America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier

Revisionist, new look at U.S.-Saudi Relations

In America's Kingdom, Robert Vitalis refutes popular claims that American-Saudi relations were idyllic for several decades and how the relationship between the two countries came into question, even fell apart, only after 9/11. On the contrary, the book shows how Americans in the Kingdom set up a kind of Jim Crow system or version of American Apartheid in the oil provinces in the 1930s. It traces the rise of a Saudi workers' movement (discussed in this book for the first time) that confronted the Americans in the 1950s. Vitalis makes a compelling case that the rascist system set up in Saudi Arabia was common everywhere American oil firms (and copper mining firms, and so on) set up operations, starting in the American West.  In fact it was part of a broader strategy of American empire building, motivated (somewhat ironically)  by the myth of U.S. exceptionalism. The book tragically shows how the same kinds of injustices that were hallmarks of American oil companies at home and abroad, continue in the world’s newest oil frontiers, in such far-flung places as Baku, Azerbaijan and in Nigeria.