Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum

Rashid had effectively managed the emirate's affairs since the late 1930s, and the article recounts that he refused, under considerable British pressure, to force his father to abdicate. He was known for touring the town in the early hours to inspect project sites, then questioning progress at his several daily majlis sessions, and for revisiting sites in the evening on horseback. He acceded as ruler of Dubai on his father's death on 10 September 1958. ^{1 2}

Dubai's customs had been reformed before the Second World War and by the 1950s its port was the most important in the Gulf, its merchants profiting from the gold trade with India. The creek was dredged in 1958–1959 under a plan drawn up in 1954, financed by "creek bonds" and a Kuwaiti loan, so that larger ships could berth, and the reclaimed land was sold to help pay for the work. After oil was discovered at the offshore Fateh field in 1966, Rashid borrowed against the expected revenues to build Port Rashid, expanding the design from four berths to twenty-one before it opened in 1972; Dubai's population rose from 59,000 in 1968 to over 278,000 in 1980. In 1971 he ordered a further port at Jebel Ali, which opened in 1983 as the world's largest man-made harbour, and he built the Dubai World Trade Centre, inaugurated in 1979 as the tallest building in the Middle East. ¹

In aviation, he pressed the British for an airstrip despite neighbouring Sharjah's, secured BOAC flights from Bombay by promising to pay for any unsold tickets — the planes flew full — and saw an asphalt runway built in 1965 for jetliners. The BOAC manager he dealt with, Maurice Flanagan, later became the founding chief executive of Emirates. ¹

When Britain announced in January 1968 that it would end its protectorate and withdraw by the end of 1971, Rashid and Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi travelled to London to press for a rethink, then met in the desert between their two emirates and agreed on a union of the two as the nucleus of a wider federation. The United Arab Emirates was proclaimed on 2 December 1971; Rashid became its first vice president, and on 30 April 1979 its prime minister, the first vice president to hold the two offices together — an arrangement that became the de facto norm after his death. ^{1 2}

Rashid died on 7 October 1990, after almost a decade of illness. His son Maktoum — who had been the UAE's first prime minister, from 1971 to 1979 — succeeded him as ruler of Dubai. He married once, Sheikha Latifa bint Hamdan Al Nahyan, who died in 1983; they had nine children, four sons and five daughters, among them the future rulers Maktoum and Mohammed. ^{1 3}

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