Qahwa Sada

Book Forum: America's Kingdom

While the redesign of the main Qahwa Sada site is still underway, and will probably relaunch after the holidays, I am delighted to present the first Qahwa Sada Book Forum.   These Book Forums will discuss new books in Middle East Studies, with the author and a few critical discussants and hopefully commentors joining in the discussion.   Our first Book Forum features America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier, by Robert Vitalis (Stanford University Press). 

 

America's Kingdom is a fascinating and highly provocative book.   Today, we kick off with initial framing remarks by Bob Vitalis, followed by commentary by two Gulf experts: F. Gregory Gause III (University of Vermont) and Toby Jones (formerly of the International Crisis Group, and currently at Swarthmore College).  I'll weigh in with my comments tomorrow. Everyone else is encouraged to comment here (general comments on this post, specific comments on the appropriate post) or over email!

UPDATE:  I have collected and edited the forum into a PDF file which can be downloaded here:   Download AmericasKingdom.pdf .  Great work everybody!

Vitalis: America's Kingdom

Qahwa Sada Book Forum:  America's Kingdom, by Robert Vitalis

Writing America’s Kingdom
Robert Vitalis

I want to thank Greg Gause, Toby Jones, and especially Marc Lynch for the chance to discuss my new book with three very sharp thinkers. What I will do to kick off the discussion is rehearse the book’s main arguments, briefly, and the objectives in writing it.  I also want to consider in a way that I wasn’t able to in the book itself some steps in the crafting of it. For a website devoted to Middle East scholarship, the latter points might prove interesting and, ideally, useful. However, I also assume some, maybe most readers on this site want to know why a book about the 1940s and 1950s matters today and not just to professors and graduate students, how it helps us in understanding America in the Persian Gulf and in the world now. I’ll tell you what I think, and then let’s see what my colleagues say.

America’s Kingdom is most basically about the organization of the labor process in the oil industry in Eastern Saudi Arabia during the time when the private U.S.-owned company known as ARAMCO was charge of exploration and production, starting in the 1930s. My book identifies the racist order built by ARAMCO in Dhahran and the other company campsites for what it is, a Jim Crow system, meaning that its white American executives pursued a purposeful, planned project of discrimination and forced segregation. I show that firms generally in the U.S. mining industry organized the labor process in this way in, among other places, what was then Indian territory, Arizona, “New” Mexico, and so on, beginning in the 1860s and 1870s in the copper industry, and, a decade or two later in the newly emerging oil industry, and when American oil firms move beyond the Caribbean Basin (Mexico, Trinidad, Colombia, Venezuela) and start to explore for oil in the Gulf and its surroundings.

At stake was what I call the “racial wage.” All firms paid miners, drillers, and other skilled and unskilled labor different wages according to race. And ending the racial wage became the issue that pitted the subordinate races against not only the white owners and managers but also the privileged caste of workers in strike after strike across the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The full panoply of Jim Crow institutions—segregated housing, differential access to services, let alone the degradation and humiliation of white supremacist thought—worked to buttress the labor control regime. The system was exported everywhere U.S. firms went, although it has not been noticed anywhere by anyone writing about oil in the past few decades, with one important exception. The historian Miguel Tinker Salas has been working on a similar project in the case of the Creole (Exxon’s subsidiary) camps in Maracaibo, Venezuela, when oil exploration began there in the 1920s.

I also explain the causes for, in this case, the halting and partial steps to dismantle the Jim Crow order inside the kingdom, which happens during the brief moment of a Saudi labor movement in the 1950s and what I call an incipient challenge to the hierarchy of the camps, the world oil market, and American hegemony launched for different reasons by a set of progressives in government and their allies in the royal family. It is a remarkable, wholly forgotten moment in modern Saudi Arabian history. In the last chapter of my book I tell the sad story of the end of this moment—a Saudi “revolution” is how more than one observer at the time referred to it—and the creation of what I call America’s Kingdom—consolidation of the power of the coalition known as the House of Fahd, which still rules today.

