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- ********0
mediocrity: a bitter pill
- grunttt0
if supermodels were airplanes this place would be a bus station.
- ********0
1250 days of Sodom
- mr_snuggles0
was dressed for success
but success it never comes
and i'm the only one who laughs
at your jokes when they are so bad
and your jokes are always bad
but they're not as bad as thiscome join us in a prayer
we'll be waiting waiting where
everything's ending here
- pepsi0
I think I caught a cold today
- ********0
sodomite
- ********0
my 2 and a half year old boy broke a chair in his room yesterday and blame it on Elmo ...
I'm so proud!
- canuck0
Son you have mastered the art of transferring blame.
A very useful skill.
- ********0
We should not confuse ideology with message, nor message with meaning. The message belongs in part - that of logic - to ideology, and in the other part - that of irreason - to meaning. The logical message is almost always evil, lying, hypocritical even when very sincere. Who could doubt my sincerity ...
- mr_snuggles0
–
I myself have always found it difficult to treat anything too seriously and I believe the world would be a better place if everyone followed my example. I am completely without ambition. My motto – "It is better to incur a mild rebuke than to perform an onerous task" – should be well known to you all by now. All I want out of life is to enjoy myself. But before one can achieve this happy end one must obviously get hold of a lot of money. Money is essential to a sybarite. It is the key of the kingdom. To which you, the carping reader will almost certainly reply, "You say you are without ambition, but do you not realize that the desire for wealth is in itself one of the most obnoxious ambitions of them all?" This is not necessarily true. It is the manner in which one acquires wealth that determines whether or not it is obnoxious. I myself am scrupulous about the methods I employ. I refuse to have anything to do with money-making unless the process obeys two golden rules. First, it must amuse me tremendously. Second, it must give a great deal of pleasure to those from whom I extract the loot...–
––
- ********0
I've read that before somewhere
- mr_snuggles0
higher up in the blogging order...
- ********0
check
- ********0
jocularity conceals social anxiety
- ********0
Fortitude. Radio countermeasures division broadcast 13, 358 phony messages, 230 a day during the operation. After the war, it was discovered that only two of the messages broadcast were noted by the Germans.
- ********0
Alan furst
- Teeuwen0
1
Captive Narratives: A Brief and Unexceptional
Introduction to the History of Firms and States
Doheny didn’t overlook the visual arts. He commissioned a European painter, Detleff
Sammann, to create a mural on the walls of his study at 8 Chester Place. Doheny
proposed that the whole work depict the history of the United States—from the arrival of
the pilgrims to the discovery of oil, the latter scene showing Doheny and his late partner,
Charles Canfield, discovering oil in old Los Angeles in 1892.1
Al-Tih or The Diaspora, the first book in Abdelrahman Munif’s quintet, Cities of Salt, begins the
story of oil development and the emergence of a workers movement in Saudi Arabia in the 1940s
and 1950s. He calls the kingdom “Mooran” but we know he is writing about the place he fled in
1963.
Back then, the young Munif had joined workers, intellectuals, and other dissidents in calling on
the ruling family, the Al Sa`ud, to accept constitutional limits on its arbitrary and absolute power.
That moment ended in defeat for him and his comrades. Munif lived the rest of his life in exile. As
we will see, others were not so lucky. When he died in Damascus in 2004, a new generation of
Saudi dissidents was once again taking up the call for political reform and once again being
imprisoned for challenging the despotism of a still intact Saudi oilgarchy.
In conjuring the past, a world before oil, the writer turns to one of the most familiar tropes in
western literature: the garden paradise that exists as if outside of time.
Wadi Al-Uyoun: An Outpouring of green amid the harsh, obdurate desert, as if it
had burst from within the earth or fallen from the sky. It was nothing like its
surroundings, or rather had no connection with them, dazzling you with curiosity
and wonder:
But the wonder vanished gradually, giving way to a mysterious respect and
contemplation. It was one of those rare cases of nature expressing its genius and
willfulness, in defiance of any explanation.
2
It is the coming of the Americans to Mooran and its oasis town Wadi al-Uyoun that sets history in
motion in Cities of Salt, and history sweeps away the townsmen and their families. The oil drillers
destroy the lush oasis, and the residents of Wadi al-Uyoun are forced to abandon their homes.
Some will—it seems are destined to--build a new form of solidarity as workers in the oil camps on
the Gulf coast.
The destruction of Eden has served countless writers and, in our own time, filmmakers who
continue to tell stories of nature, natural forms of solidarity, whole peoples and ways of life
destroyed by forces coming from the outside, setting a certain train in motion: the White Man,
western technology, capitalism, the railroads, or the oil industry. Consider, just in the case of the
American West, Pulitzer Prize-winner Wallace Stegner’s early novels. Or leaf through one of the
lavish 1960s photo essays by conservationist groups like the Friends of the Earth or the Sierra
Club. Watch Dances with Wolves (1990). Many of us still cling so tightly to the belief in the
existence of something like a pristine “wilderness,” an unspoiled nature or people, that even
where scholars have tried taking apart these myths, it hardly makes a difference.
Other myths, though, loom even larger in popular imaginaries than the ones about a wilderness’s
end and a paradise’s loss. Munif and others have been, consciously or not, substituting one fable
for another more powerful and apparently productive one about a people’s (or ruling family’s)
ability to escape a history that has trapped all those less fortunate tribes and races before them.
Two centuries ago Americans began to speak about the Anglo-Saxons’ manifest destiny. And in
the 1930s men in the pay of the Court in Riyadh and the oil company in San Francisco—men
such as Amin Rihani, Hafiz Wahba, Khayr al-Din al-Zirkali, Karl Twitchell, St. John (`Abdallah)
Philby, and George Rentz—began to imagine a unique destiny of the Al Sa`ud to unite the lands
and tribes of the Arabian Peninsula and form a modern nation-state, the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia, in 1932. The scholars among them, the Orientalists as they were then known, might
underscore the religious dimensions of unification (tawhid) but for American audiences King `Abd
al-`Aziz, referred to in the west as Ibn Saud, would be called Arabia’s George Washington.
There can be no unique and providential course for a chosen people unless there is also the
other, conventional or normal path traveled by the rest. Professors have a name for this way of
3
thinking about and writing the history of a state or people, one that underscores its exception to
presumed general historical tendencies or what Marxists call the laws of historical motion. We call
it exceptionalism. There is no small irony in the fact that this term, used to describe the dominant
paradigm or template for the writing of American history is owed to Joseph Stalin, or so Princeton
Professor Daniel Rodgers argues in the best short account I know of exceptionalism as one
powerful way of imagining the course of a people through time.2
Rodgers’s essay makes two key contributions to our understanding of the idea. First, he
underscores the misapprehension in a standard skeptic’s response to the concept that some
people’s past is exceptional. The skeptic’s argument goes that all nations or states are unique or
special in their own way. This view mistakes exceptionalist history writing for an argument about
difference. “Exceptionalism differs from difference,” as Rodgers puts it, so perfectly and
succinctly.
