Though formally a work of comparative politics, Robert Vitalis's book occupies the small niche of interesting if impressionistic social science works that includes Mike Davis's City of Quartz (1990) and James Scott's Seeing Like a State (1998). Insights abound, but this book is not designed to test a corpus of theory. The focus is Aramco's operations in Saudi Arabia, from their inception to the mid-1960s. Using corporate source documents in Saudi archives, Vitalis has created a window into the structural racism that pervaded Aramco's operations in Saudi Arabia in its early years.

We may divide the meandering presentation of America's Kingdom into three core themes. The first theme is the political economy and sociology of enclave economies, which is developed through an analysis of U.S. mining operations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the American Far West and Latin America. The second theme is what happens when these established practices are grafted onto the specifically Saudi environment, which gives the book its name. At this level of analysis, the book studies the politics of Saudi resistance to the construction of a racist American petroleum enclave. This resistance is difficult to untangle because the family structure of the Saudi ruling class turns a nominal class struggle into a fight between members of the royal family and factions within a nascent middle-class technocracy.

The third theme is the construction of an ideology of dominance in the United States; the vehicle for analyzing this is a political and literary biography of novelist Wallace Stegner's virtually unknown corporate history of the oil industry's development in Saudi Arabia, a book commissioned by Aramco. Stegner's Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil (1971) was forced into an unusual publishing venue for a Pulitzer Prize winner at the peak of his career, the Beirut Middle East Export Press. The political significance of Stegner's struggle with Standard Oil is that the novelist wanted, in the 1960s, to publish the story that Vitalis now tells. Vitalis uses Stegner's conflicts with Standard Oil as an indirect indicator of the intensely racist and ideologically charged American political environment. Stegner's saga neatly ties the third theme of racist political culture to the previous themes of political economy.

Vitalis's account debunks corporate propaganda and sometimes accords it more attention than it merits: The Aramco corporation did start the myth that it introduced agriculture to Saudi Arabia, but the myth is a long-standing object of derision: In 1951, Douglas Crary (“Recent Agricultural Developments in Saudi Arabia,” Geographical Review 41[July]: 366–83) lampooned the myth, dryly noting: “The introduction of mechanized agriculture into Saudi Arabia is not as recent as popular journalists would have us believe.” Still, the photograph (p. 28) of Ibn Saud playing with a vast model train set at a huge New York banquet table is priceless. This book invites us to meditate on such images and the relationships between political mythmaking and the raw forces of despotism and exploitation.

Favorably priced for pedagogical use, this book is not a basic introduction to the development of Saudi Arabia. Indeed, the author hyperbolically concludes the foreword (p. xx) by saying that the book “is not about Saudi Arabia.” But at a minimum, Chapters 7 and 8 are good “stand alone” resources on the reign (1953–64) of King Saud. He was long derided as a profligate and drunk, and his losing struggle against Faisal is well presented. Faisal emerges as the bastion of reactionary cronyism. King Saud made genuine efforts to support reformers, but the efforts collapsed for want of internal support and due to external pressures that had already felled the monarchies in Egypt and Iraq and were threatening to engulf Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The book's puncturing of the “progressive Faisal myth” is a significant contribution.

Some of Vitalis's judgments regarding Saudi internal policies are in conflict with other, more perceptive insights. He mocks Ibn Saud's efforts to extend agriculture into the kingdom (pp. 70–74), and excoriates his preference for a railroad to a highway from Riyadh to Dammam (pp. 74–76). Both sections, in my view, ignore the emphasis Ibn Saud placed on sedentarization of the nomadic tribes, which was critical to making the kingdom “safe for oil.” Roads are 24-hour conduits for roving bands of Bedouin, and small individual cars and trucks are easier prey than a train. Hafuf had been attacked by Bedouin in Ibn Saud's memory. After conquering the Hejaz, Ibn Saud agreed to let some of the tribes retain some self-governance if their leaders stayed away from the roads. In short, roads were a major headache, and Ibn Saud was right to delay in favor of a railroad. Agriculture, even if feeble, was also crucial, no matter what the cost, because it allowed sedentarization. Ibn Saud could hardly pretend to be a ruler worthy of his oil royalties if itinerant tribes plundered pilgrims in the Hejaz (giving Egypt an excuse to intervene) and roved unchecked among vulnerable oil facilities in the Al Hassa region. As late as 1980, half the population of Saudi Arabia was employed in agriculture (compared to 2% in oil), which received major subsidies in order to break up the tribal zones, move toward more stable property rights, and give the displaced tribes something to do.

Yet Vitalis is dead-on when he observes (p. 171) that the palace building and “waste” of the early regime was a carefully constructed system of patronage. He mentions the early bin Laden family's connections to building contracts, and keeping crews busy was surely a major purpose. But I suspect that the building program was also related to establishing property claims in the mawat (unused, unclaimed lands) and, in effect, legitimizing the upstart monarch as the authority who could presume to assign other unused tracts (and irrigation) to individuals and clans, and thereby create the modern Saudi state. Subsequently, converting some palaces to hospitals and charities (awqaf) was a further link in the patronage chain, which cemented an alliance with the clergy in the system of governance, while no doubt retaining direct and indirect control of the asset. Such expenditures may be “wasteful” from a Western bureaucratic perspective, which assumes secure property, but no one has ever put a price on sedentarization as a path to social peace—and a petroleum bonanza.

America's Kingdom stands peerless as a history of American corporate racism in Saudi Arabia, and is a very good introduction to racism in the U.S. mining industries in general. We may regret that the book ends in the 1960s and thus fails to explore a different form of racism, that of the medallah. Western workers in Saudi Arabia today need to live under the protection of the Saudi state, which harbors them because they are useful, just as Moroccan monarchs once sheltered communities of Jews. Just how and when the racist Aramco enclave became a medallah is the natural question that follows from a study such as this, but Vitalis sticks to his available sources and is silent. Pursuit of this question would require a more detailed look at the relationship between Wahabite Islam and the Aramco enclave than this book provides. The book forces the reader to think about racism as a dynamic force in global politics, even when it is silent on important, related issues. Pushing the reader to engage these themes is a sign of the work's success.