What most analysts, journalists, and oil, business, and diplomatic historians have done until now is reproduce the company’s propaganda unreflectively, when, for example, ARAMCO officials then and retirees now insist that the company led all others anywhere in its dedication to developing the kingdom, uplifting Arab workers, training them to take over the running of the oil industry, and the like. The reality is quite different. The firm’s own records and the testimony of its top officials reveal that its competitors in Iraq and Iran (joint moved faster and further on all the dimensions that Saudi workers began to mobilize to change and that the small Saudi state-building class pressed ARAMCO to honor. I resurrect an explanation that was known at the time but has since been forgotten. To quote from the book,

While all three countries were monarchies, only Iran and Iraq had functioning parliaments, parties, and unions. Populist politics, which emphasized inclusion and redistribution, gained ground in both places after World War II, culminating in the famous nationalization of Anglo-Persian in 1951…and revolution in Iraq in 1958.  Conditions for the nascent Saudi labor movement and the relative handful of officials who sought to move Saudi Arabia in a more inclusive and redistributive direction were, to understate the obstacle of absolute rule, inauspicious, and the firm there had a freer hand to deflect, ignore, and counter demands for fairness and human capital development.

Finally, therefore, I try to trace the origins of these myths themselves and analyze their affinity with ways in which many write, equally problematically, about the histories of firms and states more generally.

The path to overturning the foundational myth about ARAMCO began with reading the vast U.S. state department archive for the 1940s and 1950s (and later the 1960s), where we find detailed records of the strikes that rocked the Saudi oil frontier in those decades. Let me simply note that few other scholars have used these records, and those that have, notably Nate Citino and Sarah Yizraeli, all challenge conventional claims about Saudi state formation and U.S-Saudi relations. It is hard not to. I wrote the first paper on these matters while on leave at Princeton’s Davis Center for Historical Studies in 1995-1996 (published in 1999 and reprinted in the 2004 book I co-edited with Madawi al-Rasheed), which drew mainly on these records and the Mulligan Papers at Georgetown University, which comprise a partial set of company records taken from the kingdom by a retired employee. Like any archive, the Mulligan papers have to be used with great caution, and let’s just say that all the new, rushed-to-press books in the past few years, designed to instruct us anew on the U.S.-Saudi special relationship, treat the materials a bit too reverentially. I eventually worked in seventeen different archival collections during the course of my research.

Just as important as the records themselves, I began a kind of tutorial that year with two historians at Princeton, Steve Aaron and Karen Merrill, who were new assistant professors specializing in the nineteenth and twentieth century American West. The connection with them began with Wallace Stegner, who I knew only as a guy who wrote a terrible history of ARAMCO’s pioneer era, and they knew as one of America’s greatest writers (he indeed is) and influential environmentalist who, they insisted, never wrote a book about oil (he indeed did). Those conversations led me to study the history of mining enterprise and the discovery of what I call the unbroken past of hierarchy across the nineteenth and twentieth century mining frontiers (and some readers will recognize my homage to the recently re-released, path-breaking book by Patricia Limerick, Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West.)

I returned to Princeton University and commuted from there to the New School on a second leave in 1997-1998 to retrain in Afro-American studies with Kevin Gaines, Adolph Reed, and Vicky Hattam, hoping to develop a better understanding of the history of race and racism in the international order during the rise of American dominance or hegemony. I published two pieces on the history of race and international relations that I worked on during the fellowship year, before resuming work once more on America’s Kingdom during a third and final leave at NYU’s International Center for Advanced Study in 2002-2003. ICA was then running a three-year project on the Cold War as Global History. All these strands are woven together in a book that takes seriously the transnational turn pioneered by black theorists and what Dan Rodgers calls post-exceptionalist history writing.

As I came to understand more about why so many before me have gotten the story so wrong, I made it an objective of my book to explain how bound up our views of the world are with two constructs of the cold war. One is the belief that America is “exceptional,” which a lot of people think translates into “better” or “different” but I think Dan Rodgers gets it right when he says it is more as if we think America is insulated from processes that shape the world at large. The relevant example for my book is the idea that unlike all other great powers or would be great powers of the nineteenth and twentieth (and now twenty first) century, America has resisted the imperial temptation or the ancestors learned to get along without an empire or that the so-called neo-conservative cabal is just getting around to building an empire now in Iraq.  The second construct that works basically like a powerful set of blinders on our ability to understand the world is what Toni Morrison calls the tradition of not noticing race. She calls it the “graceful and generous liberal gesture.” The norm against noticing is another construct of the Cold War.

