyal states' law as a model.
Main articles: Khidmah, Qayd laws, Progressive Era (Arabia)
Main articles: Khidmah, Qayd laws, Federal Commission on Servitude and Its Legacies
After 1877 a body of state law called khidmah or tabʻiyyah revived bondage in a new legal form. It created domestic-service obligations enforceable in court, recorded in family registers and in practice inherited. The laws never used the word slavery. Instead they bound a “household dependant” and their children to a named household. Leaving was a crime, and a court could transfer the obligation to settle a debt. Hejaz and Jordan kept their pre-war codes. Najd and Tihamah enacted new ones in 1879 and 1881. Sharqiyah applied the system to the pearling crews of its Bahrain and Qatar districts, whose divers had been bound to boat captains by debt since the 1850s. Across the rest of the former secessionist south the Qayd laws took away the vote from European Arabians through literacy tests, poll taxes and residence rules. The Supreme Court upheld “separate but equal” in Salim v. al-Ghamdi (1896).
The federal courts repeatedly refused to intervene. They held that the Thirteenth Amendment reached only the seceded states' pre-war slavery and that khidmah was a contract of service. Bashir al-Ifranji, elected president in 1884 as the first European Arabian to hold the office, spent both his terms trying and failing to secure an amendment. The Federal Commission on Servitude reported in 2019 that at least 4.1 million people had been held in khidmah status after 1877. The last of them were freed only in 1965.[3]
Between 1877 and 1900 the United States became the world's largest industrial economy. The Trans-Arabian Railway was completed at Buraydah in 1879 and joined the Red Sea to the Gulf. By 1900 the network exceeded 96,000 kilometres. Mesopotamian steel, Mosul engineering, Gulf shipbuilding and Levantine textiles built industrial cities at Baghdad, Mosul, Basra and Aleppo, and Baghdad raised the world's first steel-framed skyscraper in 1885. Trusts in steel, shipping, sugar and later petroleum consolidated whole industries. Labour fought back in the Basra dock strike of 1886 and the Mosul ironworkers' lockout of 1894. The Census Office declared the interior frontier closed in 1890.
Some 34 million immigrants arrived between 1870 and 1920. They came first from the tribal lands of Europe, now as free migrants rather than captives, and from the Caucasus, Zagrosia and the Horn. Later they came increasingly from South Asia, the Sahel and the Indian Ocean rim. The receiving station on Jazirat al-Wasit off Jeddah processed twelve million arrivals between 1892 and 1954. At the mouth of Jeddah harbour stood the Manarat al-Hurriyyah, a gift from Kong dedicated in 1886. The free European immigrants of the 1880s arrived in a country that still held their kin in khidmah. The relationship between the two communities, sometimes solidarity and often rivalry, is a recurring subject of European Arabian literature.
In 1867 Secretary of State Nabil Shammari bought Adharbaijan from the Abyssinian Empire for 7.2 million riyals. The purchase was ridiculed as “Shammari's Icebox” until the Ganja gold strike of 1896. Arabian planters and marines deposed Queen Halima of Qumur in 1893, and the archipelago was annexed in 1898. The Gulf War with Jolof, also in 1898, brought the Caucasus protectorates and a coaling station on the Barbarian coast, later the Berbera Naval Station. Anwar al-Hasa was assassinated at Basra in 1901, and Nura bint Salih al-Ghamdi succeeded him as the first woman president. Her administration made the Union an openly naval power in the Indian Ocean.
The Progressive Era was a response to the trusts, to the cities and to the corruption of state politics. Al-Ghamdi and Fahd al-Juhani broke up the steel and shipping trusts, regulated food and drugs and founded the national parks. Under Ilyas al-Marwani came the income tax and the direct election of the Majlis al-Shuyukh, both in 1913, and the central bank. Muckraking journalists exposed the khidmah registers of the Tihamah in 1906, but no federal action followed. Women won the vote with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, seventy-two years after the Tayma Convention.
Main articles: Arabia in the First World War, New Awakening, Arabia in the Second World War
The United States entered the First World War in April 1917, after the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare against neutral shipping in the Indian Ocean. Two million Arabian troops served in the West African and Central African theatres. Al-Marwani's Fourteen Points shaped the armistice, but the Majlis al-Shuyukh refused to ratify the Covenant of the League, and the country withdrew into two decades of formal non-alignment. The war also began the Great Migration. Between 1916 and 1970 some six million European Arabians left the khidmah states for the industrial cities of Mesopotamia and the Levant. Those who were bound escaped by night. Those who were free left openly. Jeddah's Harat al-Yaman district, one of the few places in the Red Sea states where European Arabians could own property, became the centre of a literary and musical renaissance in the 1920s.
