Kuwait: History of Kuwait

The State of Kuwait from Antiquity to Modern Times

A chronology of events from the 1600s to the 2020s

Kuwait is a constitutional monarchy and has the oldest directly elected parliament among the Arab states of the Persian Gulf.

The World Factbook provides basic intelligence for 266 world entities. Learn about Kuwait's people and society, check travel facts, find out about climate and geography, transportation and communication, transnational issues, and more.

"This guide is designed to help prepare you for deployment to culturally complex environments and achieve mission objectives. ... The guide consists of two parts: Part 1, "Culture General," provides the foundational knowledge you need to operate effectively in any global environment with a focus on the Arab Gulf States. Part 2, "Culture Specific" describes unique cultural features of Kuwaiti society. It applies culture-general concepts to help increase your knowledge of your assigned deployment location. This section is designed to complement other pre-deployment training."

Kuwait is located between Saudi Arabia and Iraq and is larger than the state of Connecticut. Oil has turned Kuwait into one of the Middle East’s richest countries. Its landscape consists almost entirely of flat desert with slight elevations. Approximately 75 percent of the population is Muslim, including nearly all Kuwaiti citizens. Kuwaiti society is generally conservative, in which Islam is a pervasive influence. Sincerity, family ties, and adhering to tradition are important in Kuwaiti society.

Global Issues in Context – Kuwait integrates news, global viewpoints, reference materials, country information, primary source documents, videos, statistics and more to explain the historical and contemporary conditions necessary to understand global issues, conflicts and events.

The changing social history of Kuwait can be broken into three stages: the period before the discovery of oil in Kuwait, the period immediately after the discovery of oil, and the present-day. This essay will explore the influence of Western liberal ideology on Kuwait's traditional Islamic culture especially with regard to gender and Kuwaiti youths.

Adhering to a single national identity does not necessarily mean neglecting ethnicity and religion, and the challenge becomes in keeping the balance between both identities, the national one that is related to being a citizen and the original one that deals with the citizen's background. Keeping this balance in a way that does not allow any identity to neglect the other is usually the answer to a stable society that lives in harmony among its components. Kuwait is an example of such a heterogeneous society that has divisions across tribal, as well as sectarian, lines.

Link to the full text of this historical study that focuses on the establishment of two women's organizations -- the Arab Women's Development Society in December 1962 and the Kuwait Women's Cultural and Social Society in February 1963. To sway the negative image of women in a patriarchal society, women used activism as a public relations tool to achieve their social, civil and political rights.