Difference requires contrast; exceptionalism requires a rule. Difference feeds on
polarities and diversity; exceptionalist claims pin one’s own nation’s
distinctiveness to every other people’s sameness—to general laws and
conditions governing everything but the special case at hand... There are no
exceptions without well-understood generalizations or norms in contrast to which
the exception commands attention... When difference is put in exceptionalist
terms, in short, the referent is universalized. Different from what? Different from
the universal tendencies of history, the “normal” fate of nations, the laws of
historical mechanics itself.3
Professional history writing and those social science frameworks that look like history writing
embraced exceptionalism after World War II. The latter “theoretical schools” have different names
in different disciplines and in different sections of the professional associations, including
American political development, historical-comparative and historical-structural analysis,
dependency theory, historical sociology, and so on. These schools and approaches are the ones
that wrestled with the problem of absences, why America had no socialism, why the third world
4
had no bourgeois revolutions, why Germany was not democratic (then) or why the Middle East is
not democratic (now).
The Cold War era invited if it did not require the accounts of the course that led to the American
century, that solved the a putative puzzle about escaping the fate of Europe, and explained what
seemed like liberalism’s rapid progress and imminent triumph over the race, class, and ethnic
divisions that had shaken the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was a time when
some of the most brilliant thinkers insisted on a new, so-called realism in foreign affairs, defined
against old, hopelessly idealist and utopian visions about ending war or transcending capitalism,
and, without a hint of irony, also insisted that a color-blind society was within easy reach. Finally,
it was the moment when the long course of American empire was forgiven and forgotten.4
Today’s Intellectual historians of that earlier era, such as Dorothy Ross and Dan Rodgers, also
see the undercurrents, dissident histories, and more ironic readings that were being produced at
the edges of the exceptionalist consensus. These alternatives would emerge as a full-blown
challenge by the 1970s and 1980s.5 As Rodgers notes, though, “nothing showed the massive
presence of exceptionalist assumptions more than the difficulty critical historians of the 1960s and
1970s had in surmounting them.” His main example is the effort to bring American empire back
in (“an empire which had been all but suppressed from political memory”) by the great William
Appleman Williams and his students in the Wisconsin School. As they and the many who are
indebted to them argued, it was an empire, all right, but a different kind of empire rooted in
America’s unique experience and values.6 These ideas about American exceptionalism on the
world stage were the reigning ideas at the time when ARAMCO was operating full blast in Saudi
Arabia, when it hired Wallace Stegner, himself a dedicated exceptionalist, made films, took
journalists on tours, and subsidized scholars and Middle East Centers, and when the first
generation of radical critics of American Gulf policy were writing. We are forced to wrestle with
this legacy among the professors and, worse, the obliviousness to what has since transpired in
the history and social sciences, a matter of pride for today’s journalists, historians-for-profit,
memoirists, and the like, who recycle the old myths.
5
Rodgers’s second crucial point is that the American historical profession once wrote in a different,
unexceptional register. There was a time before exceptionalism’s triumph. Consider the once
dominant explanation for the sources of American institutions in the natural racial-evolutionary
development of Teutonic “germs” that produced the Anglo-Saxon race. Men like the historian
Herbert Baxter Adams and his student, the political scientist, Woodrow Wilson, pursued these
ideas in their work. The concept of nation could not be clearly distinguished from the
understandings of race of which it was an indissoluble part. America was not so much
exceptional, different from all other nations, as it was the highest stage of a common whiteness.
Historian Frederick Jackson Turner, perhaps the most famous historian of the twentieth century,
offered an exceptionalist twist on the argument, through which he would account for America’s
uniqueness despite the common Teutonic origins of its institutions. Turner argued that the
successive frontiers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century remade Anglo-Saxons into
Americans, interrupting or confounding the normal laws of social evolution.
While exceptionalism gained the high ground in the ensuing decades, there were other
progressive historians, materialists, as we once liked to say, who insisted on seeing America in
terms of global economic processes and forces. “As for the giants of early twentieth-century
American history-writing—Charles Beard and W. E. B. Du Bois—they had absorbed too much of
class and economic analysis and instinctually thought on too large, world canvasses to be
exceptionalists.” We might add to this list a young historical-oriented political scientist, Ralph
Bunche, and a young historical-oriented sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox who wrestled with the
dialectic of race and class in ways that prefigured the world systems analysis of the 1970s and
1980s, using terms that we have not yet escaped. We ought to add as well, though, that Bunche,
Cox, and, most remarkable of all, Du Bois, would be dropped from the professors’ reading lists for
at least a generation. Barrington Moore could publish his Social Origins of Dictatorship and
Democracy in 1966 on America’s distinctive road to modernity, rooted in an argument about the
civil war and its consequences, and yet not cite Du Bois’s masterful Black Reconstruction, written
thirty years earlier.
6
Finally, Rodgers’s offers as succinct a statement as I know of the move that defines the history
writing of the past two decades, what he calls a postexceptionalist history. “The question of
difference was, from the beginning, false and tautological. The antithesis at the core of
exceptionalist history was never that between difference and sameness but between autonomy
and connection.” I would make the point plainer still. The places and peoples across what we
now call the United States have always been linked in complex ways to other places and people
beyond the shifting borders of the Republic. This is not just true only for the nineteenth century or
only after 1945. Nor is it reducible to the idea of common “external” shocks or “transnational
forces” that spring a national elite (or a tribal chief) into action to steer the state toward some
unique end or to forge a distinct path to the same one, modernity. Rather capital, nomads,
copper, oil, workers, ideas, intellectuals, missionaries, terrorists, soldiers, slaves, and spies,
moving constantly across the so-called frontiers, borders, and seas, are all part of one, ongoing
story. It is an extremely hard one to tell.
Saudi Exceptionalism
I participated in a conference in February 2004 on Saudi Arabian politics and society where a
prince in attendance argued, “sometimes I think we Saudis were dropped out of the sky and
landed on the earth, like we are extraterrestrials, because no models or theories fit our special
circumstances. We are always contradicting them all.”7 The first thing I thought was shades of
Munif and Wadi al-Uyoun fallen from the sky! The second thought was that his claim is as good
an example as any of a mostly unrehearsed defense of Saudi exceptionalism. The idea of Saudi
Arabia’s politics and society being unlike any other place anyone else has encountered is so
commonly held by many who should know better that it seems not to need a defense. The third
was that, the prince’s claim notwithstanding, there is at least one model that Saudis use regularly
to tell the story of the “birth of the Saudi state,” particularly although not exclusively so when
telling it to westerners. It is the one first told by westerners in fact and perhaps compelling to us
until now for that reason. The state was forged by conquest, back a long time ago. And its great
7
leaders managed against all odds to keep imperialism at bay.8 Other Arab countries were not so
lucky, their leaders not so gifted.
