The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

by Daniel Yergin

Financial need also fueled Sheikh Ahmad’s interest in courting concessionaires. Like all the other sheikhdoms down the coast of the Persian Gulf, Kuwait was suffering severe economic hardship. The local pearling trade had been Kuwait’s number-one industry and principal source of foreign earnings. Whether or not he knew the name, Sheikh Ahmad had good reason to be intensely annoyed with a Japanese noodle vendor from Miye prefecture, one Kokichi Mikimoto, who had become obsessed with oysters and pearls and had devoted many difficult years to developing the technique for cultivating pearls artificially. Eventually, Mikimoto’s efforts paid off, and by 1930, large volumes of Japanese cultured pearls were beginning to appear on the world’s jewelry markets, practically destroying the demand for the natural pearls that divers brought up from the waters off Kuwait and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf. Kuwait’s economy was devastated; export earnings plummeted, merchants went bankrupt, boats were laid up onshore, and divers returned to the desert. Ahmad and his principality needed a new source of revenues; the welcome prospect of oil had appeared just in time.