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A review by buermann
America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier by Robert Vitalis
5.0
An authoritative if not exhaustive history of US-Saudi relations between 1930 and 1960 through the primary conduit of that relationship, ARAMCO. He documents the Jim Crow system the American managers of ARAMCO exported to the Saudi Oil fields, and upends much of the generally accepted history of this period as so much company public relations. When workers protested their unequal conditions as early as 1945 ARAMCO responded like any Colorado coal baron and called in the governor to put down the unrest by force, exile, and mass imprisonment. The strikes and organizing were discounted as the products of foreign communist influence, and hushed up in deference to the myth of ARAMCO's mission of development.
In the late 50s King Saud began implementing modernizing reforms -- building professional civil bureaucracies outside the control of the royal family and implementing local municipal elections -- but one of these civil servants in the oil ministry, Abdullah Tariki, performed his job a little too competently and became a thorn in the side of ARAMCO's management. When Saud fell ill and left Faisal in control of much of the country in 1962, Faisal began dismissing civil servants, including the troublesome Tariki. After he became king in 1964, amidst grandiose promises of modern reform, he finished dismantling the nascent civil service in deference to the whim and plunder of the royal family, embracing Wahhabism as a missionary ideology to combat communism (a topic largely elided here: Faisal embraced the exiled Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and founded the Muslim World League), and ending the municipal elections. The official histories remember only Faisal's empty promises and praise him as the reformer, while King Saud is remembered only as a corrupt profligate -- as compared to what other absolute monarchs? -- whose experiments in democracy are rarely remembered at all.
Often clearly written, there are inevitably stretches of tangled prose dealing with myriad interpretations of the available evidence. Vitalis' passion for his subject is evident, and his judicious expressions of humor and indignation lighten the academic load.
In the late 50s King Saud began implementing modernizing reforms -- building professional civil bureaucracies outside the control of the royal family and implementing local municipal elections -- but one of these civil servants in the oil ministry, Abdullah Tariki, performed his job a little too competently and became a thorn in the side of ARAMCO's management. When Saud fell ill and left Faisal in control of much of the country in 1962, Faisal began dismissing civil servants, including the troublesome Tariki. After he became king in 1964, amidst grandiose promises of modern reform, he finished dismantling the nascent civil service in deference to the whim and plunder of the royal family, embracing Wahhabism as a missionary ideology to combat communism (a topic largely elided here: Faisal embraced the exiled Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and founded the Muslim World League), and ending the municipal elections. The official histories remember only Faisal's empty promises and praise him as the reformer, while King Saud is remembered only as a corrupt profligate -- as compared to what other absolute monarchs? -- whose experiments in democracy are rarely remembered at all.
Often clearly written, there are inevitably stretches of tangled prose dealing with myriad interpretations of the available evidence. Vitalis' passion for his subject is evident, and his judicious expressions of humor and indignation lighten the academic load.