Dubai is an emirate and one of seven that formed the United Arab Emirates on 2 December 1971. The Al Maktoum family has governed the territory since 1833, when they broke from Abu Dhabi and established a settlement on the Dubai Creek. The city and the emirate are effectively the same thing: the emirate covers roughly 4,114 square kilometres, almost all of which is either city or desert with no one in it.
Around 3.7 million people live in Dubai. Approximately 10–12% are Emirati nationals. The rest — the overwhelming majority of everyone you will meet, work beside, or be served by — are foreign nationals on residence visas. South Asians form the largest group, followed by other Arab nationals, Filipinos, and a significant Western expat population drawn from roughly 200 countries. This is not a recent or unusual development; Dubai has been a migrant city since it was a pearl diving and trading port in the nineteenth century. The composition has changed; the structure has not.
Dubai's oil reserves were modest and largely exhausted by the 1980s. Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum — and then his son, the current ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid — made a deliberate, sustained bet on trade, tourism, logistics, and finance instead. Jebel Ali Port, opened in 1979, is now one of the largest container ports in the world. Emirates airline launched in 1985 with two aircraft and a government loan. The Burj Khalifa — the world's tallest building — opened in 2010. Someone who was a teenager working on a creek-side dhow in the mid-1970s watched all of this happen in a single lifetime, in the same city.