'86/1 VIII Kuwait Oil D 106'

The correspondence in the volume is primarily concerned with the ongoing negotiations between the Kuwait Oil Company (led by Frank Holmes and Archibald Chisholm) and the Shaikh of Kuwait, Shaikh Aḥmad al-Jābir Āl Ṣabāḥ, which were suspended in June 1934 following disagreements between the parties over certain financial remunerations and the question of the appointment of a Chief Local Representative in Kuwait, before being resumed in September 1934 and concluded in December 1934 with the signing of the concession agreement. Copies of the final draft concession agreement can be found at folios 82-97 and 247-283. Other correspondents in these negotiations are the Political Agent at Kuwait (Harold Dickson, with Ralph Ponsonby Watts acting) and the Political Resident in the Persian Gulf (Trenchard Craven Fowle, with Percy Gordon Loch acting). Also included in the file is correspondence relating to a company called Traders Limited who submitted a draft oil concession agreement to the Shaikh of Kuwait in September 1934, potentially breaching the agreement made by the Shaikh with the Kuwait Oil Company not to consider any other oil concession application during the period June to September 1934. The question of the oil concession for the Kuwait-Nejd neutral zone is also discussed, with corespondence between the Foreign Office, HM Minister in Jedda (Sir Andrew Ryan), the Secretaries of State for India and Foreign Affairs, representatives of the Arabian Development Syndicate, and the Deputy Saudi Minister for Foreign Affairs (Fuad Bey Hamza). The correspondence focuses on attempts to understand how the Saudi Arabian Government is handling their share of the concession, and how this might affect Kuwait. The volume also includes confidential records of meetings held at the Foreign Office with Fuad Bey Hamza (Foreign Minister for Saudi Arabia) in which the possibility of dividing the neutral zone are discussed. The Political Agent, Harold Dickson is consulted about these proposals and provides background information on the establishment of the neutral zone, the potential detrimental effects that disbanding it could have on the nomadic tribes living in the zone, and observations on the possible oil locations which would be most likely end up in the Saudi Arabian half under any division of the zone and the detrimental effect that might have on Kuwait. Other correspondence in the file includes discussions between the Secretary of State for India, Gilbert Laithwaite (India Office), Wilfred Ashton McClaughry (Air Ministry) and Charles Stuart Burnett (Air Vice-Marshall in Iraq) regarding the possible future need for a site at Shuwaikh as an airbase, and an agreement with the Shaikh of Kuwait for mooring buoys to be placed in Shuwaikh Harbour.

The contents of the volume have been arranged chronologically according to the date the correspondence was received at the Political Residency in the Persian Gulf. Folios 316-326 contain file notes which list each letter or communication in the file giving the date, along with any relevant notes and in the margins are pencil numbers which refer to the folio that the relevant item can be found on and can therefore be used as an index.

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