FROM WARRIORS TO ADMINISTRATORS: CAPITAL AND COERCION IN THE EARLY PROCESS OF STATE FORMATION IN ARABIA (1900-1938)

The major scholarship on state formation tends to privilege external (colonial or post-colonial) factors when it addresses cases of non-European states. Contributing to a growing literature that complicates such a tendency, this thesis challenges the standard view of the rise of Arab national states by demonstrating how the formation of the Saudi Arabian modern state was primarily driven by internal factors. It suggests that the emergence of a centralized state in the early twentieth century Arabia was largely a response to internal threats rather than a consequence of war threats or a construction of a colonial project. Based on secondary materials and a sample of primary documents, the thesis presents a historical analysis of the period from 1900 to 1938. It utilizes Charles Tilly's conceptual framework that highlights the effect of war and revenues in the development of the national state. The findings indicate that, in conformity with Charles Tilly's stipulations, the coercive-intensive state in the phase of expansion (1902-1924) yielded an indirect rule of a tribute tanking empire. The transition from an empire-state to a centralized, bureaucratized national state in the early 1930s, however, was not, the findings suggest, determined by external threats, made insignificant by the imperial protection of the British. The episode of the Ikhwan Revolt, the study shows, was decisive in transforming the polity into a national state.