The way I think this all works—to simplify things a little bit here—is that we have an exaggerated sense of time--the distance between the past and present—and space—the distance between something called home and all other places abroad. We might tell one story about the nineteenth century, and even acknowledge some troubled aspects of that “national” history, but as we do so we also distance ourselves from it. The past is always being transcended or obliterated or overcome.  Then we believe there is some coherent nationally bounded story to be told about the United States that has intermittent and sporadic connections with some places and more continuous connection with some other places, all of which have coherent national stories of their own. There is even a kind of logic of comparison across all these different places with their distinct national trajectories (otherwise my colleagues who specialize in comparative politics would be in real trouble). So when I started working on the American West as part of my study of ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia, the historian of the Middle East I know best asked if it didn’t make more sense to look at the British empire in Africa? Others asked even more frequently why I wasn’t studying the British East India Company? Of course, these latter histories are also ones that specialists on the Middle East, including American-born and employed ones, are ones they are more likely to know than ones about American empire in the nineteenth-century West.

The goal I set for myself, therefore, was to write a book that tried to undo these conventions. As I put it in the Foreword,

America’s Kingdom shows why it is imperative that we tear down the wall between the 1940s and all that came before, and that we topple that other, more formidable wall, once understood as dividing races and now as dividing nations or cultures, which protects the myth of an isolated and autonomous history of the United States of America.

Before I do what many or maybe most who are reading the page are anxious for me to do—to stop writing like a professor to other professors and say something about how the book matters for understanding US-Saudi relations today—I want to note for the record that I reject that distinction—it is invidious in fact—that is often made between the campus and the so-called real world.  I think the most important thing my book can do—to the extent that readers come away after finishing it with a new view of the past than the one they started with—is to motivate them to do some work on their own in exposing the struts and bolts of hierarchy, as Toni Morrison puts it, in the present. The basic question to ask is what blinders continue to constrict our understanding about the world generally? The same question is relevant whether you are a student, professor, working person, retiree, history buff, bartender or political activist.

That said, the book demands that the activists work harder on understanding the international politics of oil, starting with the myth that nothing has changed in the decades since the 1950s and that oil companies still dominate Saudi Arabia or other Gulf producing states in the ways I write about (and if you didn’t make this argument yourself or heard it at an antiwar rally, then spend a little time on line and you will find plenty of variants of this idea). Those days are long gone and the challenge is to work out how hierarchy is reinscribed today in the world economy, by whom, and to what end.
Lesson two, needless to say, is to trust nothing written about the U.S. – Saudi relationship by the pundits who play geostrategists on television, the second rate scholars, ex-diplomats, adjunct fellows, and the like that are writing from the Upper East Side and DuPont Circle. Do you recall the early days after 9/11, the handwringing by the kingdom’s “friends” in response to the "Saudis are our enemies" line of the Christians, Israel-first types, Rand consultants, and spies-turned-authors? Check the archival records yourselves. See who was arguing that the so-called special relationship was suddenly in crisis, allegedly, for the first time since Franklin Delano Roosevelt met Ibn Saud on board the U.S.S. Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake (the location of which the Council on Foreign Relation’s Gulf expert is still not quite sure of). My book tells you why 1. I never believed any of this talk and why you should not have either, and 2. Why those same prophets have no good explanation now for why it is business as usual between the United States and the Kingdom. Hint: it doesn't have anything to do with the Carlyle Group.

Finally, there are plenty of so-called experts out there who think that the only thing that stands between the United States and a trouble free relationship with Saudi Arabia and other Middle East states is Israel and the influence of the so-called Jewish lobby. There are people who have argued the same thing every decade since the 1940s. My book shows why it wasn’t true then and, by extension, why it isn’t true now, no matter how many times the Arabists, lobbyists, and energy consultants repeat the myth.

