Book review: America’s Kingdom

ENAR

Saudi Aramco, valued anywhere from $2 trillion to $7 trillion and employing more than 55,000 people, is the world’s largest unlisted company. How it got there is a story that has been told before — from the first discovery of oil to the entrance of the American oil majors, to the development of the so-called “special relationship” between Saudi Arabia and the United States. But Robert Vitalis’s newly updated book, the product of a decade of research and writing, charts the history from a different perspective, viewing Aramco as a microcosm of the colonial order. It describes an ‘oil-garchy’, the partnership that began decades ago with some of the largest oil companies in the world —Socal, later renamed Chevron, Standard Oil of New Jersey, later Exxon, and Socony-Vacuum Oil, later Mobil — and the relations between Washington DC and Riyadh until Aramco was fully nationalized in 1980, becoming known in