The hundredth–year (hijri) anniversary of the 1902 conquest of Riyadh by the founder of the modern Saudi state has triggered major initiatives since the late 1990s to document the country’s nascent history. The attendant multi-billion dollar archives, museums, and urban redevelopment projects were among the many efforts to institutionalize and memorialize an officially sanctioned discourse of the Saudi past. The elision of oil—and the multi-pronged struggles that make up its social life—from the new material record and built environment is striking. The recent failure of attempts by a Saudi state archive to obtain records from the ARAMCO archives in order to “document oil” in Saudi Arabia is equally telling. Why is oil, so pervasive in our imaginations of Saudi Arabia, so absent in the new cultural and urban landscapes? How can we think through the ways in which producers of historical knowledge have actively relegated oil to matters of exploration, production, and wealth, as a platform for us to understand how the political economy of oil has co-constituted political, economic, and social life in Saudi Arabia and beyond? What is the relationship between the politics of historical representation and the very real, and often violent, struggles that went into appropriating and consolidating the oil economy in the mid-twentieth century? In this paper, I pursue such questions by attending to the centrality of the 1950s anti-imperialist movements, and the power struggles they heralded, to the making of the Saudi state form. The disciplining of oil laborers who went on strike, along with their anti-imperialist supporters, is one among many moments of state sanctioned violence that counter the national fiction that undergirds the modern state. After all, demands for social justice and political participation threatened the interests of the ruling family, the oil company, and by extension, the world economy. In this context, the commemoration of the national fiction in everyday life and the emergent spatial politics that saturate the Saudi population’s national consciousness are thus deployed today to reproduce the power of the state and project a disciplined future, and by extension, a disciplined Saudi citizen. By using records from Saudi state, private, and newspaper archives, I argue that this particular historical juncture in the mid-twentieth century has had salient effects on the consolidation of the Saudi state and the oil economy as well as the shaping of social relations.