Sheikhdom of Kuwait

The Sheikhdom of Kuwait was an emirate under British protection from 1899 to 1961. In January 1899 Sheikh Mubarak Al-Sabah signed an agreement with the British government in India that placed Kuwait's foreign affairs under British control, mainly as a defence against Ottoman pressure. Kuwait itself had grown from the small village of Grane, where families of the Bani Utbah settled in the mid-to-late eighteenth century under the loose authority of the Bani Khalid. After the Ottoman expedition to Al-Hasa in 1871 it became a nominal Ottoman vassal within the Basra Vilayet. The 1899 treaty gave Britain a decisive voice in Kuwaiti affairs while the Al-Sabah family retained internal rule. The Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1913 nevertheless defined Kuwait as an autonomous kaza of the Ottoman Empire, and only after the Ottoman defeat in the First World War did Britain declare it an independent sheikhdom under its protection. Oil concessions in the 1930s and the discovery of oil after the Second World War transformed the emirate. The agreement was ended in 1961, when Kuwait became an independent state.