Middle Eastern and North African Colloquium Series

Saltwater Kingdoms: Fossil-Fueled Water and Climate Change in Arabia

Bio: Michael Christopher Low is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. Low received his PhD from Columbia University in 2015 and previously taught at Iowa State University. He is the author of Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj (Columbia University Press, 2020). In 2021, Imperial Mecca received the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award and was shortlisted for the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize. Imperial Mecca has since been translated into Arabic and Turkish. Low is also co-editor of The Subjects of Ottoman International Law (Indiana University Press, 2020). In 2020-2021, he was a Senior Humanities Fellow for the Study of the Arab World at NYU Abu Dhabi. Low is currently working on a new book, Saltwater Kingdoms: Fossil-Fueled Water and Climate Change in Arabia, under contract with University of California Press.

Abstract: It is an undisputed truism that the story of the twentieth-century Arabian Peninsula is synonymous with oil. And while oil and gas pipelines have rightfully been understood as the infrastructural lifeblood of the region’s meteoric rise, another set of pipelines and processing plants has remained virtually invisible to historians, desalination facilities. Despite this seeming invisibility, all Gulf states have embraced fossil-fueled solutions to address their acute water problems. Thus, instead of petro-states, this lecture argues that we also need to understand Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbors as desalination powerhouses or Saltwater Kingdoms. This story traces their dramatic twentieth-century struggle to reverse the flow of Arabian ecology and history. At the same time, it also explores how our climate-altered future poses a new set of existential risks to the region’s system of fossil-fueled water production.