Philby and the Fossil Economy of Saudi Arabia
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In this post, Mahdi Zaidan of King’s College London discusses their ongoing research, supported by the EHS Fund for Graduate Students.
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Harry St John Philby, British colonial administrator, adviser and adventurer, was, like his more famous son, the double agent Kim Philby, a man of competing loyalties. He was at once a self-professed non-believer and a Muslim convert at the Wahhabi court of Ibn Saud (Monroe, 1998, p. 163), an anti-war candidate for the far-right British People’s Party who sold weapons to the Saudi state (Griffin, 2019; Monroe, 1998, p. 203), and a critic of imperial policy in the Middle East who supported the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland (Krairi, 2017, pp. 141–142).[1] He was, in his own words, ‘a free man, ready to work on behalf of any serious bidder’ (Monroe, p. 203).
Before Arabia, Philby climbed the colonial service career ladder in India. When World War I broke out, he accompanied the British army to Iraq. In 1917 was tasked with delivering Britain’s cash subsidy to Abdulaziz, the then Sultan of Nejd and future King of Saudi Arabia. The meeting would prove fateful. After a brief stint replacing T. E. Lawrence as top spy to Transjordan (1922–1924), Philby returned to Nejd to seek his fortunes. Whether he returned as a British official or a private individual remains ambiguous (Krairi, 2017, p. 337).
Philby’s diaries, reports and published articles shed light on the early political history of Saudi Arabia. Inconsistencies and the clear adulation of the Kingdom in his published material led the historian Goldberg to tarnish his credibility as an objective observer of Saudi history (1985). Palestinian journalist and historian Khairi Hammad portrayed Philby as a loyal servant of British imperialism in Ibn Saud’s court (1961). Edward Said lumps him with other orientalists who perceive their knowledge of the orient as the result of ‘some intensely personal encounter with the Orient, Islam or the Arabs (Said, 1978, p. 237).’ While the historian Priya Satia cuttingly paints him as a ‘lesser Lawrence’ (2008). Consensus among scholars is that Philby is an unreliable source for the history of the early Saudi state.
Philby was not only engrossed in the political machinations at the heart of early Saudi history: he was a participant in the profound changes wrought by the emerging fossil fuel economy in the Peninsula. In the second volume of his travelogue Heart of Arabia Philby gives himself the honour of being the ‘the very last European to sojourn in Wahhabi Arabia before its desert spaces were desecrated by the advent of the motorcar (Philby, 1922, p. vii)’ an honour he would later tarnish by holding Saudi Arabia’s monopoly on the import of Ford cars. The pace of change recorded in his own dispatches is striking. Saudi diplomat to Britain, Hafiz Wahba, reported that in January 1926 only four motor cars operated in the Hejaz, all of them belonging to the deposed King Hussain and his family; three years later the figure Philby estimates stood close to 1,500, and roughly half of the 420,000 pilgrims arriving over those four years travelled by car. Philby narrated a transformation of which he himself was a broker.
The records shown above invite a different question from the one the existing literature has asked. Goldberg, Hammad, Said and Satia have debated Philby’s reliability as a witness to early Saudi history. Supported by the EHS Graduate Grant, my research turns instead to his business ventures. For his role as propagandist and negotiator at the Saudi court, Philby was rewarded with lucrative concessions through the Company of Explorers and Merchants in the Near and Middle East — later known as Sharqieh Ltd (Alkhashil, 2016). These records offer a rare glimpse into Saudi commerce and the changing material base in the period preceding and following the discovery of oil.
The Sharqieh papers record a man embedded in the material apparatus of the new state. The company brokered wireless installations across Najd at Hail, Qasim, Shaqra, Tabuk and Hofuf, with mobile units mounted on Ford lorries; it delivered bitumen supplies for the Jedda-Mecca Road, coinage contracts, water-drilling equipment, benzine imports, lighting schemes in addition to explorations for minerals. These contracts were only the first in a long history of oil-funded modernisation schemes that stretches into present megaprojects like Neom. My project incorporates Philby’s early ventures into the history of oil-based economic development in Saudi Arabia.
[1] The ‘Philby Plan’ as it became known later was a proposal made by Philby and Chaim Weizman to provide King Ibn Saud with a subsidy of £20 million in exchange for his acquiescence to the expulsion of the Palestinian residents from their historic homeland.
Bibliography:
Alkhashil, M. (2016). Sharqieh ltd. And mineral-exploration projects in Arabia (1926-1960). Rev. Hist. Polit. Sci, 4, 43–51.
Goldberg, J. (1985). Philby as a source for early twentieth‐century Saudi history: A critical examination. Middle Eastern Studies, 21(2), 223–243.
Griffin, M. (2019, August 14). `Calls himself an Englishman’: The shifting loyalties of Harry Philby. QDL. https://www.qdl.qa/en/\%E2\%80\%98calls-himself-englishman\%E2\%80\%99-shifting-loyalties-harry-philby
Hammad, K. (1961). Philby: Kita’ men Tarikh al-Arab al Hadith [Philby: A Piece from Modern Arab History]. Commercial Office Publication.
Krairi, K. A. (2017). John Philby and his political roles in the Arabian Peninsula, 1917-1953.
Monroe, E. (1998). Philby of Arabia (Illustrated, revised reprint). Ithaca Press.
Philby, H. St. J. B. (1922). The Heart of Arabia: A Record of Travel and Exploration. Legare Street Press.
Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books.
Satia, P. (2008). Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the cultural foundations of Britain’s covert empire in the Middle East. Oxford University Press.
To contact the author:
Mahdi Zaidan
King’s College London
