Saudi Arabian Oil History Aramco’s Corporate Interpretation of the Kingdom and Petroleum Industry 1980

Aramco

First Edition

Arabian American Oil Company. Aramco and Its World: Arabia and the Middle East, published in 1980, documents the corporate information system through which Aramco interpreted Saudi history, Islamic culture, petroleum technology, and national development for employees and a broader English-language audience. Revised and expanded from the company’s earlier handbook series, the volume explains how Aramco oriented foreign personnel through a coordinated program of historical narrative, cultural instruction, industrial diagrams, maps, and photography. It therefore provides primary-source evidence for the study of petroleum administration, expatriate training, United States–Saudi relations, corporate cultural diplomacy, and institutional representations of modernization. Its publication coincided with a decisive transfer of authority: the Saudi government increased its participation interest in Aramco’s concession rights, production, and facilities to 100 percent in 1980, although the Saudi Arabian Oil Company was not formally established to assume Aramco’s responsibilities until 1988.

Arabian American Oil Company. Aramco and Its World: Arabia and the Middle East. Washington, D.C.: Arabian American Oil Company, 1980. First edition. Edited by Ismail I. Nawwab, Peter C. Speers, and Paul F. Hoye, with principal research and writing by Paul Lunde and John A. Sabini. Printed in the Netherlands. Profusely illustrated with color photographs, maps, diagrams, and reproductions of Arabic calligraphy. Bound in dark green leatherette with gilt lettering and ruling, accompanied by a matching gilt-lettered slipcase. 4to. The preface traces the work to Aramco’s postwar need to prepare large numbers of American employees for residence in Saudi Arabia, where unfamiliar language and social practices created practical challenges for company operations. A section on Arabic writing reproduces Kufic forms, Ottoman tughras, zoomorphic designs, and ornamental monograms, interpreting calligraphy for readers largely unfamiliar with Islamic visual culture. Landscape photographs record the Hijaz escarpments, desert dunes, Red Sea shallows, and Jabal Tuwaiq, while a color-coded map titled “The Growth of the Modern Saudi State” charts Ibn Saud’s territorial expansion from 1902 to 1932. Industrial sections show offshore rigs, desert drilling sites, workers handling drilling equipment, refineries, shipping installations, and petrochemical facilities. A gas-operations diagram traces ethane, propane, butane, and natural-gasoline flows between processing plants and the industrial centers of Yanbu, Ju’aymah, Ras Tanura, and Jubail, demonstrating how extraction, separation, transportation, export, and industrial development operated as an integrated petroleum system.

The volume’s substantial documentary content is shaped throughout by Aramco’s institutional perspective. Its industrial photography and diagrams preserve detailed evidence of drilling, gas processing, refining, shipping, and infrastructure expansion, while its historical and cultural sections position the company as a mediator between Saudi Arabia and the industrialized West. The book acknowledges the need to explain Saudi society to foreign employees but gives less emphasis to the contemporary transfer of petroleum ownership to the Saudi state, preserving the language and visual conventions of an earlier American corporate order even as that order was being restructured. Official Aramco histories confirm that Saudi participation reached 100 percent in 1980, making the volume especially valuable as a corporate publication issued at the boundary between American consortium control and full Saudi ownership. Minimal handling wear affects the volume and slipcase, with no significant defects reported; binding and contents remain clean and sound. Fine. A richly illustrated record of the technical, cultural, and administrative knowledge Aramco used to explain its operations and institutional authority during a pivotal year in Saudi petroleum history.

Item #22551

Price: $240.00