Interpreting the Oil Kingdom: Opportunities and Hazards

Abstract

It is telling that Cambridge University Press commissioned two anthropologists to write its histories of modern Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Having escaped the experience of direct colonial rule, these countries do not fit comfortably into the dominant model of modern Middle Eastern history. It follows that the template for modern Saudi statehood cannot be retrieved from the colonial archives, or the postcolonial corporate ones, for that matter. Instead, it must be cobbled out of disparate parts, some Arabian, some Islamic, and some imported. Few modern states defy the reigning scholarly consensuses of economics, politics, history, and anthropology like Saudi Arabia, a place that on account of oil wealth has been transformed almost beyond recognition in the span of two or three generations. As a rentier-based, kinship-organized, orally inscribed, puritanically orthodox Muslim polity, Saudi Arabia poses problems for the best traditions of graduate training in any single discipline.