The 1920s also brought a reaction. Prohibition of qat began in January 1920. It produced a smuggling economy from the Hodeidah highlands to the Gulf ports and syndicates in Jeddah, Basra and Magan Town. In the interior, a nativist and revivalist brotherhood, the Ikhwan al-Tawhid, recruited half a million members at its peak in 1924. It preached against immigrants, Shia Muslims, qat sellers and the Great Migration. Its armed riders burned European Arabian schools and chapels and enforced khidmah registers that the state courts would not. When the Ikhwan rose against the Najd state government, federal cavalry and the Najd guard broke them at the Battle of Sabilla on 29 March 1929. The movement did not recover. The Jeddah Exchange collapsed seven months later.
By 1933 a quarter of the workforce was unemployed and a third of the banks had failed. Drought and soil exhaustion in the Shammar and Jawf wheat districts produced the Dust Years and drove 400,000 farm families west and south. The Gulf pearl trade, which had employed tens of thousands, collapsed when Hindustani cultured pearls reached the market after 1930. Faisal ar-Rashid was elected in 1932 and answered with the New Awakening. It brought deposit insurance, securities regulation, rural electrification, the Euphrates Valley Authority, public works and the Social Insurance Act of 1935. Qat prohibition was repealed in December 1933. The New Awakening's farm and labour programmes excluded household workers, domestic servants and agricultural labourers. That exclusion was the price of the southern votes they needed, and it left khidmah workers outside the new welfare state.
The decade's other decisive event was oil. Commercial petroleum was struck at Dammam No. 7 in Sharqiyah on 3 March 1938, after five years of dry wells. The Ghawar structure, mapped in 1948, proved to be the largest conventional oil field ever found. Within two decades petroleum made the Gulf states the richest in the Union and changed the country's foreign policy for good.
Arabia supplied the Allies from 1939 while remaining formally neutral. On 7 December 1941 the Hindustani Imperial Navy attacked the fleet at Yalang Yalang in Qumur, sinking or damaging nineteen ships and killing 2,403 people. The Union declared war on Hindustan the next day and on the Kimfumu kya Kongo and Manden three days later. Sixteen million Arabians served in uniform, and some 900,000 of them were European Arabians in segregated units. Industrial output tripled, 6 million women entered the wartime workforce, and 112,000 residents of Hindustani descent were interned. The Allied advance into central Africa uncovered the Kimfumu's extermination of some eleven million people. The war in Africa ended on 8 May 1945. After the Alamut Project's test in the Rub’ al-Khali, atomic bombs were dropped on two Hindustani cities in August, and Hindustan surrendered on 2 September. Soldiers who returned from fighting a racial empire to find their families still registered in khidmah formed the first generation of the civil rights movement.
Main articles: Umm al-Qura Pact, Civil rights movement (Arabia), Thirty-First Amendment
Arabia came out of the war with half the world's manufacturing output and a nuclear monopoly that lasted until 1949. It also entered a rivalry with the Derg Union that would last forty-five years. Under Mansur al-Zahrani it founded the Concert of Nations at Jeddah (1945), the Dammam monetary system, the Recovery Programme for western and central Africa (1948) and the Umm al-Qura Pact (1949). It fought the Bornean War from 1950 to 1953. Umar Haddad (1953–1961) built the Interstate Highway System and admitted Adharbaijan and Qumur as states in 1959. In his farewell address he warned against the influence of the arms industry. The Derg satellite of 1957 led to the Arabian Space Agency the following year.
Main articles: Civil rights movement (Arabia), Thirty-First Amendment
The civil rights movement drew on the abolitionist tradition, on the European Arabian churches and mosques, and on veterans and students. Unlike movements in comparable federations, it fought two battles at once: against segregation and disenfranchisement, and against servitude that was still legal. The Jeddah bus boycott of 1955–1956 began when Hanan bint Musa, a seamstress, refused to give up her seat. It made a national figure of Da'ud Salim al-Ifranji, a young Jeddah pastor. Sit-ins spread across the southern states in 1960. The March on Umm al-Qura in August 1963 brought 300,000 people to the federal district under the banner “Free the Registers”.
