For the monarchies of the Arabic-speaking Persian Gulf, tribal capitalism is often used as short-hand to explain the power of pre-capitalist social relations and hierarchies to shape such things as contemporary governance and labor policies. The result of this perspective is that tribal capitalism becomes the primary explanation for contemporary social relations in the Gulf. This understanding of the Gulf States does not give adequate attention to the role of laborers, oil companies, and the British colonial government in the development and maintenance of contemporary governance. To address contemporary labor hierarchies in the Gulf and the role of both pre-oil social forms and the oil industry in shaping these hierarchies, this paper will focus how capitalism can, and often does, create relations of exploitation and oppression that appear pre-capitalist. I will argue that stratification and naturalization of social relations arises out of worker struggles with capitalists. This paper will draw on strikes by Gulf Arab workers in the 1960s in Qatar and Abu Dhabi and the responses by oil company management and the British administration. In formulating a response to worker action, oil company managers and colonial officials relied on tropes concerning tribal relations to explain worker collective action. This resulted in the reification of tribal relations, the invalidation of worker requests and, ultimately, the restructuring of the workforce so that it is made up of migrants who are precariously positioned.

The dramatic rise in oil prices during the 1970s launched a wave of global debates over how Arab petrodollars should be used within international economic and political systems. In the Arab world itself, a new sense of hope that oil wealth could be utilized to create a new world order widely took hold, though there was a wide range of opinion as to the ultimate goals of such an endeavor. This paper analyzes Iraqi and Saudi newspaper articles and political cartoons to reveal the underappreciated role of debates over the international deployment of Arab petrodollars as a means to either uphold or attack the domestic legitimacy of the Baathist regime in Baghdad and the Saudi monarchy in Riyadh. Utilizing a historical, qualitative approach, this research undertakes a close reading of pieces from the Iraqi newspaper al-Thawra and the Saudi newspapers al-Riyadh and al-Medina. As the national governments of these newspapers largely controlled the political messaging of their content, these articles and political cartoons provide a window into how Baghdad and Riyadh sought to advance narratives that legitimized their own rule and delegitimized the other in the eyes of their citizens and the larger Arab reading public. The competing narratives of Baghdad and Riyadh centered around whether or not their international use of petrodollars advanced the causes of the Arab and Third Worlds. My research finds that the relationship of the United States to these two issues dominates these debates. Iraq narrated itself as leading the Arab and Third Worlds in their struggle to end the economic and political exploitation of US imperialism, while condemning the House of Saud for its investments in and trade with the United States. The Baathist regime thus capitalized upon rising anti-American sentiment and the vastly different levels of economic ties between the United States and Iraq and Saudi Arabia to shore up political support at home and abroad. Unable to deny the large number of petrodollars flowing from Saudi Arabia to the United States, Saudi media instead pushed an opposing narrative, in which they emphasized the perceived benefits of economic and political collaboration with the United States, arguing that Saudi-US petrodollar interdependence enabled Riyadh to extract benefits from the United States for Saudi Arabia and the wider Arab and Third Worlds.

In June 2017, three members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, cut political and economic ties with Qatar, their neighbor and fellow GCC member. The boycott or siege of Qatar came shortly after Donald Trump visited Saudi Arabia on his first international trip as president of the United States. Yet while the role of the United States in the recent divisions within the GCC has received considerable attention, the deeper roots of the conflict and the role of the British empire in establishing the political and economic fault lines have been underappreciated. The argument of this paper is twofold. First, it contends that British colonialism, through its shaping of the boundaries and political institutions of the Arab Gulf states, produced lasting international divisions that led to the current crisis within the GCC over Qatar. Second, this paper demonstrates how postcolonial struggles related to the political economy of the media are centrally situated within this crisis. As Qatar has globally advanced its media production, it has increasingly challenged Saudi Arabia's international media empire. A critical recent factor in this struggle is Qatar's selection to be host of the 2022 World Cup. Qatar's hosting of the highly viewed international sports event constitutes a major economic and media shift in the region while at the same time undermining the economic and political roles of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, a challenge they could not allow to go uncontested. Through historical analysis of media production in the Gulf, this paper investigates the contemporary inter-Arab struggle over the political economy of the global media through the lenses of postcolonial politics. Its findings conclude that the current crisis within the Arab Gulf is rooted in the political order and disputes established by British imperialism and then replicated under the system of US hegemony.