Book Review – David Commins, “Saudi Arabia: A Modern History” (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2025).
Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The rise of Saudi power in the eighteenth century is not easy to explain. There are few sources, and most of them are highly partisan, remarks David Commins, a professor of history at Dickinson College and the author of “Saudi Arabia: A Modern History.” And yet, we know enough about that period to confidently say that it was two men, Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Muhammad Ibn Saud, who were at the origins of the modern state of Saudi Arabia.
The first, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, was a religious Sunni leader who saw enemies all around him. In his eyes, other clerics were guilty of not enforcing correct religious beliefs, Shiites were idolatrous for believing Ali was the rightful successor of Prophet Muhammad, and Bedouins were infidels because of their lax application of ritual duties and legal obligations. The second man, Ibn Saud, was the emir (or ruler) of Diriyah, a town in central Arabia close to modern-day Riyadh, the Saudi capital.
In 1744, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab established an alliance with Ibn Saud. Whereas the emir gained religious legitimation from Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the cleric received political backing for his sectarian mission. Commins credits a combination of religious zealotry, dynastic unity within the Sauds, and strategic patience for the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance’s success in dominating most of Arabia by the turn of the century.
However, it soon becomes clear to the reader that the history of Saudi Arabia is one of a modern kingdom despite the odds. In 1818, the troops of the Egyptian pasha Mehmet Ali left Diriyah in ruins, and Emir Abdullah, the Saudi leader, was dispatched to the Ottoman capital of Istanbul and beheaded.
At a time when Europe was recovering from the Napoleonic Wars and the Industrial Revolution was about to move from the United Kingdom to continental Europe, the Saudi kingdom was at risk of disappearing. If it had done so, it would likely have remained a footnote of history.
But the Egyptians faced a stubborn resistance in Arabia. Bedouin raiders confined Mehmet Ali’s troops to their garrisons, and a Saudi emir, Turki ibn Abdallah, organized a military campaign that drove them away in 1824. With Diriyah destroyed, the capital moved to Riyadh, and the network of Wahhabi advisors to the Saudi rulers was reconstituted.
Emir Turki presided over decades of relative stability, only to be succeeded by a civil war within the Sauds that weakened the kingdom and facilitated the takeover of Riyadh by a rival family, the Rashidis. With the Sauds in exile in Kuwait, the future looked unfavorable for the dynasty, not unlike the period after the destruction of Diriyah. But the Sauds were destined to be what London School of Economics Professor Madawi Al Rasheed calls a “durable dynasty”, as opposed to a “non-durable dynasty” such as the Rashidis.
In the “second revival of Saud power”, as Commins puts it, the Sauds recovered Riyadh in 1902. In 1925, with the conquest of the Hijaz, the western province of Arabia where Mecca and Medina are located, the Sauds had control over the territory that would formally become the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. On their way to dominate Arabia, the Sauds established their first alliance with a Western power, receiving money, weapons, and protection from Britain.
The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been a tale of downfalls and revivals for the Saudi kingdom. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the temporal focus of “Saudi Arabia: A Modern History,” were to be different. In Commins’ book, Saudi Arabia’s recent history appears as a constant of gradual political, cultural, and economic integration with the West repeatedly opposed by the most puritanical elements of Saudi society.
The forces of Wahhabism unleashed by the Sauds have often worked against the rulers’ objectives. The most obvious example is Riyadh’s support for the Mujahideen fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. This was the conflict that radicalized Osama bin Laden and other young Saudis. Under the banner of Al-Qaeda, they would go on to launch a campaign of terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s. With the 9/11 attacks, in which 15 of the 19 attackers were Saudi, the terrorist group threw the kingdom into a serious crisis with its most important ally, the US.
There are echoes of 9/11 in another, earlier moment in Saudi history that Commins draws our attention to. After the conquest of Hijaz, Abdulaziz, the first king of Saudi Arabia, made important concessions to the Wahhabi clerics, allowing the destruction of religious memorials in Mecca and Medina that they considered to be idolatrous. But the Brethren, the religious militia made of Bedouins that was key in Abdulaziz’s conquests, were not content with the king’s growing ties with the West and the arrival of modern technology such as the telegraph. They turned against Abdulaziz, who put down the Brethren rebellion in 1929.
Commins’ book devotes considerable attention to Saudi Arabia’s economic evolution, perhaps one of the most vertiginous ever recorded. Between 1964 and 1972, the country’s GDP per capita tripled, only to do it again between 1972 and 1974, and 1975 and 1981. Obviously, none of this would have been possible without the discovery of oil, which started to be exploited in 1938. As of 2023, Saudi Arabia was second not only in oil production but also in oil reserves.
With time, the oil rents were behind the establishment of a lopsided economic structure in which most Saudis are employed by the state and foreign nationals crowd the private sector, especially in construction and trade jobs. These days, under the Saudi crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia has embarked on the so-called Vision 2030.
This economic plan seeks to diversify the national economy away from oil and increase the number of Saudis in the private sector. Nevertheless, as Commins reminds us, the relationship between ruler and society remains the same it has been since oil wealth transformed the Saudi kingdom, that is, a rentier bargain in which “the government delivers benefits in exchange for the population’s compliance”.[1]This combination has helped Saudi rulers navigate a regional reality dominated by the anti-monarchic agitation of Arab nationalists in the 1960s and the profound discontent of protesters during the Arab Spring in the 2010s.
The political structure of Saudi Arabia dramatically expanded with the country’s economic rise. In 1939, explains Commins in a revealing anecdote, the visit to Europe of a Saudi prince and his foreign affairs deputy left the foreign affairs ministry without enough personnel. Abdallah Sulaiman, King Abdulaziz’s right-hand man, had to take on additional tasks and organize such menial affairs as the transportation arrangements of a prominent visitor.
Nowadays, Saudi Arabia has close to one hundred embassies around the world and 23 ministries, but the continuing lack of democracy has ensured that power remains in the hands of the royal family. In fact, under King Salman, on the throne since 2015, the system of rule has arguably become even less democratic. It was a tradition for Saudi rulers to consult with senior members of the family and exercise a certain collective leadership. But this tradition fell victim to the centralization efforts of King Salman and his son, Mohammed bin Salman. When he succeeds his father, bin Salman is expected to concentrate more power than many of his predecessors.
What kind of ruler will Mohammad bin Salman be? The one lauded by sectors of the Western press for allowing Saudi women to drive in 2018? Or the one responsible for the Saudi military campaign in Yemen that led to the death of close to 9,000 civilians, not to forget bin Salman’s role in the brutal murder of Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi? Most likely the second.
In the epilogue to the book, Commins provides a glimpse into Saudi Arabia’s future. He writes that two elements in the kingdom’s history have remained constant: “absolute power for the palace and close alignment with the US”[2]. Still, Commins is confident that “for all the power and wealth on the side of the monarchy, ordinary Saudis will have a hand in their country’s future.”[3]
Commins’ book is a valuable introduction to the history of a country that remains surprisingly unknown considering its G20 status. The volume largely focuses on political, economic, and societal trends, but it also finds time to track the changes in national culture. “Saudi Arabia: A Modern History” deserves a place in the bookshelf of those interested in current affairs.
[1] David Commins, “Saudi Arabia: A Modern History” (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2025), p. 274.
[2] Ibid., p. 292.
[3] Ibid.
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