America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. It has just been reviewed by Tariq Ali in this month's LRB.
Read an excerpt of the review below (via London Review of Books):
In Princes' Pockets
[...] Critical academic works on the Saudi kleptocracy are rare, however. Many Arab Studies departments on Anglo-American campuses receive generous endowments from the Saudis and other Gulf states. Conferences on the region are often funded from the same source. The money arrives without fanfare and with no conditions explicitly attached, but the recipients are now well trained. Which is why America’s Kingdom comes as a pleasant surprise. Robert Vitalis, who teaches political science at the University of Pennsylvania, has produced a scholarly and readable book on the interaction between Saudi society and Aramco, the US oil giant that had its beginnings when the Saudi government granted its first concessions to Standard Oil of California in 1933. Combining history with political anthropology, Vitalis sheds a bright light on the origins and less savoury aspects of the Saudi-US relationship in its first phase, when oil production was accompanied by the manufacturing of myths that prettified the US presence. In 1955, Aramco funded Island of Allah, a ‘documentary’ about Saudi Arabia. It was a box-office flop. An American novelist, Wallace Stegner (who later founded the Stanford creative writing programme), was hired to write a history of Aramco to make up for the movie’s failure. Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil was written in a month, but was shelved for 12 years by Aramco executives before it was finally published. It was not uncritical enough: Stegner’s mild observations on racism inside the company went down badly.
America’s Kingdom took ten years to research and write and Vitalis has clearly enjoyed himself. He sees Aramco as a microcosm of the colonial order at home and abroad. His aim is to destroy the foundational myths of the company – which he does in style. Aramco’s treatment of the native workforce, he argues, was not unusual, and he describes US mining companies in the late 19th century dealing with indigenous tribes in Arizona and New Mexico in similar fashion. The work camps set up in Saudi Arabia were a replica of what had been tried out in Maracaibo in Venezuela after the discovery of oil there in the 1920s.
The story he tells, of the Aramco workforce’s struggle against the ‘racial wage’, has not been told in detail before: strikes from below, angry confrontations at management level, blatant racial discrimination against Saudi workers and managers and ‘divide and rule’ tactics on the part of Aramco. There were no ‘honorary Whites’ (as the Afrikaners labelled the Japanese) here. Bosses and engineers were exclusively white Americans, many from Texas, most imbued with prejudices which were the legacy of slavery, the Civil War and the institutionalised apartheid that followed the brief flowering of formal equality during Reconstruction. Vitalis mentions the prevalence of Ku Klux Klan membership in the industry (it’s worth remembering that by 1925 the Klan had four million members, making it the largest organised political movement in US history). [...]