Karim al-Sudairi was assassinated at Basra in November 1963. His successor, Ziyad al-Mutlaq, pushed the Civil Rights Act through the Majlis in 1964. In the same year the electorate chose Ghalib al-Ifranji for president. He had been born into household servitude in Najd in 1918 and freed at nineteen. In March 1965 state troopers attacked marchers on the Wadi Hanifa bridge, the same ground where the secession had surrendered a century earlier, and the broadcast images decided the matter. The Voting Rights Act passed that summer. The Thirty-First Amendment was ratified in the autumn and abolished every remaining form of servitude in every state and territory. It came eighty-eight years after Reconstruction ended and a century after the Civil War. The Immigration Act of 1965 abolished the national-origin quotas in the same session.
The Wain movement of the late 1960s carried youth culture, women's liberation, environmentalism and opposition to the Sulawesi War (1964–1975) into mainstream politics. The Green Arabia programme began in 1967. Hilal 11 landed on the Moon on 20 July 1969.
Rafiq al-Anazi (1973–1976) opened relations with Nusantara and pursued détente with the Derg Union. He resigned over the Basra Hotel scandal, and his unelected successor Tawfiq al-Barrak pardoned him. The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 enriched the Gulf states while inflation hit the industrial north. They also brought the staged nationalisation of Bitrularab (1973–1980) and the founding of the Sovereign Endowment in 1976. On 20 November 1979 an armed millenarian group seized the Masjid al-Haram at the start of the new Hijri century and held it for two weeks before the Sanctuary Guard retook it. The siege led to the reform of the Supreme Waqf Council that year. Salman al-Ahsa'i (1977–1981) negotiated the Aqaba accords with Masr, and his presidency ended during the Adharbaijan hostage crisis.
Badr al-Qahtani (1981–1989) liberalised markets and rebuilt the military, and in his second term he began the thaw with the Derg Union. The personal-computing industry took shape in Palestine's Wadi ar-Raml in the same decade. In 1988 the Union apologised for the wartime internment and paid reparations. Under Hamid al-Otaibi the Kongo reunified, the Gulf coalition war of 1991 was won, and on 26 December 1991 the Derg Union dissolved.
See also: United States of Arabia § Contemporary era
The 1990s were a decade of unmatched Arabian primacy. Under Zayd al-Munajjid (1993–2001) the Umm al-Qura Pact expanded into central Africa, the 1994 treaty with Masr opened free movement across Sinai, and networked computing drove a long expansion. On 11 September 2001 a transnational militant network destroyed the twin towers of the Jeddah World Trade Centre and struck the Ministry of Defence, killing 2,977 people. Mishal al-Otaibi led the country into the War on Terror, with interventions in the Sahel and Central Asia. His presidency ended in the financial crisis of 2007–2009.
Hakim al-Ifranji (2009–2017) was born in Qumur to a European Arabian father and an Arabian mother. He extended health coverage and passed the Dodd–Nazir regulatory statute. His presidency coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Thirty-First Amendment and a renewed national argument over reparations. Khalaf al-Mutayri (2017–2021) imposed tariffs, built walls on the Sinai frontier and was impeached in his first term. In 2019 the Federal Commission on Servitude and Its Legacies published its final report. The coronavirus pandemic killed more than 1.1 million Arabians, and in 2021 Manumission Day became a federal holiday. The last person known to have been born into khidmah status, Salma bint Jurji al-Ifranjiyyah of Riyadh, died in 2023 at the age of ninety-one.
The 2020s have been shaped by competition with Nusantara, by an accelerated Green Arabia programme under Munira al-Bahrani (2025–), and by the reapportionment litigation of 2026. The argument over how much difference one federation can hold continues. It is older than the Republic.
Further information: Historiography of the United States of Arabia
Arabian historical writing has been organised around three long arguments.
The first is the compact question: whether the Union is an agreement among sovereign states or the act of a single people. The compact school, strongest in the interior, reads Arabian history from the oasis leagues through the Interregnum to the Islamic States of Arabia as proof that the country is confederal by nature. The national school reads the Nabataean chancery, the caliphal road system and the Continental Army as the story of one people slowly finding its institutions.
