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  • Race Worlds:Discrimination, American-Style, in the Middle East
  • Melani McAlister (bio)
America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. By Robert Vitalis. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007. 353 pages. $29.95 (cloth).

In May 1953, a group of workers at an ARAMCO oil camp in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, walked off the job. The group, which included Saudi nationals, Palestinians, and others, asked for increased benefits and better working conditions, but they also demanded redress on a more volatile issue: the systematic discrimination against non-Americans by management, and the dismissive, racist treatment of Arabs by U.S. employees.

As Robert Vitalis describes the situation in his remarkable study America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier, the Saudi workers in particular were infuriated by this discrimination, and they understood it as intimately related to the "American-ness" of ARAMCO. In the desolate areas where oil was drilled, ARAMCO built company towns where workers lived in strictly segregated compounds. The Americans had their own area, with ranch-style homes, swimming pools, a movie theater, and so on. A group of Italians had decent conditions but with many fewer amenities and inferior food. Other foreigners—Egyptians, Palestinians, Indians, and others—lived together, and they were in turn kept separate from the Saudis. Conditions in the camps grew worse as one descended the ladder from Americans to Italians to "regional" foreigners and finally to the "miserable surroundings of [the] Saudi camp" (92–93).

The workers stayed out for ten days. The Saudi government supported ARAMCO, arresting approximately a thousand of its own citizens before forcibly putting an end to the strike. The U.S. embassy had a very small role to play in these events other than to stolidly back the company, which was, according to the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, "the most important single American interest on the face of the Earth outside the U.S." (164). Not surprisingly, then, the U.S. consul general's account of the strike closely [End Page 1237] resembled ARAMCO's official version; communist involvement, he said, was almost certainly to blame. However, the diplomat also admitted grudgingly, perhaps a "general dissatisfaction" with working and living conditions was also a factor (150–52).

Vitalis, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, has written an extraordinary analysis of oil, politics, and race in Saudi Arabia from the immediate post-World War II period to the early 1960s. This is a truly transnational history, because it is a history of U.S. corporate and political relations abroad as well an examination of the impact—and reworkings—of U.S. race politics on the "new frontier" of Saudi Arabia. Combining political and labor history with a political scientist's attention to global economic systems and some analysis of the role of cultural production, Vitalis intimately links U.S. and Saudi history, and ties both to the global politics of oil. And what connected both national histories and oil power, he argues, was the politics of race—a politics that was "American" and international all at once, and that was everywhere apparent in the Saudi oil industry. As this rich, marvelously researched, and densely argued book makes clear, American studies—long attentive to issues of race and deeply concerned about transnationalism—has a great deal to learn from a detailed study of the ways that state politics and capital accumulation played out on the ground of labor. Examining U.S. history in a global context, we cannot afford to ignore the corporate outposts that brought the United States to the world.

ARAMCO, now Saudi ARAMCO, has its origins in a 1933 agreement that granted Standard Oil of California the right to search for oil in Saudi Arabia. Oil was discovered a few years later, and by the end of World War II, the Arabian American Oil Company was in control of one of the world's most important strategic assets. Over the years, various oil companies controlled ARAMCO, and the financial arrangements with Saudi Arabia varied, but for fifty years, until the late 1980s when the Saudi government took over oil production and refining, ARAMCO was a behemoth of U.S. capitalism...

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