Saudis seem to think it fits “their reality” really well in fact. Consider for example the full-page
advertisement that Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin `Abd al-`Aziz al-Sa`ud, the kingdom’s
ambassador to the United States since 1983, placed in the Washington Post on July 4, 1994,
American Independence Day. "The Saudi state has been around in one form or another since
about 1744, a quarter of a century before the American Revolution." The comparison with
America’s independence day has some problems, as we will see, but Bandar and his public
relations people were not worried about making professors happy and getting the comparison
right. Rather, the intention was to convince readers that a regime with such deep roots had no
fear of a budget crisis that year that had professional Saudi watchers and the U.S. Treasury
wringing their hands and the Post's editors discovering on June 23, 1994, not for the first time,
that the prince was the face in Georgetown of "a repressive one-family state" running a "routine"
torture regime shrouded in "feudal secrecy."
Still, the idea that the Saudi state is even older than America is a rather strange one given that
the kingdom was founded in fact in 1932, that is, about two hundred years after the date noted in
the advertisement. What logic lets Bandar draw a straight line from 1744 to the twentieth
century? Basically, at some but not all points over those two earlier centuries Bandar’s ancestors
ruled one of the many tiny emirates—a town or two and some of the tribes that claimed grazing
and raiding rights over the nearby country—that had risen in central Najd. St John Philby once
likened the system of emirates to the Middle Ages in Europe when hundreds of tiny principalities
existed in the place of the relative handful of nation states we know now. In 1744, the Al Sa`ud
tried to extend the frontiers of its domain in the name of a new and puritanical Islamic reform
movement, which westerners call Wahhabism. It is the beginning of this expansionist episode that
Bandar is thinking of when he imagines a Saudi state “in one form or another.” He doesn’t tell you
that one of those forms is imaginary or a mirage or an aspiration for the future.
Comparing the moment of expansion to the moment of American independence doesn’t make
much sense. In the comparable parable, where the original germ of some future political entity is
8
imagined to begin to spread, it is not the 1776 U.S. declaration of independence that matters but
instead the founding of the first permanent settlement in North America in 1607 or perhaps the
Puritans splashing ashore in New England in 1630. Stephen Webb would probably argue for the
1650s when, he insists, "the structures of politics, administration, and ideology that still mold our
governmental institutions and direct our imperial aspirations" were consolidated before England
reasserted its control via a protectorate.9 Even counting from this latter date, Bandar would have
to concede that whatever tribal confederation Webb sees as comprising the people that were
carriers of that originating ideology still have a century over the Al Sa`ud.
Bandar might also have noted for the Post’s readers that, like so many of those little principalities
in Europe, his family’s amirate was wiped off the face of the earth. This key fact is what makes
the comparison with American independence in 1776 so fantastically misguided. That date, 1776,
commemorates the successful defense of a sovereignty claim by the American colonies through
victory in war with a European great power. The norms governing relations among the emerging
European state system dictated recognition of the new state’s strong empirical assertion of
sovereignty. The same would have been true for an enlarged Arabian emirate—a Saudi state in
other words--if only Bandar’s ancestors had succeeded and a state had actually been built.
Unfortunately when the Saudi-led, Wahhabi inspired army crossed Najd to sack the holy cities on
the Red Sea, the dominant imperial power, the Ottomans, launched an expedition from Egypt that
crushed the movement and razed its towns.
The lands, towns, and scattered peoples of Najd remained nominal possessions of the Ottomans
until 1915. They just didn’t matter much to the Sultan, however, in comparison either to the rich
oases and small ports to the east in al-Hasa, along the Persian Gulf shores or the western towns
of the Hijaz along the Red Sea, where the holy cities of Mecca and Medina were found. Warring
emirates fought for regional dominance and control, in Najd and were more or less left alone by
the imperial center.
[MAP OF SAUDI ARABIA HERE]
The Al Sa`ud tried twice more to reclaim and extend its domains, once in the 1840s, when the
clan again failed and was driven into exile, and in the early 1900s. The outcome of the last long
9
wars of conquest in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the towns and most of the
tribes of Najd were ruled by the Rashids in Qasim, and an independent Arab Kingdom existed in
Hijaz, was hardly determined. Saudis like to think of the outcome as destiny. Professors prefer a
more complex and contingent story about how the Saudis went from the conquest of Riyadh in
1905 to ruling over the Peninsula in the 1920s, and we would underscore the decisive fact of
intervention by the then great power, Great Britain, which let one troublesome client in Hijaz go
down in defeat at the hands of a new and more reliable one, Ibn Sa`ud.
The twist in the story that everyone seems to forget is that Ibn Sa`ud signed a treaty with Great
Britain that conceded sovereignty rights for protection in 1915. In 2005 we refer to “security” and
“long-term strategic relationships” rather than protection. Nonetheless, the new Saudi emirate-information
in Najd represented one of the last pieces of Middle East real estate brought formally
into the empire. Great Britain declared a protectorate over Egypt too that same year, formalizing
its two-decade old occupation. In 1919 the League of Nations assigned to London the “mandates”
of Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine. These latter three countries were, basically, protectorates too
in all but name. Protectorates represented the old imperialism. Mandates were intended to
represent something slightly new. A key difference with both Egypt and with Iraq, where the
British were forced to put down rebellions and advance the date of independence, is that the
Najdi amir, `Abd al-`Aziz, chose formally to pledge allegiance to the British empire at a moment
when Egyptians and other colonized peoples were advancing claims to the right to national self
determination. One couldn’t blame Ibn Sa`ud, of course, given the prospect that without British
protection the lands he had conquered would likely be lost to those bigger, more powerful nearby
states. International recognition of the rival independent kingdom of Hijaz the next year, in 1916,
under the banner of the Arab nationalist movement, though, created a serious dilemma for the
ruler of the new Najdi protectorate, which intensified when Egypt gained its independence in
1922. The Saudis seemed to be moving in the opposite direction.
There are two points to make about the recognition in a second British treaty of `Abd al-`Aziz Ibn
Sa`ud's "complete and absolute" independent rule of the twin kingdoms of Hijaz and of Najd and
its Dependencies in 1927, renamed the single or amalgamated Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932.
10
One is that the juridical status accorded `Abd al-`Aziz's newly independent countries did little to
alter the reality of the king's dependence on the British or the extent to which the imperial power
checked Ibn Sa`ud's autonomy more effectively than he could ever hope to do in his own
dependencies and protectorates, al-Hasa and Asir. Most crucial is that Ibn Sa`ud never attempted
war against his British-allied rivals in Jordan and Iraq for the territories he claimed belonged to
him. Instead, he had to resign himself, as later would his sons, to borders and frontiers imposed
by others.
