America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. By Robert Vitalis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 392p. $29.95.

Though formally a work of comparative politics, Robert Vitalis's book occupies the small niche of interesting if impressionistic social science works that includes Mike Davis's City of Quartz (1990) and James Scott's Seeing Like a State (1998). Insights abound, but this book is not designed to test a corpus of theory. The focus is Aramco's operations in Saudi Arabia, from their inception to the mid-1960s. Using corporate source documents in Saudi archives, Vitalis has created a window into the structural racism that pervaded Aramco's operations in Saudi Arabia in its early years.