il revenues. In fact, this latter eventuality has meant that the development of Kuwait City has been much more a matter of planned growth and development than seems usual with such cities--the government can afford to make decisions about development and then implement those decisions in various programs. Most of the cities in other Third World countries developed more slowly, gathering population and changes over time, and also more haphazardly, depending on economic and other conditions as they changed over time. Kuwait City has also been a hostage to fortune for most of its history, but with the discovery of oil, the Kuwaiti people gained a control over the development of their city that has eluded most Third World peoples.
Kuwait began as a small village selected as a base for bedouin hunters sometime in the seventeenth century. It was known as Kut, a reference to a small fort, and it became a converging point for many of the utub tribes forced out of the Arabian Peninsula by fami
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