Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia (review)

Toby Jones opens his history of the struggle to control nature in Saudi Arabia by describing the government’s unrealized November 1976 proposal to tow a 100-million-ton iceberg from Antarctica to the Red Sea coast. The vignette illustrates his claim that the Saudi ruling family’s authority has rested as much on water and agriculture as on oil exports, though revenue from petroleum made it possible to contemplate such “fanciful” schemes as iceberg relocation (p. 1).

Based on research in Arabic and interviews conducted in the kingdom during 2003, Jones’s book is one of the most important about modern Saudi Arabia. But he rejects Saudi exceptionalism and avoids describing even the most hubristic development projects with a Kubla Khan exoticism. For him, Saudi Arabia is a central case for studying the relationship between technical expertise and political authority in the twentieth century. He features the transnational networks of experts on whom the Saudis relied to consolidate their hold on the Arabian Peninsula, as well as the domestic dissent arising from marginalized Shiite Muslims who did not enjoy the promised benefits of Saudi rule. The kingdom was not merely a petrostate, Jones explains, “but also a modern technostate, one in which science and expertise, scientific services, and technical capacity came to define the relationship between rulers and ruled” (p. 14).

In seven clearly written chapters, Jones analyzes how the Saudis used the supposedly apolitical discourse of “scientific expertise as a justification for increasingly intrusive efforts to manage and remake nature and society” (p. 13). The first experts enlisted in this campaign came from U.S. oil companies that formed the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco). Geologist Karl Twitchell helped to map the kingdom’s borders; anthropologist Federico Vidal studied nomads drawn to Aramco’s huge Ghawar oil field and populations settled in the eastern oasis of al-Hasa; and entomologist Richard Daggy sought to eradicate the malarial mosquito. In the 1960s King Faisal imported experts from United Nations agencies, American research foundations, and European engineering firms. His most ambitious undertakings were in al-Hasa, where he sought to rescue the kingdom’s largest date-palm oasis from encroaching desert sand dunes and tried to halt the depletion of its aquifer through the massive al-Hasa Irrigation and Drainage Project (IDP). Although it failed to increase date production or save al-Hasa’s water, IDP “lived on in Saudi Arabia’s national narrative as a wondrous achievement” (p. 135). Faith in technology justified additional investments in desalination and desert irrigation that for a time made the kingdom the world’s sixth-largest grain exporter, a policy that one U.S. official described as making “about as much sense as planting bananas under glass in Alaska” (pp. 231–32).

IDP typified Saudi development by seeking “technical fixes rather than attending to many of the underlying social inequalities that caused the problems in the first place” (pp. 126–27) and Jones masterfully explains how irrigation practices in the kingdom’s Eastern Province reflected Shiites’ subordination to Sunnis. Using neglected Arabic periodicals and recent interviews, Jones describes how Shiite dissidents contrasted the relative squalor of their communities with the gleaming oil cities of Dhahran, Dammam, and al-Khobar. Their protests culminated with popular demonstrations in November 1979, violently suppressed by the government, the same month that Sunni radicals seized the Great Mosque in Mecca. In response, Saudi leaders began emphasizing their Islamic credentials over their scientific ones, at least until September 11, 2001. Since then, King Abdullah has dedicated the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, and the Saudi government has acquired vast tracts of agricultural land in Africa and Southeast Asia. “These agricultural projects—the kingdom’s latest attempt to control nature on a grand scale—“distribute the political risks and consequences abroad” (p. 235).

Jones confronted challenges in gaining access to sources, challenges still faced by specialists who study the kingdom, but...