4 - Kuwait after oil

Summary

In the decades since oil, Kuwait has experienced remarkable political stability. This stability has been achieved by a complex – and precarious – redistribution of power within the shaikhdom, a process which involved the eclipse of the merchants as a major political force and the ruler's replacement of his merchant allies with a strengthened ruling family and with supporters in the larger national population. These alliances, between the ruler and his family, and the ruler and his new popular base, were established in the 1950s and reshaped in the post-independence period to accommodate the political transformations which growing oil revenues, independence, and the policies of the 1950s themselves catalyzed. The strategies worked; continuity was maintained. In the process, however, Kuwait's rulers were forced to contend with new problems associated with the bureaucratic growth which accompanied the expansion of state services and with the growing interest of Britain in Kuwait which accompanied the development of Kuwait's oil industry.

The rise of the ruling family

Historically, Kuwait's ruling family was a weak political institution. The ruler relied on his family as little as possible, preferring court favorites and merchants. Early in the century, Lorimer (1908–15, vol. 2: 1074–5) observed Mubarak's rule to be “personal and absolute … The heads of his departments are mostly slaves; his near relations are excluded from his counsels; even his sons wield no executive powers … In the town the smallest disputes, whether civil or criminal, are settled by the Shaikh himself.”