From Twelve to Two Hundred and Forty Thousand: The Story of British Migration to the UAE

How a dozen names on a 1957 expat list became a quarter of a million Britons in Dubai alone — told through treaties, oil concessions, school runs and tax returns.

Jul 04, 2026

From Twelve to Two Hundred and Forty Thousand: The Slow British Migration to the UAE

In 1957, a British surveyor named Christopher Meyer sat down and wrote a list of every foreigner living in Dubai. It ran to twelve names. A political agent on leave, an assistant, a BP man, an IPC man, a doctor, a bank manager and two assistants, an agriculturalist, a police chief and a couple more besides. Every single one of them was British. Today, there are roughly a quarter of a million, and Dubai holds more Britons than the city of Oxford. That gap — twelve to 240,000 — is the whole story. It did not happen overnight, and it did not happen by accident. It is the product of nearly two centuries of naval treaties, oil concessions, banking deals, school runs and, more recently, plain old tax arithmetic.

The trade routes came first

British ships were already sailing past this coastline in the seventeenth century, when the East India Company ran the sea lanes between Britain and Asia and the sheikhdoms along what was then called the Pirate Coast were simply somewhere you passed on the way to somewhere more important. Britain’s actual involvement began not as a settlement but as policing. The Royal Navy ran punitive campaigns against local shipping in 1809 and 1819, and then, in 1820, signed the General Maritime Treaty with the coastal rulers — the deal that gave the region its old British name, the Trucial States. Further treaties followed in 1843 and 1853, and by 1892, an exclusivity agreement made the arrangement formal: the sheikhs would deal with no foreign power but Britain, and in exchange, Britain would defend the coast.

None of this brought many British people to live here. For well over a century, “British presence” meant a handful of naval officers, a political resident based first in Sharjah and later in Dubai, and not much else. This was protection at a distance, not migration.

The airfield that put the Gulf on the map

The first real trickle of Britons arrived not for oil, but for the airmail. Imperial Airways needed a stopover between London and India, and in June 1932 struck a deal with the Ruler of Sharjah for a landing strip; the first flight touched down that October. The RAF built the runway; Imperial Airways built a fortified rest-house called Mahatta Fort, complete with a wireless station, to put passengers up overnight on their way to Karachi and beyond. It was staffed by a permanent crew of three British expatriates — arguably the first resident British community in what is now the UAE.

It was also, in its small way, comic. In 1933, a group of British women staying overnight caused a local scandal by walking into the souq in the “beach pyjama” trouser suits Coco Chanel had made fashionable — an early lesson in cultural friction that Imperial Airways staff learned to navigate by simply banning passengers from wandering into town without the Ruler’s permission. The Second World War turned the strip into RAF Sharjah, a base first for anti-U-boat patrols and later for operations against insurgents in Oman, and it stayed in British hands until the RAF withdrew with the UAE’s formation in 1971.

Alongside the airmen came soldiers. The Trucial Oman Levies, later renamed the Trucial Oman Scouts, were formed after the war as a locally recruited force under British officers, tasked with policing borders and putting down the odd tribal skirmish. Veterans of the Scouts still talk of it as one of the last “desert romances” of the British Army — small, informal and deeply attached to the place.

Oil, and the men who came looking for it

Oil is what turned a handful of officials into an actual community. British Petroleum — trading as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company — had worked the wider Gulf since 1909, and turned its geologists toward Abu Dhabi and Dubai in 1935. The first wells went down in 1950; the first commercial strike came off Abu Dhabi’s coast in 1958, and the first oil shipment left in 1962. BP built the country’s first petrol station in Abu Dhabi, a single pump behind a rough concrete wall.

This is where the British diaspora stops being a rounding error and starts being a demographic fact. Geologists, engineers and their families followed the concessions. So did the bankers: the British Bank of the Middle East — a forerunner of HSBC — opened as the region’s financial plumbing, and Barclays built its own six-decade presence alongside it. Lord Denman, a decorated wartime infantryman turned director of the British Bank of the Middle East, became such a fixture of Abu Dhabi’s early business scene and such a close confidant of Sheikh Zayed that he kept returning to visit every year until he died at 96. Another Briton, John Harris, was hired by Sheikh Rashid to be Dubai’s first town planner; the “Harris Masterplan” laid out the roads, hospitals and schools that still shape the city, and Harris personally designed the Dubai World Trade Centre, the emirate’s first skyscraper.

Families need schools, and schools are a good proxy for permanence. Dubai English Speaking School opened in 1963 as the city’s first — children reportedly travelled to it by abra and camel — and Jumeirah English Speaking School followed in 1975, both still running today. A community that builds schools is a community that has stopped thinking of itself as temporary.