Jones: America's Kingdom

Qahwa Sada Book Forum:  America's Kingdom, by Robert Vitalis

Reading America’s Kingdom
Toby Jones

Bob, your new book America’s Kingdom is a remarkable achievement. In fewer than 300 pages of elegantly and smartly argued prose, you turn the standard approach to writing the history of U.S.-Saudi relations – as well as the history of the formation of the modern Saudi Arabian state – on its head. America’s Kingdom is a brilliant intervention in Saudi studies and will hopefully facilitate equally critical and insightful work in the future.

In spite of my enthusiasm that this may happen, we’ll have to wait and see. As you would no doubt acknowledge, although the investigative work needed to write America’s Kingdom required work in seventeen archives (!), the story was there to be told if earlier scholars had only done the necessary mining of the sources. I’m not sure if their inability to do so reflected choice, laziness or more likely, as you suggest, the Cold War era failure to notice things such as race and racism.

Even for those scholars who will no longer be taken in by the claims of exceptionalism, other challenges remain for critical examinations of Saudi Arabia and/or the American role there. Sources remain hard to come by, particularly with regard to the Saudi side of things. I was fortunate enough to get into the kingdom for ten months in 2003 to carry out research. Even so, it took luck and the assistance of Saudi citizens sympathetic to my project – and critical of the Saudi state – to find the most interesting and important resources for my own work.

One of the things I learned in Saudi Arabia is that a remarkable parallel to the story you tell of ARAMCO is the presence of a powerful sense of Saudi exceptionalism. Here, your application of Dan Rodgers’ formula, which in this instance might be restated as Saudi Arabia seeing itself as “insulated from processes that shape the world at large”, would be appropriate. The volume you edited with Madawi al-Rasheed, Counter-Narratives, touches on this to some extent. But I might go a step further and make that claim that the history of race, state-building, and imperial power in Saudi Arabia in the period after America’s Kingdom ends – say after 1960 – appears to parallel the American story in Saudi Arabia in very interesting ways. I would even argue that to some extent the Saudi approach to the challenges of governing a population that does not see the state as legitimate is to some degree derivative of ARAMCO practices and policies. Hopefully, we can return to this later in the week.

For now, I am compelled by your most basic premise that America’s Kingdom shatters several myths, the most important of which is the long-unchallenged claim advanced by the giant American oil conglomerate ARAMCO and its chroniclers that Americans were a force for good in Saudi Arabia. In a rousing bit of myth-busting, you succeed in showing how ARAMCO fits neatly into a long tradition of American corporate racism, in which the oil giant constructed an elaborate discriminatory residential and professional system that institutionalized the worst abuses of the Jim Crow order.

Like me, however, you probably would not be surprised if few readers were shocked to learn that American oil companies were hardly good citizens abroad. After all, we live in an era of hyper-cynicism about big-business. Even so, it is impossible not to be outraged (if this is still possible) to learn in grim detail the wrenching degree to which ARAMCO not only relied on race to order its operations in Saudi Arabia, but also the ways in which company managers ignored and sought to circumvent those (the Saudi victims of racism) who challenged its discriminatory practices.

For me, one of the most revealing aspects of this sordid history is that ARAMCO managers understood well the racist order they constructed – it was a deliberate act – and were even embarrassed enough about it to excise references to their discriminatory practices from the company’s promotional materials, including company histories and even a feature-length film. Not once, did their embarrassment and clear understanding of wrong-doing lead to a reversal in company policy. Not once.

Worse, by the mid-1950s when the company began to face sustained periods of labor unrest and challenges to its racism, ARAMCO stood firm and sought ways to avoid solving the specific problems their discriminatory policies were generating. As you note, ARAMCO managers deployed Cold War rhetoric to mask the substance of the grievances levied against them, deflecting criticism by charging their critics with being communists and agitators for the overthrow of the Saudi and American political order. Given that this was the same tactic used to smear Civil Rights advocates in the United States, this does not come as much of a surprise. It is interesting to note that the Saudi state also came to mimic the same line, charging dissenters with sympathy for communism as a method for undermining their potential appeal, not to mention as a pretext for cracking down on them. In this respect, American Cold War logic and discourse proved highly malleable and portable.

