Dubai () is one of the seven emirates in the United Arab Emirates. The main city of the emirate is Dubai. The city is sometimes called "Dubai City" to prevent it from being confused with the emirate.

Dubai is the second largest emirate in the UAE after Abu Dhabi. The emirate is on the Persian Gulf, southwest of Sharjah and northeast of Abu Dhabi. The town of Hatta is an exclave of the emirate of Dubai. It borders nearby Oman.

Dubai's economy is different from other members of the UAE because income from oil is only 6% of its gross domestic product.

History 
On 8 January 1820, the sheikh of Dubai was one of the people who signed the British sponsored "General Treaty of Peace" (the General Maritime Treaty).

In 1833, the Al Maktoum dynasty of the Bani Yas tribe settled at Dubai creek. From that point on, Dubai was a newly independent emirate. It was always struggling with the emirate of Abu Dhabi. An attempt by the Qawasim pirates to take over Dubai was stopped. In 1835, Dubai and the rest of the Trucial States signed a maritime truce with Britain and a "Perpetual Maritime Truce" about twenty years later. Dubai came under the protection of the United Kingdom (keeping out the Ottoman Turks) by the Exclusive Agreement of 1892. Like four of its neighbours, Abu Dhabi, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah and Umm al-Qaiwain, its being on the way to India made it an important place.

In March 1892, the Trucial States (or Trucial Oman) were created. 

After the Gulf Rupee lost value in 1966, Dubai joined the newly independent state of Qatar to set up a new monetary unit, the Qatar/Dubai riyal. Oil was discovered 120 kilometres off the coast of Dubai, after which the town granted oil concessions. 

On 2 December 1971 Dubai formed the United Arab Emirates, together with Abu Dhabi and five other emirates. This was done after former protector Britain left the Persian Gulf in 1971. In 1973, Dubai joined the other emirates to adopt a single, uniform currency: the UAE dirham.

Modern Dubai 
Oil supply in Dubai is less than 1/20th as much as the emirate of Abu Dhabi, and oil money is now only a small part of the city's total money. Dubai and its twin across the Dubai creek, Deira (independent at that time), became important ports of call for Western manufacturers. Most of the new city's banking and financial centers were in this area. Dubai kept its importance as a trade route through the 1970s and 1980s. The city of Dubai has a free trade in gold and till the 1990s was the center of a "brisk smuggling trade" of gold ingots to India, where gold import was restricted. 

Today, Dubai is an important place for tourists and port (Jebel Ali, built in the 1970s, has the biggest man-made harbour in the world), but also increasingly becoming a center for service industries such as IT and finance, with the new Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). Transport links are helped by its rapidly-expanding Emirates Airline, made by the government in 1985 and still state-owned. The airline is based at Dubai International Airport and carries over 12 million passengers every year.

The government has set up industry-specific free zones throughout the city. Dubai Internet City, now combined with Dubai Media City as part of TECOM (Dubai Technology, Electronic Commerce and Media Free Zone Authority) is one such enclave whose members include IT firms such as EMC Corporation, Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM, and media organisations such as MBC, CNN, Reuters, ARY and AP. Dubai Marina is a master plan development by EMAAR which will be the worlds largest marina when complete. Dubai Knowledge Village (KV) is an education and training hub is also set up to complement the Free Zone’s other two clusters, Dubai Internet city and Dubai Media City, by providing the facilities to train the clusters' future knowledge 
workers.

Dubai had a property boom when they announced freehold property resulting in large capital investments. With the global recession property prices have fallen dramatically.

References 

Emirates of the United Arab Emirates
Current monarchies