Independence, and the businesses that stayed

Britain’s political role ended on 1 December 1971, when the exclusivity treaties were annulled, and the Trucial States became the United Arab Emirates the next day. London had already announced in 1968 that it could no longer afford to defend the Gulf, and the withdrawal, though politically awkward, was economic rather than dramatic. What is striking is how little the commercial relationship is noticed. British business simply stayed on: more than 4,000 UK companies now operate in the UAE, some tracing their presence back over eighty years.

The population numbers from this period tell their own story. The UAE’s first census, conducted in 1968, recorded a total population of 180,226. By 1975, that had tripled to 557,887; by 1980, with the oil boom in full swing, it had passed a million. Expatriates — European and Arab professionals filling gaps the local workforce could not, alongside a growing wave of South Asian labour — made up 70 per cent of residents by 1975 and 88 per cent by 1985. British nationals were a small but disproportionately senior slice of that inflow, concentrated in oil, banking, aviation, law and the civil service that Sheikh Zayed and Sheikh Rashid were busily assembling.

Aviation supplied one more wave. When Dubai’s ruling family decided to launch a national carrier in 1985, they turned to a group of British aviation veterans, including Sir Maurice Flanagan, a former BOAC executive, to run it. Emirates flew its first commercial service that October with two leased aircraft, and within a few years had become one of the most consequential airlines in the world — built, in its earliest years, on unmistakably British aviation know-how.

From frontier posting to lifestyle choice

By the 1990s and 2000s, the character of British migration had changed completely. The earlier waves were mostly professionals sent out by employers — oil executives, bankers, engineers, teachers. What followed was something closer to voluntary relocation. Dubai opened its property market to foreign freehold ownership in the early 2000s, and the Palm Jumeirah and similar developments turned the emirate into a place Britons could simply buy into, rather than merely be posted to. One long-time resident, Ananda Shakespeare, who moved out in 2005, has described watching the city transform almost beyond recognition in the two decades since.

The scale of that shift is starkly evident in the data. The British population of Dubai stood at around 100,000 in 2010; by 2025, it had more than doubled to roughly 240,000. Britons now form Dubai’s largest European expatriate community and its third-largest tourism market, well ahead of the roughly 40,000 Americans resident in the city. British buyers accounted for about 15 per cent of all foreign property transactions in Dubai in 2024, the second-largest group after Indian buyers. Enquiries about relocating jumped 420 per cent over five years, according to one removals firm, with online searches for “move to Dubai” and “jobs in Dubai” up 50 per cent in a single year.

Ask people why, and the answers repeat themselves: no income tax, no capital gains tax, no inheritance tax, English widely spoken, familiar schools, familiar supermarkets. Rhian Lindley, who moved with her family in 2010, put it plainly: “It was the tax-free earnings without a shadow of a doubt that became the attraction”. Legal reform has helped too — cohabitation for unmarried couples was decriminalised in 2020, removing one of the last frictions for younger arrivals. Brexit and Britain’s frozen tax thresholds have added a harder edge to the calculation: Henley & Partners’ wealth migration data shows the UAE pulling in roughly 6,700 high-net-worth arrivals in a single recent year, more than any other country, and analysis of Britain’s company register found the UAE the single most popular destination for high-growth founders leaving the country, ahead of Spain and the United States, with tech entrepreneurs especially likely to go.

A relationship is still being tested

That confidence has been shaken this year. The regional conflict that broke out in late February 2026 closed Gulf airspace and prompted the Foreign Office to register well over 100,000 British nationals in the region for emergency support, with the Foreign Secretary putting the total British population across the Gulf at around 300,000. Financial Times data cited by CNBC suggests roughly one in eight Britons in the UAE — around 30,000 people — left in the weeks after the fighting began, some to Europe, some simply home. Most analysts expect it to be a pause rather than a reversal; the London government, perhaps optimistically, is even trying to use the moment to lure some of that talent back to Britain. Meanwhile, Britain’s own emigration figures keep climbing — 246,000 British nationals left the UK in the year to December 2025, a scale of departures not seen since the “brain drain” years of the 1970s, with Gen Z specifically leading the way to the UAE.

There is a neat symmetry buried in that last fact. The 1970s brain drain that pushed British professionals abroad is the same decade that first filled Dubai and Abu Dhabi with British oilmen, bankers and schoolteachers. Half a century on, a new brain drain is filling the same two cities again, only this time the migrants are advertising executives, tech founders and retirees rather than geologists, and they are choosing the move rather than being sent. The instruments have changed — a maritime treaty then, a tax return now — but the direction of travel has not. Twelve Britons in 1957 became 240,000 by 2025, not through any single decision, but through a hundred years of small, compounding ones: a runway built for the airmail, a bank opened for the oil money, a school built for the children, a freehold sold for the villa. Britain governed this coastline for a century and a half and then left it. It’s people, it turns out, never really did.

Notes

The Emirates Wire

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?