The second and more critical point is that Saudi Arabian independence illustrates the
transformation in the norms of the interstate system ushered in by World War I and Versailles. As
Robert Jackson argues, the strong presumption in earlier centuries that sovereignty depended on
a positive capacity to uphold the claim no longer applies.10 Again, court and company historians
sometimes leave the impression that Ibn Sa`ud’s statesmanship somehow kept Saudi Arabia
“freer” in comparison to Egypt and Iraq. As I have tried to suggest, believing the idea requires that
one not look too closely or think too hard. Prince Bandar would have been on stronger grounds
had he argued that the state he represents in Washington has been around in one form or
another only since 1927, and, as he knows better than most, on the basis of a broad accord or
international protectorate regime, anchored first by British and after 1945 by American power.
The Truman administration replaced the British as sole protectors of the Al Sa`ud, taking over a
role that dated back to the days of the Ottoman Empire and its subventions to the emirs of Hijaz
and Najd. As I have said, Ibn Sa`ud had little choice, given the position of his kingdom in the
regional and global orders. Placed in its diminished context, his independence was limited to
bargaining on the terms of the new U.S. airbase in Dhahran, the postwar loans, and Export-
Import Bank credits. The Americans had no problems, for instance, refusing the king's pleas for a
treaty that would make American defense of the Al Sa`ud more reliable.
On the eve of World War II the vast new lands of the kingdom were essentially still little more than
a federation of tribes and towns. The conquest of Hijaz had provided the Al Sa`ud with the
rudimentary technology of administration that, as we will see, his agents sought fitfully to master.
The rebellions of the 1930s had been defeated. Ibn Sa`ud's cousins and nephews supervised the
11
taxing of the cities and provinces. And as the kingdom's affairs grew increasingly bound up with
the world economy, those who ruled gradually adopted a set of practices that made a Saudi state
easier to imagine.
As we shift from a focus on sovereignty claims to more mundane realms such as work, education,
technology, finance, health, industry and so on, we will see that the idea that the domains of the
Al Sa`ud escaped imperial domination or, if you insist, “external influence” is indefensible. The
transformation of the landscape that became Saudi Arabia was wrought in great part by
foreigners, arriving in increasing numbers in the 1940s and 1950s, financed by foreign
investment, foreign private and public aid, and large loans secured by future oil royalties. There
was little capacity on the part of the king and his handful of agents to direct or to even oversee
these changes, and "government" of the economies (it is impossible to think of the domains as an
integrated network of markets and administrative rules in any meaningful way) was essentially
limited to keeping the Al Sa`ud solvent. This was no mean feat, given the king's generosity as his
American fans put it, and one cannot help but admire `Abdallah Sulayman, the state's most
important economic agent for decades and an extraordinary rent-seeker in his own right. The
consequences of this spending spree included the arrival in 1951 of the first of many "missions"
to guide the creation of national-level policy agencies and practices.
Saudi Arabia in this sense was not that different from Panama and El Salvador in the same era,
and, like these two latter American dependencies, lacked the capacity or will of other nearby
states to challenge the prevailing order. As we will see, after the death of the loyal American
client Ibn Sa`ud, his successors actually tried taking this treacherous path before giving up and
accepting the less exalted but doubtless safer status of client of the emerging global “liberal”
hegemon.11
The logic not to mention the irony ought now to be apparent in the twinned Cold War stories (“the
special relationship”). There is a global hegemon on the one hand and its client on the other,
arguably, America’s most important client. President Kennedy’s national security advisor,
McGeorge Bundy, told the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1963 that it was the location of America’s
single largest private overseas investment. That investment represents the mechanism of control,
12
as we have never stopped imagining it, of the world’s single largest untapped source of a vital
resource, oil.12 We would expect precisely what we find in the scholarly literature, let alone in the
pronouncements of the various heads of states and their functionaries (and, as we discuss below,
the firm and and its functionaries).
American exceptionalism and its account of the U.S-Saudi encounter helps makes possible Saudi
exceptionalism itself, where the rhetoric and substance of imperialism is rejected as a way of
telling the story of U.S.-Saudi relations and of Saudi state formation. The latter story thus always
begins with an account of the distant and "natural," "indigenous," "internal," "pristine," and so on
foundations of the state. The seemingly much later story of the dawn of the new American era is
structured by rote comparison with other, earlier national imperial styles and epochs. The
capacities of clients and dynasts in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere are romanticized, emphasizing
the ability to manipulate great powers for their own objectives, seemingly undaunted by systemic,
global power asymmetries.
Saudi Arabian historiography works to put maximum possible distance between the kingdom and
America. A narrative devoted to the autonomy (using Dan Rodgers’s term) of the kingdom’s path
through time has the effect of adding resonance and depth to the new state's sovereignty claim.
The narrative was invented in the 1950s and ‘60s as a response to those in Nasser’s Egypt and
Bathist Iraq who disparaged the Saudis’ right to rule and called for the family’s overthrow! The
arguments of the kingdom’s opponents are familiar ones. The kingdom was, and some still insist
is, a puppet state, a country that imperialism simply invented (Saudi propaganda would say the
same about both Egypt and Iraq), a set of tribes with a flag, manifestly not like other imagined
real or authentic nations.
Exceptionalism is thus both probably inevitable and to an extent useful given such powerful
prejudices and conceits. We are then faced, however, with a dense shroud of myths, as if the
identities that states assert are liable otherwise to disintegrate at first light. And, as we will see, a
lot of money was spent on mythmaking. A lot still is being spent. We have a valuable resource of
our own, however. The archive.
