Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia

by Rosie Bsheer

The production of history is premised on the selective erasure of certain pasts and the artifacts that stand witness to them. From the elision of archival documents to the demolition of sacred and secular spaces, each act of destruction is also an act of state building. Following the 1991 Gulf War, political elites in Saudi Arabia pursued these dual projects of historical commemoration and state formation with greater fervor to enforce their postwar vision for state, nation, and economy. Seeing Islamist movements as the leading threat to state power, they sought to de-center religion from educational, cultural, and spatial policies.

With this book, Rosie Bsheer explores the increasing secularization of the postwar Saudi state and how it manifested in assembling a national archive and reordering urban space in Riyadh and Mecca. The elites' project was rife with ironies: in Riyadh, they employed world-renowned experts to fashion an imagined history, while at the same time in Mecca they were overseeing the obliteration of a thousand-year-old topography and its replacement with commercial megaprojects. Archive Wars shows how the Saudi state's response to the challenges of the Gulf War served to historicize a national space, territorialize a national history, and ultimately refract both through new modes of capital accumulation.

Genres: History, Middle East, Nonfiction, Politics, Islam, Academic

384 pages, Paperback

Published August 25, 2020

About the author

Rosie Bsheer is a historian of the modern Middle East and Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University. Her teaching and research interests center on Arab intellectual and social movements, petro-capitalism and state formation, and the production of historical knowledge and commemorative spaces.

Reviews

[Vance Miguel Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly well written and synthesized. A must read for anyone wanting to be well versed in global history outside of the West.

[Basil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rarely do I read an academic text under the generic field of “Middle East Studies” written this bravely, and with so much political urgency. Theoretically sophisticated and historiographically dense, this book manages to tackle a sweeping variety of social, historical, political and economic concerns around Saudi Arabia (and the region as a whole) simply by looking at the question of archive formation.

[Mesut Bostancı · Rating 5 out of 5]

this really is a remarkable book. Remarkable for the exact reasons that the book so painstakingly explains: Saudi Arabia is a country whose history has been relentlessly battered for a century by the forces of absolutist epistemicide and know-nothing incompetence. I have read few books that do a better job justifying their own project as historiography/intellectual history by showing how deeply political and high the stakes of history writing are.

[Ata · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most readable thing I've ever read recently.