Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia

Toby Craig Jones is Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University at New Brunswick.

Toby Craig Jones's new book about the kingdom examines the Saudi state's relationship to water and oil, the twin resources that are its blessing and its curse (or, according to some, its two curses). Jones argues that Saudi ruling classes hold their inherently fragile state together through a strict and bold program that manages these two substances. In Saudi Arabia, more so than in almost any other place on earth, the business of the state is the control of nature, because to control nature is to control people. -- Graeme Wood The National 20101105 Desert Kingdom is sure to spark discussion and debate. It touches on some of the most sensitive nerves of a society. But, it also describes how determination and perseverance built Saudi Arabia into a Middle Eastern powerhouse. Toby Craig Jones opens the door to understanding how it happened. -- Joseph Richard Preville Saudi Gazette 20101205 [A] provocative book...Desert Kingdom is a much needed addition to the small shelf of Saudi Arabian histories based on archival research and political economy rather than caricatures of oil wealth and the desert. The connection of geography to political power is compelling. -- Frederick Deknatel The Nation 20110228 For a desert kingdom to concern itself with the control of water would seem to be a given, but the subject has received slight attention in studies of Saudi Arabia. Although oil has always figured prominently in Saudi studies, this book is surely the first to trace Saudi policies concerning oil and water since the 1920s. Jones presents these policies as dictated by a Saudi drive to create not so much a nation-state as an empire in the Arabian Peninsula. Saudi Arabia is not all desert, but the agriculturally more advantaged Eastern Province, with its appreciable Shiite population, has been the most disadvantaged when it comes to receiving a share of the government's development projects. This explains the Shiite uprising there in 1979 and the halting Saudi efforts