Are you deficient? What was the Middle East selling to the rest of Asia before WWII.
National Geographic: On March 3, 1938, an American-owned oil well in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, drilled into what would soon be identified as the largest source of petroleum in the world. The discovery radically changed the physical, human, and political geography of Saudi Arabia, the Middle East, and the world. Before the discovery (made by the company that would eventually become Chevron), Saudi Arabians were largely nomadic.
Prior to the beginning of the oil era – first in Bahrain in 1932, then in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in 1938, in Qatar in 1940, in the UAE in 1952 and lastly in Oman in 1967 – the Gulf region was one of the poorest areas worldwide, with its economy mainly based on pearl diving, subsistence agriculture.