9
implementation) in the region’s states. However, variation in the social and political terrain,
especially center-periphery relations, presented rulers with different sets of challenges in
building coalitions to ensure political rule. We can think of this as the raw material from
which state builders worked to fashion new socio-political arrangements to cement ruling
coalitions (Anderson 1987). Rents are thus important variables insofar as they expand
political and economic strategies for rulers and arrive at specific junctures of ongoing socio-
political development. Moreover, just as pre-rent conditions carry political inertia, so to
does decades of dependence on easy exogenous revenue.
In a number of cases, the arrival of exogenous rents, either through colonial grants
or early mineral concessions, changed established political arrangements, but not completely.
The timing of rent arrival interacts with pre-rent administrative/institutional settings and
existing socio-political arrangements and hierarchies. Historians of the Middle East have
shown that Ottoman rule in the Middle East varied administratively and substantively across
and within political districts and that these differences increased as European powers sought
to lure Arab parts of the empire away from central control (Anscombe 1997). We also know
that there was important political and administrative variation in the transition from
Ottoman domination of the Middle East to European domination. Anderson, for instance,
demonstrated contrasting levels of military, tax, and commercial reform by Ottoman and
later European authorities in Tunisia and Libya. The result was that while Tunisia entered
the post-colonial period with the semblance of a bureaucratic state, Libya faced
independence with little institutional development connecting center to periphery. Another
contrasting situation from Libya can be found in the Gulf. Chaudhry argued that more
centralized political control (monopoly of violence) in Saudi Arabia allowed for a form of
pre-rent state-building which would be dismantled once oil concessions boomed.
8
Developing more generalized understandings of variance in Ottoman and colonial
administrations is one key to developing a fuller understanding of trajectories after rents.
One can also conceive of pre-rent relations between political authorities and
important social groups such as merchants and tribes as another form of raw material. On
the eve of oil rent arrival to Libya, “clientalistic ties of the Ottoman period had crumbled
and been replaced by a resurgence of kinship networks during the Italian occupation.”
(Vandewalle 1998, 32). Access to exogenous rents at the onset of state building, thus,
8
It should be noted that there is debate on this historical characterization of Saudi state building.
Convention