As important as the details of the practice of racism on the ground are in your recounting, America’s Kingdom is perhaps more important for what it suggests about the role of ARAMCO and racism in the shaping of American political power abroad and what we might come to think of as American empire. It is clear from your account that American “hegemony” in Saudi Arabia did not conform to our typical perception of how empire works. In the kingdom, American political interests followed ARAMCO and, in fact, those interests were subordinate to ARAMCO for several decades. It is beyond dispute that ARAMCO and its racist ways played the paramount role in shaping not only American policy but also the Saudi political order.

You point out the fascinating ways that this took shape as well as the important ways in which Saudi state-builders and leaders pushed back against American power. Saudi Arabia proved no mere puppet and the United States proved no Great Britain. And yet, at the end of the day, American hegemony in Saudi Arabia was no less nefarious than those formal empires that dominated the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. As you show the Americans played no small role in undermining the kingdom’s potential transition to a more liberal political order at the end of the 1950s, even if the U.S. did not actually orchestrate the ascension of the highly bureaucratized and institutionalized authoritarian political system that followed.

In later years, in the 1960s and well into the 1970s, other American organizations and firms actually helped strengthen the authoritarian character of the Saudi state (not to mention Saudi sovereignty itself) by bolstering the operation of various police forces and governing ministries. And, given that the ruling al-Sa¬ud came to rule over communities and territories that despised them, it may be true that even if the story of ARAMCO and the United States in Saudi Arabia is not one of formal empire, it may well be a story in which they trained the kingdom’s leaders how to maintain one themselves.

Gause: America's Kingdom

Qahwa Sada Book Forum:  America's Kingdom, by Robert Vitalis

Reading America’s Kingdom
F. Gregory Gause III, University of Vermont

   I am tempted to say that the only criticism I can aim at Robert Vitalis’ excellent book is that his publishers chose not to use the blurb they solicited from me on the dust jacket.  I’ve lost the e-mail in which I composed it, so I will just summarize here.  I think there are four reasons why people interested in America and the myth of its exceptionalism, the history of American foreign policy, race relations, Saudi Arabia, ARAMCO, the oil industry, the Persian Gulf and all sorts of other stuff should read this book.  First, Bob takes on really big and important questions about American exceptionalism, American foreign policy and the oil industry.  Second, he does so while staying very close to his sources, many of which have never before been utilized in scholarly work.  Third, he contributes invaluably to our understanding of Saudi Arabia and Saudi-American relations.  Fourth, this is one of the best-written academic books I have ever read.  Bob says he wants his readers to take it to the shore (as they say in Philadelphia; the rest of us would say the beach).  This is one academic book that actually makes good beach reading. 

    The big target of the book is the myth that somehow the United States and American companies were different from the bad old colonial countries like Great Britain and France in their dealings in the “Third World.”  Bob devastates that contention through his careful examination of ARAMCO, which had always put itself forward as an example of how American business dealings with Third World governments and societies were of a higher standard than those of the colonialists.  Suffice it to say that ARAMCO World magazine will not be publishing excerpts of this book.  Bob shows that ARAMCO basically and unapologetically recreated the racial hierarchies of American mining towns in the eastern Arabian desert.  It did next to nothing to advance Saudis in the company.  Its labor practices were antediluvian, making Anglo-Iranian’s treatment of its Iranian workers (you know, the ones who supported Mossadegh’s nationalization in 1951) look good.  I am a more credulous person than Bob, but even I wondered as a graduate student studying Saudi Arabia if the stories about ARAMCO as good corporate citizen in Saudi Arabia were all that believable.  Nobody can think that any more after this book.

    The other big contribution, to my mind, of the book is its treatment of Saudi politics and the Saudi-American relationship in the 1950’s and early 1960’s.  Bob says that this is a book about America, it just takes place somewhere else.  But he helps us to understand this fascinating period in Saudi history much better than anyone else who has written about it (with the possible exception of Sarah Yizraeli).  His target here is the dominant story of “Faisal the reformer,” and he very successfully calls that story into question.  He also makes it clear that the belief that Saudi-American relations were smooth and uncontentious from the arrival of the first Standard Oil of California workers in the 1930’s to the oil embargo of 1973 is groundless.  Bob is not the first to take on this bit of the conventional wisdom (Safran’s book on Saudi foreign policy treated it most directly), but he does an excellent job is showing the ups and downs of Washington’s relationship with Riyadh during the period.   