13
Business (History) as (Un)usual
Until now, the debate about the adequacy of exceptionalism as a way of writing history has been
one about the history and identity of nation states (or peoples more popularly). The debate is one
that is also generally confined to the world of the professors, although on occasion the brawl may
spill out into the wider public arena, as when the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Art
mounted the exhibit “The West as America” in 1991. The show was a relatively tame rehearsal of
the historical revisionism (“reinterpreting”) going on in the academy. As Patty Limerick, who is
probably the best known of the historians in the now old controversy, said, the “show is about as
revolutionary as if you had a Southern history exhibit, hung romantic paintings of plantations, and
then said slavery was a rough business—not a very wild proposition, and the same kind of
proposition this show offers about the West.”13
Not all agreed with her, naturally. Charles Krauthammer wrote that the exhibit had “a crude halfbaked
Marxist meaning” that would have been at home in Moscow “thirty years ago. ” It showed
“contempt for every achievement of Western expansion.” Expansion is the word that Americans
uses in place of another, more familiar one, imperialism, that somehow does not fit the story of
America. Defenders of the exhibit argued, sensibly to my mind at least, that the “conquest of the
West is a story of success and failure, heroism and betrayal, capitalist triumph and labor
exploitation. Colorado miners and Mexico peons are as much a part of the story as pioneers on
the Oregon Trail.” Visitors’ reactions, meanwhile, were mixed, as we might guess, but what
angered many the most was the rough treatment accorded Frederick Remington, the famous
painter, sculptor, and illustrator whom Krauthammer went out of his way to defend. He was just
painting a “classic cowboys vs. Indians gunfight.” Others called his paintings the “truth” plain and
simple. The exhibit, though, suggested that paintings done thirty years after the fact might have
reflected more of the artists’ own beliefs circa 1903 and less of a faithful rendering of, say, a
battle in a war with the Comanche, and those beliefs of his were complex ones. ““Jews-ingunschinamen-
Italians-Huns-” he wrote, were “the rubish of the earth I hate.”” Note by the way which
pieces of rubbish are capitalized, and which are not.14
14
It turns out that firms are a lot like states when it comes to telling their own stories, and that they
are implicated in the stories that Patty Limerick would tell instead. Certainly American company
histories echo the more familiar kinds of American exceptionalist fables. A firm, the Phelps Dodge
Company, say, or Eagle Oil Company or the Arabian American Oil Company, ARAMCO, reliably
overcomes immense obstacles to become a giant that then marshals its tremendous resources
on behalf of its own people, but also on behalf of the countless others who are beneficiaries of its
largesse. The “uniquely progressive and socially capacious character” that two or more
generations of American historians have ascribed to American political development at home and
the exercise of its power abroad is, it would seem, basic to the identity of those same firms that
claim to have opened up the West or Africa and those that have forged a partnership in progress
and development with Mexicans, Venezuelans, Indonesians, Iranians, Saudis, Libyans,
Nigerians, and so on.15 Look again at the quotation that opens this chapter. Legendary investor
Edward Doheny, whose vast holdings in California and Mexico earned him the title Emperor of
Oil, would see his drilling of the first Los Angeles producing wells as the providential end of a
journey begun when the Pilgrims set sail aboard the Mayflower in 1620.
The artifice may be obvious, perhaps, but it is also understandable. After all, what other way
might a firm imagine telling its own story or having historians that it hires tell it? Don’t answer,
“with the truth,” a highly contested idea in these times, or even with a variant of the idea found
above, that a firm’s history might be told as a “story of success and failure, heroism and betrayal,
capitalist triumph and labor exploitation.” I have yet to read a history by or for a firm that aspires
to portray this dialectic. ARAMCO excised the word exploitation in one account where the
meaning was plainly the simple one of “to make use of.” The histories all tend to read the same, I
am afraid, although those bought and paid for before World War II will sometimes express
matters with a frankness that the later ones shy away from, as when the first historian of Phelps
Dodge wrote of the managers confronting the “forces of darkness,” including Apaches, Italians,
half-breeds, and Mexicans. ARAMCO’s managers instead insisted that its own historian excise all
equally derogatory and routine references to Saudis from a story based on journals, letters home,
and the like.
15
The point about a firm’s history taking a particular form is only made more obvious when we
consider why firms commission histories in the first place. ARAMCO did so in response to what
its agents viewed as profound anti-company biases first and foremost in the United States and
secondarily in the Arab World. I document this at some length, and show how company histories
were viewed like other parts of the public relations arsenal—company magazines, movies, stories
planted in newspapers, and the like. Not all firms necessarily hire a historian for this reason but
we don’t have histories of company history-writing. We do have histories of company public
relations programs, however, which show this very logic at work in the invention of company
magazines, such as ARAMCO World, as we will see.
One obstacle in the way of our ability to generalize about motives is that in a key respect firms
are not like states. As Gregory Nowell notes, "corporations see historical records as a cost to
maintain, and at times as a threat to the firm--they do not systematically preserve their political
records the way nations do."16 We know the story in ARAMCO’s case because we have access
to the papers of the writer it hired and because one of its employees took records from his
division home with him when he retired. He did this presumably without the permission of the new
owner, the Saudi state. These records, ironically, reveal that the company destroyed some of its
files, exactly as Nowell describes. Its agents also hid and possibly destroyed the records of
others, St. John Philby (of Arabia) to be exact, that they didn’t want researchers to view. Those
weeded-through files are now part of the archive at St Antony’s College. It is not clear that St.
Antony’s knows that its archive is incomplete. ARAMCO shipped other records out of Saudi
Arabia (the nominal headquarters of the firm after 1959) that the Americans determined Saudis
should not see. We don’t know what happened to the microfilms and those documents the
company hid in a salt mine in Utah. The firm may well have returned them to the new owners, in
which case chances are we will never see them again.
Even those firms that preserve their records are not like states, or at least not like liberal
democratic states. Companies are more like authoritarian countries. The keep records hidden.
They pay for extravagant hagiographies. They open their archives for use only for those they hire.
They insist on the right to approve what is written. The pay for histories and then file them away in
16
drawers. There are no sunshine laws and no Freedom of Information Acts against corporate
privilege.
If we cannot generalize about why companies sometimes publish their histories, we can read
them and see that the main point is to document the particular achievements of the enterprise on
a dangerous and hostile frontier or market, triumphing over adversity, boldly going where none
has gone before. The alternative leaves much to be desired. Imagine: a company acting pretty
much like others in its industry, a leadership stumbling, having grown fat on rents, and the
regulators getting it right about its evasion of one or another law. Now imagine integrating the
perspective of a firm’s workers—the “miners and peons”--into the story, such that strikes
occasionally reflect the legitimate grievances of the exploited rather than the desperate efforts of
power hungry marginal men, malcontents, outsiders, or those obviously better off than their
compatriots outside the fences or the refinery yet still seeking respect. Business and labor history
are in reality two distinct and oppositional specializations in the United States. While business
history as a discipline moved in more complex directions, the histories of the oil firms between the
all read the same way, and none who has written about ARAMCO and Saudi Arabia since has
dissented from these terms.
Reading the published histories—of British Petroleum, say, and Chevron or Mobil--side by side
produces what might be thought of as the Lake Wobegon effect. It would seem as if all the firms
performed better than their competitors, paid higher wages than many, always unspecified others,
served the surrounding communities responsibly, and recognized a kind of compact with the
“host” society to uplift the race as it once was put. Services, benefits, education, housing
programs and the like all “expanded” continuously. When labor unrest occurred, infrequently, it
reflected politics outside the work place, nationalism, and xenophobia. The regular upgrades in
wages, benefits, and uplift had little if anything to do with those same unions, strikes, or populist
parties. The causal arrow runs in some other direction. As Garrison Keillor puts it, "Welcome to
Lake Wobegon, where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all the children”
and, we might add, big oil firms “are above average."
