Saudi Arabia In The Oil Era

When I began a survey of source material for this book in the early 1980s, I was somewhat surprised by the paucity of sources relating to socio-political dynamics in modem Saudi Arabia both in European languages and Arabic. Thus, William Rugh's article 'Emergence of a New Middle Class in Saudi Arabia' (1973), for instance, remains a classic to this day. In the field of social anthropology I found only a handful of serious studies of the Saudi population produced by western and Arab scholars (Kat