Qatar

A peninsula the size of a small county that turned gas into global influence. Qatar was a poor dependency of pearling and fishing under Al Khalifa and then Ottoman authority before the Al Thani established themselves and signed a treaty with Britain in 1916. The pearl trade collapsed in the 1930s when Japanese cultured pearls arrived, and the country was among the poorest in the region. Oil came in 1949 and then the North Field, discovered in 1971 and shared with Iran, which is the largest natural gas field in the world and made Qatar the highest income per head of any country for a period. Independence came in 1971 after declining to join the United Arab Emirates. Al Jazeera, founded in 1996, broke the region's state-television monopoly and made the country both influential and resented; Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt blockaded Qatar from 2017 to 2021 partly over it. The 2022 football World Cup drew sustained scrutiny of migrant labour conditions under the kafala system. Around nine in ten residents are foreign nationals. Doha is the capital. The country has about three million people on eleven thousand square kilometres. Arabic is official and English widely used. It is a peninsula with a single land border, with Saudi Arabia. Almost all its fresh water comes from desalination. The Museum of Islamic Art and the national museum were both built as cultural investments. Qatar has hosted mediation between parties that will not speak to each other directly, including over Afghanistan and Gaza.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history