This chapter examines the impact of oil on the twin processes of state formation and space-making in the Trucial States and United Arab Emirates and Sultanate of Oman in the mid-twentieth century. In much of the literature on the history of the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula, these processes are linked through oil concessions. Concessions necessitated the demarcation of domestic and international boundaries in the Arabian Peninsula, a key part of the state formation process. This chapter looks instead at state formation through a new means of oil-fuelled mobility – automobility. Beginning in the early 1950s and surging dramatically at the end of the 1960s, the automobile rapidly displaced older modes of transportation, in the process becoming synonymous with modernisation and state-building. The automobile's speed and power sparked violence, necessitated new modes of regulation as well as a new road network, and made the state visible and tangible in even the most remote areas of the region. New boundaries between states were demarcated, with different rules for travel by car and by foot or animal. In the process, new understandings of space emerged, and state control over territory dramati-cally intensified. Eventually, it became both physically possible and morally permissible for UAE and Omani citizens (and others) to travel to places that had not been open to them before, while other patterns of circulation were closed off by a new international border; automobility and roads created both new freedoms and new restrictions. Through the lens of automobility, oil's role in state formation becomes more complex and contested, as various actors ranging from British Political Agents to local sheikhs wrestled with how new forms of movement ought to be governed.

Two spatial imaginaries frame the chapter's analysis – the pre-oil dirah, rooted in seasonal migrations and kinship relations, and the nascent dawla (state), which required free movement within demarcated boundaries. The shift from the dirah to the dawla is traced through several episodes involving automobile travel. The potential of automobility to undermine the existing political and spatial order is seen in the 1938 Majlis Movement in Dubai and in a 1950 conflict in Shaʾam, in northern Ras al-Khaimah.