Free City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism by Jim Krane

Shindagha, called for four berths. Sheikh Rashid tore up those plans, quadrupling it to sixteen berths. By the time those drawings were done, Rashid ordered the port doubled again, to thirty-five berths.
    In 1971, when Port Rashid’s first berth opened, it brought immediate relief. The first of 120 ships anchored off Dubai began to discharge cargo. 26 The state-run operator that ran the port would eventually grow into the world’s fourth largest.
    Queen Elizabeth II arrived to inaugurate the port in 1972. Her arrival was a bit of serendipity. She happened to be flying across the region and planned to refuel in Bahrain, but she had heard about Sheikh Rashid’s new airport terminal in Dubai. Recalling her meeting with the Dubai leader in London three years earlier, she ordered her pilot to stop at Dubai instead. 27
    Dubai in the 1970s was a city erupting onto the earth. Foreigners poured in: businessmen, laborers, investors, and fast-buck chasers. The city spread over the desert like an oil stain. In 1960, Dubai’s 60,000 residents lived in an area of just two square miles, the size of a few city blocks. By 1970, the city held 100,000 people in a seven-square-mile area—roughly the size and density of present-day Cambridge, Massachusetts. Five years later, Dubai more than doubled in size again, reaching eighteen square miles, with 183,000 people—about like Providence, Rhode Island. By1980, it doubled again, to thirty-two square miles and 276,000 people, nearly the size of Buffalo, New York. In those two decades, Dubai’s area grew sixteen-fold and its population nearly quintupled. 28
    Dubai’s first big hotel, the Intercontinental, coped with occupancy rates approaching 200 percent. Staff housed strangers together as a matter of policy. Businesses imported laborers from India and Pakistan to cope with the work. Hendrik Bosch, a thirty-three-year-old Dutchman overseeing construction of the five hundred-room Dubai International Hotel, tried a different tack. He toured Southeast Asia looking for six hundred workers. He liked those in Thailand, except few Thais spoke English. His next stop was Manila. In the Philippines, Bosch found a veritable mine of service-oriented people willing to live in Dubai. And, as citizens of a former American colony, they spoke English. Bosch worked out a deal with the Philippine government and in 1978 imported six hundred workers in three planeloads.
    Bosch was the first major recruiter of Filipinos, a group that soon came to dominate jobs in hospitality, retail, and nursing. Filipina women also took jobs once held by slaves: as housemaids and nannies.
    Sheikh Rashid wanted Dubai to be more than a port. He wanted it to be a center for the shipping industry. In 1971 he commissioned a feasibility study on building a dry dock, a yard where the largest vessels could be hauled out of the sea and repaired. But nearby Bahrain also had dry dock ambitions, and it got backing of the chief Arab oil exporters’ group.
    Rashid bulldogged ahead. Dubai’s British advisers said the project was ridiculous. Global shipbuilding was in recession. Dubai was too small to absorb such a huge industrial investment. And there was simply no call for two dry docks within a few hundred miles of one another. 29 “Everyone told him this was too big. Why were we spending all this money? Why didn’t we make a joint venture with the dry docks in Bahrain?” says Qassim Sultan, the longtime head of Dubai Municipality.
    Sheikh Rashid wasn’t going to invest $500 million of Dubai’s oil revenues in Bahrain, Dubai’s main competitor. He was intent on diversifying his own economy. His answer: “Why don’t we compete with them instead?” 30
    The Dubai Dry Docks exhibited ambition that bordered on folly. ButSheikh Rashid’s next three announcements made people think he was a bit crazy. In 1979 he commissioned the mammoth Dubai Aluminum smelter—which recycled the plant’s heat to distill fresh water from the sea. He