America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier

"It may appear that this book is about Saudi Arabia but, in fact, it’s also about America. Vitalis does a very good job of explaining American oil culture and its projection abroad, which I didn’t know a lot about before. I knew about the Saudi side of the work of the oil companies, how people lived in Aramco camps and the kind of work ethic Aramco introduced into Saudi Arabia, which had not known any kind of industry or mass production before. I learned a lot about America and American oil culture and its interaction with indigenous people. As an anthropologist, I found it fascinating to read about how the racism that developed in the US was projected abroad. Vitalis does a great job of explaining how the context of American corporate culture and the racism that goes on in America affected the rest of the world. I was fascinated by how the Arab workers were segregated from the American workers. It’s a story with a lot of strands. You have oil, you have class, you have race and you have gender, because these white American corporate men brought white women as secretaries. “Mohammed bin Salman wants to create a ‘Saudi Nation’. He is responding to or trying to engage with populist nationalism. Like ‘America First’ we now have ‘Saudi Arabia First’” It’s the story of this fascinating world that was planted in the desert. He examines how Saudis reacted to this world, the demands they made and the demonstrations they staged to object to the segregation that the Americans imposed in the Aramco camps. It’s very well written and a meticulous and empirically grounded work. I’m disappointed that because his work tells a truth that many American policymakers don’t want to hear, Vitalis has been sidelined and left uninvited to big events in Washington. I knew a Saudi woman whose father was one of the first Saudis who worked as a translator for Aramco and she grew up in an Aramco camp. She went to the American school and she used to celebrate Halloween and Thanksgiving and Father Christmas in the desert. In one of my books, I followed the oral narratives of the first cohort of Saudis who worked in Aramco. The Americans created a world completely out of place and out of time. It was a walled compound and because there is a lot written about the civilizing role of the American oil company—in terms of introducing education and lifestyle amenities like cinemas, television and—this other aspect is forgotten. This book captures a very interesting moment that a lot of people have forgotten about. Yes, absolutely. He challenges the idea of a civilising mission. They gave some of Aramco’s wealth as oil rent to the monarch of Saudi Arabia, but their culture didn’t actually spread everywhere. Where it did go, it introduced bad practices like segregation and racism. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The other fascinating aspect is how Aramco and the monarchy were accomplices in suppressing workers of all nationalities. Saudi Arabia introduced legislation to ban demonstrations, civil resistance, sit-ins and strikes, simply because the workers in Aramco were doing all these things to demand better wages and better living conditions. The chief executives at Aramco would put pressure on the Saudi government and the Saudi government would send the police force to suppress any kind of protest."