The New Geographies of Aramco’s Infrastructural Projects

The immediate decades after American geologists’ 1938 discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia saw large-scale modernization efforts in the Eastern Province, the flourishing of the oil industry, the influx of American technical expertise, and an overall strengthening of economic and military relations between the US and Saudi governments. At this time, the then American-owned Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco) used the language of innovation and progress to quickly take on a vast array of infrastructure development projects from public works initiatives and facilities to extract and transport oil, to building roads, railways, pipelines, ports, airports, schools, and hospitals. This project uses ArcGIS to examine how the region around Hofuf – a site that appears in many planning documents prior to the 1953 labor strike and was where protesters were imprisoned during the widespread protests of the 1950s – was being conceptualized by experts at the time. By reading together the posthumously published memoirs of an activist imprisoned at Hofuf, US State Department records tracking the development of the 1953 protests, commissioned Aramco studies on Hofuf, and georeferencing both pre-oil and post-oil maps depicting Saudi terrain, this project shows how Aramco’s pipelines and railroads created new ways of linking together regions that previously had alternative linkages prior to the discovery of oil. Aramco’s infrastructure thus effectively dismantled existing infrastructural networks to produce an entirely new geography, which was mobilized to quell the labor strikes of the 1950s.