17
One may argue that, however vague the presentation by one or another company historian, the
above average claim could be true if the comparison is with smaller firms, in those markets where
smaller, less resourceful firms actually operated alongside the large and, as they began to
produce oil abroad, multinational enterprises. We don’t know. It was not true for ARAMCO for the
first twenty years of its operations. I have certainly never seen comparative data offered let alone
systematically collected and analyzed in any history I have read of the oil or copper mining
industries. What one does find in virtually every existing account of ARAMCO’s operations is the
turn to exceptionalist logics and, depending on how closely tied the writer is to the firm and how
uncritically he or she reads the company’s public relations material, hyperbole. ARAMCO is thus
conventionally portrayed as operating under a principle of enlightened self-interest that ostensibly
distinguishes it, although historians of British Petroleum might object, from its rivals in the Gulf.
Sometimes, though, the comparison is more artful or, frankly, fanciful still, extending not to its
contemporary rivals but to seventeenth century trading firms such as the Hudson Bay Company
or the East India Company, which, in the exceptionalist twist of logic, become the standard for
judging the essential (never changing) British form of empire over the next two hundred years,
and so proof that the idea of imperialism obviously does not fit either an American company in the
twentieth century or the successive U.S. administrations that secured the domains in which the
company operated.
Hegemonic Decline?
Many factors have operated to preserve the hegemony of the company-eyed view of the world in
the case of ARAMCO, although those who once worked for the company would reject this
characterization as fair, since, in the view of ARAMCO’s executives, virtually everyone had it in
for the giant oil firms, and even the writers and scholars they hired could not be trusted to get it
right. One factor is timing. The 1970s and 1980s were the hey day of debate on the multinational
corporation and U.S. foreign policy but also the decades of the great OPEC price rises and the
nationalization of foreign oil firms across the Middle East. It was hard to argue that Saudi Arabia
in 1980 looked much like Mexico say in 1910 or Iran in 1920 (but to be clear nor did Mexico or
18
Iran in the 1970s in the 1980s look the same), where caudillos and shaykhs could be bought,
armies hired, and oilmen could still imagine their governments possibly sending gunboats to
effect regime change in a pinch. Those were the old days when firms operated more like states
within a state. In light of critics who argued nothing had changed in the meantime (like those
today who still believed this to be true), and who didn’t understand much, either about the
international political economy or about places like the kingdom (again, not unlike today), thinkers
like Lackner and Halliday worked overtime to educate a generation of radicals about how the
world had changed, and how simple notions of the Al Sa`ud as American “puppets” were wrong.17
A more generalized form of the argument emerged roughly at the same time, one that I learned in
graduate school in the early 1980s and credit to the UCLA sociologist, Richard Sklar, the then UC
San Diego political scientist, Jeffery Freiden, now at Harvard, and the Harvard economist
Raymond Vernon, but others no doubt have canonical citations of their own. The basic point is
that as firms increased their fixed investments—oil rigs, refineries and so on—in places where
sovereign, increasingly populist governments rather than colonial consuls or occupation
authorities ruled--the fundamental change in world order in the twentieth century--these
investments left them increasingly vulnerable to the threat of nationalization. The mere existence
of a giant firm operating somewhere did not automatically translate into loss of sovereignty for the
host country (as we started to say) or into bargains that invariably cost the host more than firms
(or gained hosts less). Outcomes varied across places and over time, according to a number of
factors, but the trend away from extraterritorial privilege to domestication was clear.18
At the same time, though, the transition from one era to another was messy, and the archives
were not (and in some cases still not) available for anyone interested in writing about the post
World War II era. The U.S. state had intervened in Mexico in 1910 but the Roosevelt
administration refused to do so in 1938 in response to the Cardenas government’s take over of
American firms’ assets. Harry Truman expressed the change in view more plainly still, against his
own State Department and the big oil firms that State was backing. He wasn’t going to return to
supporting “the old Doheny interests and people who robbed the Mexicans before.”19 In 1950 a
populist prime minister in Tehran, Muhammad Mussadiq, nationalized the oil facilities when
19
British Petroleum refused to rewrite its concession agreement to reflect the better bargain that
Venezuela had obtained from owning firms there, with prodding from the U.S. State Department.
Truman was no longer president, however. The Eisenhower administration approved a CIA
operation to overthrow Mussadiq, on the grounds that he would otherwise surrender Iran to
Moscow. The last covert interventions by U.S. agencies in oil producing states during the era
when a handful of companies still managed worldwide price and supply stability, an era that was
coming to an end, were under the Kennedy administration in Iraq in 1963 and the Johnson
administration in Indonesia in 1965. The history of the last two interventions are still mostly
unknown.
The key point though is that by about 1972 the tide had turned.20 In the Middle East, Algeria, Iraq,
and Libya all moved fastest toward the full nationalization of the firms’ wells, pipelines, and
refineries. The decline in prices and the cutting off of the American market, which had spurred the
formation of OPEC, pushed producing states to overthrow the western-administered international
oil regime. It was the objective argued for first and most vociferously by Saudi Arabia’s first oil
minister, `Abdallah Tariki, in 1963 right after he was forced out of office and into exile, as we will
see. A decade later his “radical” principle had become the new norm in the industry, in and
outside the Middle East, and what would distinguish so-called radicals from moderates would be
by what means—through decree or negotiations—and over what period of time the oil producing
states would take over the assets of the companies.
The scholars who wrote the first histories of the oil era in Saudi Arabia and of ARAMCO during
this moment of “declinism,” that is, the wide-lens view of the energy-crisis prone, post-Vietnam
international order of the 1970s and 1980s, when American dominance of the world economy and
its industrial capacity were both imagined as slipping, thus tended to write as if these dramatic
changes were preordained in the oil company’s original negotiations with Ibn Sa`ud. Some
imagined ARAMCO actually pioneering a new course for other firms to follow. The competitor
firms that were not wise enough to do so, such as British Petroleum in Iran and BP’s American
partners in Iraq, would pay the price of hostile take over.21
20
ARAMCO’s description of itself as a development mission for the kingdom, invented in 1944
when it first came under attack in the United States, has been repeated so often that it does not
seem to require a defense, nor has it ever been tested against some alternative model by
anybody since the days of OPEC founder, `Abdallah Tariki, to my knowledge, until now. Rather,
the dissent might cluster around the hyperbolic version: ARAMCO as the kingdom’s salvation. So
as Wallace Stegner wrote in the introduction to Discovery! “With that fantastic American energy
and adaptability that in those days was the wonder of the world and would a few years later be its
main defense against fascism, ARAMCO began to transform Arabia... Collectively, or
corporately, they preformed prodigies with magical swiftness... It was magical.22
The breathless version provides little if any room for agency, as we now say, for Saudis, and
even the company’s managers recognized the problem with it by the 1960s, as we will see,
although the company published the book anyway. Later historians, typically diplomatic
historians, in the 1970s and 1980s were instead most impressed with those moments where
ARAMCO (or any other firm anywhere) was bested in some negotiation with a ruler or his agents,
proving, some said, that general Marxian models, dependency theory, or what we used to call
instrumentalist accounts of business-state relations did not adequately capture reality. Instead,
they might say, “states are more likely to use firms then firms are likely to use states.”