    So, being an academic, I now have to raise some critical points about the book.  Here is one:

I take Bob’s general point that the whole “Faisal as reformer; Saud as dissolute idiot” story is bunk.  Faisal was not a political reformer.  Saud did appoint the most progressive cabinet in Saudi history in 1960.  But I am not sure that Bob has provided us with a sufficient understanding of how that internal Saudi political fight worked out the way it did.  First, the reformers who are the heroes of Bob’s story here (Abdullah Tariki and Abd al-Aziz Ibn Muammar) really did not have much of a political base.  I think that they were promoted by Saud in an effort to find allies against Faisal.  Once he no longer needed them, they were gone.  So I am not sure that they could have accomplished the kinds of changes the Bob implies they could, including building institutions for popular representation in Saudi politics.  Also, one could make the case that Faisal’s opposition to these guys was not simply the result of his fears of reform (though that would be a part of it).  Faisal probably suspected the reformers of being pro-Nasser, and I think he was probably right to do so.  (Bob knows the record here better than I; I just raise the points and am open to evidence that I am wrong.)  Given that the Saudi ruling elite had plenty to fear from Nasser and Nasserism, Faisal’s stance was understandable, even if you do not like the normative implications.

Second, I think Bob misses what might be the essential dynamic in the internal Saudi maneuvering of this period.  Saud had lost most of his family allies by 1960, a fact which Bob more than adequately documents.  He was left with Talal and the other Free Princes.  As a result, or maybe this was part of a previous plan, Saud relied more and more on his own sons in government.  There were fears among the other brothers that he intended to institutionalize primogeniture, passing rule on to one of his sons and cutting out the brothers.  You do not need to be a tech’ed up rat choicer to figure out that this fear would drive the rest of the family to oppose Saud.

Third, Faisal was no political reformer.  But he did seem to have a better grasp on fiscal realities than did Saud.  Given how much trouble other governments have gotten into when they had to go to the “international community” for help to pay their bills, Faisal’s parsimonious ways with the state budget might have been what Saudi Arabia needed at the time.  Bob provides evidence from contemporary observers that Faisal did not rein in the princes; he just cut the government budget.  That seems like good self-interested politics for a Saudi leader at that time.

    I also want to challenge mildly a point in Bob’s posting about the Saudi-American relationship now.  He said that he never thought that there was a real crisis in the relationship after 9-11, because there had been problems before (the biggest, the oil embargo of 1973-74, was outside the book’s chronological focus) and the fundamental Saudi security dependence on the U.S. and the U.S. interest in Saudi oil always overcame those problems.  I do not disagree with that analysis, but I think that in the post-9-11 period it was touch and go as to whether that dynamic could be sustained.  Not because of the Saudi side, which quickly fell in line with American policy in the “global war on terror.”  Bob frequently cites Toni Morrison’s insight about the power of “not noticing.”  On the American side, the entire relationship has been built around the principle of “not noticing,” or at least the fact that most Americans either do not notice or choose not to notice what happens in Saudi Arabia.  For a brief time (I think it is over) after 9-11, lots of Americans were noticing Saudi Arabia, and did not like what they saw.  There was a risk that there might have been a reassessment in Washington of the Saudi-American relationship – if other things had happened:  Iraq had gone better, Kerry had won in 2004.  None of that happened, and the relationship muddles on.  But I do not think it was nearly as much as a sure thing as Bob does. 

    So much for mild disputation.  This is a great book.  It certainly has changed the way I think about Saudi Arabia and the Saudi-American relationship.  It has changed the way I will present those subjects in my classes.  It is my nominee for the Albert Hourani book award at MESA next year, given to the best book written in the previous year in the field.  (Too bad I am not on the committee.)  I know it was a hard slog writing it.  Thanks for the effort, Bob.