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.

This paper analyzes two arenas of elite and popular mobilizations in early independence Lebanon (1943-1958). The first centered on the cost, ownership, and working conditions of two public utilities: tramways and electricity. Focusing on Beirut, I explore the interaction of consumers, workers, businesses, and government officials. The second arena involved the fate of the agricultural sector. Focusing on the Beqaa Valley, I specifically attend to the interactions of landowners, peasants, and would-be rural émigrés. Conflict around both these systems represented two of the central arenas of elite and popular mobilizations that constituted the broader set of struggles to define the political economy of Lebanon, which was ultimately organized around an open laissez-faire service-based economy. First, I explore the shifting patterns of alliances and conflicts that animated these struggles, which ultimately shaped the nature of state-market relations in the post-colonial political economy of Lebanon. I highlight how these struggles were informed by the normative and institutional legacies of the Ottoman Empire and French mandate, but ultimately shaped by the strategies of elite and popular groups that were mobilized around said institutional arrangements: public utilities and land tenure. Neither sectarian (e.g., Maronite vs. Sunni) nor sectoral (e.g., commercial vs. industrial) interests alone sufficiently explain the patterns of alliance and conflict under consideration. The model of collective action that I utilize locates agency in networks that cut across classes, sectarian identities, and corporate interests, bringing together partners who might be united for particular short- or long-term goals. These networks were manifested through both formal (e.g., party affiliation) and informal (e.g., marriage) relationships. Second, I analyze how “the Lebanese state” was (re)produced through specific representational practices that were normalized through these struggles. Explicit discourses about the state and the economy saturated public cultural texts, including newspapers, government reports, and political leaflets. I thus argue that the making of specific state institutions (and thus Lebanon’s economy) was itself the making of “the Lebanese nation-state” as a form of political sociability. Both lines of inquiry—the struggles around public utilities in Beirut and land tenure in the Beqaa Valley as well as the attendant cultural constitution of “the Lebanese state”—shed light on processes of state and market formation in early independence Lebanon. Thus, my paper poses a challenge to prevailing narratives of Lebanese politics in these years and highlights the contingency of state-led economic development in the Middle East and other late developing countries.

This paper explores the emergence of the “oil economy” as a field of knowledge under which the “question” of labor was “managed” in the oil producing states of the Gulf, particularly in Bahrain. Its particular focus is the historic anxieties that States and Oil corporations in the Gulf have had about labor movements. I argue that these anxieties were the direct result of labor unrest in Bahrain and throughout the Gulf during 1950s and 60s. This is also why the study of the Gulf has since then been conducted through the notion of “political risk.” This paper historicizes this form of knowledge as part of the emergence of a broader category, that of the “oil economy” through which governments and corporations continue to separate labor from questions of popular sovereignty, representation, and rights. Using a variety of sources from colonial, corporate, and local archives in Bahrain, I explore this historic alliance of regimes and oil firms that came out of the experience of nationalist and labor agitation at mid-century. The period in which workers were de-unionized, re-trained, and “rationalized” after the unrest of the 1950s and 60s forms the historical element of the paper. Critically, I argue that the disciplinary and administrative capabilities of the multinational oil corporation was formative to the emergence of the State capabilities in the 60s, as a formal process of “rationalization” was completed before it was “safe” to grant the new Gulf States their “independence” in the 1970s. The paper is part of a broader dissertation that aims to analytically and historically connect the social history of labor to oil, the state, and the oil firm at the productive core of the transnational oil industry.

To follow.