Skeptics of the idea of either the U.S. or Saudi state exercising structural power over oil firms
instead tended virtually by definition to portray the ruling family as the captives of the corporation
or, at best, partners with big oil in profiting from the discovery and exploitation of the stupendous
prize. As we will see, the New York Times in 1944 compared Ibn Sa`ud and his progeny to the
Oklahoma Indian chiefs grown fat on the rents from leasing the tribal oil fields, and the trope of a
corrupt ruler or court quickly became the convention. ARAMCO executives called before
Congress year after year would insist that “camels to cadillacs” was a caricature and then offer up
one of their own, that Ibn Saud, and after him Sa`ud, and after Sa`ud, Faisal, and so on, were
each truly enlightened leaders seeking the best for his people and investing the oil revenues
wisely, with just a little back-stopping by the firm. What is truly remarkable is how, sixty years
later, the twin stereotypes of a noble chief and, its opposite, a corrupted, westoxified sybarite,
21
remain the way the story of Saudi politics of the era is told by colleagues who we trust are
unaware of the origins back in time and beyond the Arabian Peninsula of these simplistic and
racist ideas.23 Let’s leave this last point aside for the moment.
The most serious scholarship on ARAMCO to date is shaped by, and part of, an older and
grander debate in the United States about the relationship between private and public power.
Professors followed the paper trail left by a dozen congressional committee hearings, special
investigations, and scandals at the dawn of the American government’s push into the Middle
East, when one or another oil company executive turned federal official in World War II was still
being paid by his firm and having trouble determining where the public interest ended and private
profit began. ARAMCO’s vice president, James Terry Duce, was just one of the oilmen forced to
resign a government post. The documentary trail included the sensational 1952 report of the
Federal Trade Commission on the International Petroleum Cartel. The Truman administration had
classified it secret and then bent to pressure and released an expurgated version. The Justice
Department would launch a case against the firms for violating anti-trust laws, spurred by the FTC
investigation, only to have President Truman call if off in one of the last decisions in office, on
grounds of national security. And the Eisenhower administration would do the Democrats one
better, granting the oil giants exemption from prosecution in a subsequent civil suit as a quid pro
quo for “agreeing” to invest in the newly-freed Iranian fields, once the CIA restored the Shah to
power.24
The story behind the FTC investigation was itself part of the history recounted 25 years later in
the multiyear, multivolume investigation of Multinational Corporations and United States Foreign
Policy, by a special subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, headed by Idaho
Senator Frank Church. The Church Committee took on the oil companies, along with airlines,
agrobusiness, ITT in Chile, and, not least, the CIA’s role in the assassination of Chilean leader
Salvador Allende. For some, it was the zenith of countervailing congressional power in the
aftermath of the Watergate crisis, for others the collapse of the corporatist oil policy that had
stabilized world prices and supply for twenty years or more.
22
The first archival-based historians’ accounts were, in other words, a product of the years of the
gasoline lines and the fanciful calls in Commentary magazine to occupy the Saudi oil fields. I was
going to college then. I returned from Egypt in 1977 and took my first seminar in the revisionist
historians and the debate on the origins of the cold war, with Carolyn Eisenberg. We read the
soon to be oil expert Daniel Yergin’s first book, A Shattered Peace. The boundaries of inquiry, the
problems to be solved, are clear in retrospect. The “grand strategy” of the oil industry, the testing
of the “open door” thesis of William Appleman Williams and his students, and, the debunking of
various “devil theories” of war were the irresistible starting points of investigation.
Diplomatic historians were always less interested in the details of Saudi institution building than in
the costs and benefits of the protectorate relationship in which the kingdom was enmeshed and
the implications of the growing Anglo-American rivalry for hegemony in the Gulf. "Influence" is
thus discussed in terms of the ruling family's dependence on British and U.S. financial subsidies,
the Palestine question, and so on. There was apparently little interest and, in the case of the
Middle East at least, ability to write about the oil companies polices on the ground. Irvine
Anderson’s 1981 study of ARAMCO was the first and, really, only account of “the field personnel”
as he put it, by which he meant the managers and what he saw as the tension between them and
the executives in San Francisco. Only two Saudis mattered: the king who was constantly beating
the Americans at their game, and the infinitely resourceful finance minister, `Abdallah Sulayman.
Even the new leftists-turned-graduate students downplayed the question of labor (hard as it is to
believe) in the history of oil. As Petter Nore put it, in a book on Oil and Class Struggle, “the history
of oil workers’ struggle has yet to be written,” which remains true twenty five years later.
Meanwhile, though, Nore guessed that “the high organic composition of capital and the high rent
element” in the industry made it easy “for the companies to “buyoff” oilworkers with high salaries
and create a type of aristocracy of labor.”25
The Norm Against Noticing
`Abd al-`Aziz Abu Sunayd, one of the seven Saudi worker who led the 1953 strike against
ARAMCO, one of a series that had begun in 1945 and ended in 1956, during which the state
23
made strikes illegal, had first sought to bring his complaints directly to management (see chapter
7). Rational Saudi actors thought twice before taking such a drastic step as a strike, not because
they were aristocrats but because others had been beaten, jailed, and killed for doing so. Sunayd
addressed a letter to ARAMCO’s president asking why he was being treated in his own country
the way he had been treated in Washington, DC, where he and a few of his comrades, who had
been sent to the states to teach Americans a little Arabic before heading to Dhahran, had been
banned from a movie theater due to the color line. It was the same color line, he said, that the
firm had drawn in Dhahran.
The norm against noticing is thus another factor that has worked to preserve the company-eyed
view of things. It was impossible to find a scholar’s account of the 1953 or any other strike save a
one-page long version in a book written in 1960 (and hardly cited since). The existence of
Sunayd’s letter notwithstanding, Berkeley’s George Lenczowski said absolutely nothing about the
Jim Crow system that the firm had exported to Dhahran as the grounds cited by the leadership for
striking. Perhaps the letter by the workers had not been publicized. I published the first detailed
account in 1997, using declassified state department records. As we will see, however, the
leaders of every strike denounced ARAMCO’s racism and discrimination for a decade. The attack
on racism is true not just in the case of work stoppages by Saudis but also those led by Italians,
Pakistanis, and others.26 I am tempted to argue that Lenczowski left the fact out of the account to
please the ARAMCO partner that subsidized his research yet went unacknowledged in a long list
of grantors that he thanked in Oil and State in the Middle East, but the better explanation is a
structural one, applicable as much to the conservative Orientalist-turned-oil-company-c...
as to left wingers such as Peter Nore who guessed that firms had bought off the working class
and created an aristocracy of labor. It turns out that the strategy was an old and somewhat
different one: to divide labor by race as a mechanism of social control. The aristocracy of labor
idea might better be understood as a hierarchy, with white workers on top and, in the kingdom’s
case, Saudis, who Americans imagined as “black” and as “coolies” on the bottom.