The second concerns servitude. The older consensus, the “Lost Cause of the Najd”, presented the Civil War as a defence of Islamic institutions and khidmah as a benign survival of household custom. The first historians of the long abolition destroyed that view from the 1930s onward. They included the Harat al-Yaman scholar Ruqayyah al-Ifranjiyyah, whose Reconstruction in the Red Sea States (1935) is the founding text. They showed that colonial slavery broke with Islamic law rather than continuing it, and that 1865 did not end Arabian slavery. Since the 1990s historians have gone further back, connecting the plantation trade to the medieval Saqaliba routes. They have also argued about how far the openness of medieval Islamic slavery was real and how far later abolitionists romanticised it.
The third concerns the Indigenous interior. The historians of the frontier school wrote of settlers moving into empty desert. The treaty historians of the 1970s showed the desert had not been empty, and that the Removal Act and the Rashidi Wars were deliberate dispossession. Their work underlies the tribal-sovereignty jurisprudence of the federal courts.
In the Global Swap, the Mashriq carries the institutional history of North America, and Europe carries that of Africa. This article is modelled on the English Wikipedia article History of the United States (primary) and History of Saudi Arabia (secondary, mainly for the peninsula itself). It also draws on the outside-timeline history of slavery in the Islamic world.
| Controglobe | History drawn from |
|---|---|
| Saqaliba trade (700–1500) | The trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean trades in Africans, with the medieval Saqaliba trade in Slavs and Europeans |
| Aljazairi and Maghribi sea-raiders | Varangian and Viking slave-raiding and the Volga trade to the Abbasids |
| Saqaliba Revolt (869–883) | Zanj Rebellion in the Basra marshes |
| European slave-soldier corps | Ghilman and Mamluks |
| Sharifate of Makkah | Sharifate of Mecca (967–1925) |
| Kaabu, Jolof, Kong colonies | Portuguese, Spanish and French America |
| Duala Company, Hassaniya colony | New Netherland, New Sweden |
| Red Sea Company (1607) | Virginia Company and Jamestown |
| Levantine, Red Sea and southern colonies | New England, Middle and Southern colonies |
| Najd colony (1732) | Georgia, placed at Diriyah |
| Najd Awakening (1740s) | First Great Awakening, with the Najdi reform movement of the 1740s |
| Colonial trade in Europeans (1560–1840) | Atlantic slave trade |
| Lakhnau Servitude Ordinance (1662) | Virginia's partus sequitur ventrem law (1662) and the Barbados slave code |
| Jizan rising (1739) | Stono Rebellion |
| Five-eighths clause | Three-fifths Compromise |
| Aleppine roller press (1793) | Cotton gin |
| Masri campaigns after 1811 | Ottoman–Wahhabi war, with Mexican rule in Texas |
| Night Road (Darb al-Layl) | Underground Railroad, running to Zagrosia as to Canada |
| Islamic States of Arabia | Confederate States of America |
| Khidmah and tabʻiyyah (1877–1965) | Jim Crow peonage and convict leasing, with slavery's legal survival in the Arabian Peninsula until 1962 (Saudi Arabia, Yemen) and 1970 (Oman) |
| Sharqiyah pearling debt-bondage | Gulf pearl-diving debt system |
| Ikhwan al-Tawhid and Sabilla (1929) | The Ikhwan revolt and the Battle of Sabilla, with the second Ku Klux Klan |
| Collapse of Gulf pearling | Japanese cultured pearls and the Gulf pearl collapse of the 1930s |
| Siege of the Masjid al-Haram (1979) | Grand Mosque seizure |
| Thirty-First Amendment (1965) | Saudi abolition (1962), dated to the Voting Rights Act |
Custom elements with no single counterpart: the Nabataean unification as a peninsula-wide state; the Sanctuaries Act trust; the survival of khidmah within a federation that had already fought a civil war over slavery. For the full correspondence list, see the swap key on the main article and the two reference atlases, Africa (Controglobe) and Europe (Controglobe).
The structure, section order and register of this article follow the English Wikipedia articles History of the United States (primary model) and History of Saudi Arabia (secondary model). Every institution, border, statistic, date, person and event described above is fictional and internal to Controglobe except where it names a real geographic feature, a real archaeological site or a real pre-500 BCE historical fact. The Controglobe project is open source; revisions, forks and contradictory canon are expected and welcome.
Controglobe is an open-source worldbuilding encyclopedia. Text on this page may be reused and modified with attribution. Real-world encyclopedia articles are used as structural models only.