Novelist and Princeton professor Toni Morrison provides a structural explanation in her
remarkable "Black Matters," the first of her three 1990 Massey Lectures.27 She discusses the turn
24
after World War II in the U.S. to ignoring race. She calls it “a graceful, even generous liberal
gesture." Postwar generations were conditioned not to notice, she says. Morrison was writing
about postwar literary critics and their silence about race and racism in the history of letters, the
construction of literary canons, and the criticisms worth making about the canonical texts. We
can, however, easily extend the argument beyond the English Departments of the universities to
the wider state and society. Here we follow the lead of those historians and sociologists in the
1990s who rediscovered what black radical thinkers in the 1960s were arguing about the
relationship of the cold war to the course of American civil rights policies.28
As we will see, the American military officials who were training Saudis in the late 1950s and
early 1960s reported that two questions flustered American interlocutors most, requiring special
attention and better propaganda: America’s Palestine policy and the pervasiveness of racial
discrimination in the United States. Recovering moments such as these, and there are a wealth of
such moments, needless to say, forces us to reckon with another of Morrison’s key arguments,
about how "certain absences are so stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call attention to
themselves."29 A company buries records of it efforts to preserve the color line intact. In
Washington, ARAMCO’s vice president tries to convince a skeptical state department official that
protests against racial discrimination in Dhahran are really another case of following the
communist line, which is what Southern politicians were saying about African-American
demonstrators in Montgomery at the same moment. Decades later a son excises the racial slurs
from his father’s letters before publishing them as a testimony to enduring U.S.-Saudi friendship
and cooperation. And in 2003 the ex-Washington Post journalist Thomas Lippman would
plagiarize my study of the 1953 labor strikes against ARAMCO’s Jim Crow system rather than
cite the work and, more important, wrestle honestly with the argument.30
The befogged foreign correspondent may have missed the news, but historians, social scientists,
and literary critics have mounted a challenge of considerable power to the norm against noticing
over the past two decades. There is still no authoritative account of the shifts in historiography,
theory, and the wider American cultural terrain that some rue as the eclipse of political economy
and, worse, the descent into the culture wars, postmodernism, and identity politics. The news, as
25
the cliché now has it, that “race matters” hasn’t been embraced unequivocally either. As one of
the by then old school historians put it in a public forum during my first years at Clark University in
the 1990s, the prospect was real that America would descend to the horrors of Lebanon or
Bosnia if we didn’t stop the madness. The Smithsonian exhibit of the American West is an artifact
of, roughly, the same moment. I wasn’t all that invested in these debates at first. I needed to get
tenure. Still, in retrospect, I can see some important tendencies in scholarship that made a
difference, transforming the terms of debate or, perhaps, returning to the issues that progressive
era, pre-New Deal professors and public intellectuals had wrestled with.31
First, consider the study of European empire since the 1970s. There, inquiry moved away from a
focus on metropolitan authorities, the "official mind," and ideas about the fundamental uniqueness
of the French or British or American etc. civilizing missions. With the moves to widen the field of
study, to expand the definition of empire's agents, to gauge the consequences of expansion for
indigenous peoples and local environments, and to tell the story of the encounter simultaneously
as processes of political economy and culture, our ideas about the coherence of colonial projects
and the capacity of state builders have changed.32 A generation of American historians, notably
regional western and southern historians, moved in a similar direction at more or less the same
time, although there is little dialogue across the divide until now. The one exception might be the
in the case of those working in Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic.33
The new social and cultural historians of the United States returned the study of continental
American empire to a prominent place in the profession. There is a body of work that pursues
problems, from riparian conflict to class, state and race formation that ought to be familiar to
those trained in African, Asian, and Middle Eastern studies of empire. These writers targeted the
conventions and interpretive metaphors that disguise "the fact of conquest," to quote Patricia
Limerick yet again.34 The rewriting of the west as empire has impacted even diplomatic history,
which since Williams has been the main site for study of the “overseas empire” in the American
academy, and where social and cultural theory remain dissident currents. So, Williams’s heir,
Walter LaFeber, in The American Search for Opportunity, 1865-1913, a volume in the Cambridge
History of American Foreign Relations (1993), weaves an account of white settlement and
26
expansion in Native American domains into a narrative that more conventionally begins at the
Caribbean Basin and Pacific shore.35
As I have already stressed, when this work made its way from the regional journals and university
seminars to a broader public through the museum exhibits, from “West as America” to the
commemoration of the Columbian Quincentennary, the controversies that erupted dramatized the
enduring significance of exceptionalism in the wider post cold war political culture, and in
particular the rejection of the idea of America as an empire.36 The controversy may seem
momentarily less volatile in 2005 due to the self-concious efforts to rehabilitate and in some
cases embrace the term empire after September 11, 2001 as what America is and should be.37
Before 9/11, however, empire was “not a word for scholars” in political science, as Michael Doyle
pronounced, save, of course, at the discipline’s dissident edges, in Aberystwyth, Leeds, and
Milan, the teaching colleges of the rust belt, in area studies, and political theory.38
Racism, as I said in the Forward, threatens the whole rickety apparatus of one or another
exceptionalist account of America as a new kind of empire, of it’s essential anti-imperial identity,
or of the unique nature of its alternative to imperial domination, “liberal hegemony,” as G. John
Ikenberry describes it. I define racism as an institution, a concept political scientists are once
again fond of using, comprising a set of practices and rules that sustain a particular kind of
ascriptive hierarchy or system of privilege and inequality. Pass laws, Jim Crow cars, gold and
silver rolls, segregation, “humanitarian intervention,” social science theories of superior and
inferior moral qualities, antimiscegenation statutes, and the denial of citizenship rights are some
of its infamous hallmarks. As philosopher Charles Mills, among others, shows, racism's ethics
prescribes different norms for humanity's different ruling and subject races.39 And as has long
been obvious to philosophers and politicians both, empire in the liberal age requires rather than
simply allows the making of invidious distinctions—the great contradiction. Institutions other than
racism may do similar kinds of work in sustaining hierarchy, but racism was the most common
one through the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century.
We have seen scholars adopt one of four positions in trying to reconcile their beliefs about the
exceptionalism of firms and states with America’s rich racist heritage. The first and most common,
27
as Toni Morrison shows, is not to notice or pretend it is not visible, say, in the layout of the oil
camps. Lippman is simply one, recent, wonderfully egregious example in the case of writing
about ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia. The second, well-known one, the Myrdalian position, is to argue
that racism is a kind of cultural atavism, a hold over from some earlier time, an import fro
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yar!
- Teeuwen0
aye!
- emokid0
that was refreshing