 Welcome, thanks for coming to this discussion of Adam Hania's book, he's probably in need of no introduction but I'll give him a brief one anyway since he's the star of the show. A reader in development studies here at SOAS, Adam is the author of tens of articles and three monographs treating issues as diverse as development in Palestine, global migration, neoliberalism and much more. His first book, Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States came out in 2011. A quick two years later, his second book, Lineages of Revolt, Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East came out with Haymarket Books and his latest book which we're here to celebrate and talk about, Money, Markets and Monarchies, the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East was published very recently with Cambridge University Press. Adam will be talking for maybe ten minutes about the book and then we'll hear commentaries from Sarah Salem here in the middle, an associate professor of sociology at LSE. Her research focuses on post-colonial theory and Marxism, Egypt, the Middle East. She's also an editor at the Journal of Historical Materialism and at the far end, Professor Laleh Khalili, Middle East politics member here at SOAS and her book, Sinus of War and Trade about Maritime Transport and Infrastructure will be out this autumn with Verso. So we will look forward to a book launch of that in the coming months. I'll hand it over to Adam and then you each have about ten minutes for your commentary. Okay, I'd like to begin by thanking everyone for being here tonight and especially Laleh Sara and Laurie for helping, for being part of the event and also LMEI and Hassan and the team for pulling the event tonight together. As Laurie said, I wanted to spend a few minutes just introducing some of the themes of the book and some of the motivations behind writing it because I think it's very clear if we look at the newspaper we follow the events in the Middle East, it's very clear that the Gulf Cooperation Council states have begun to play or have taken a much more present role in the region over the last few years. I've long felt that the GCC states, however, are quite poorly understood in much of the mainstream media coverage of the region and much of the political debate around the Middle East. Often the Gulf is just reduced simply to its oil exports or to the intrigues of ruling families or the role of religion. So what I wanted to do tonight is, in the book, is actually to look more closely at the importance of a political economy perspective to the role of the Gulf. With a focus on the way that the Gulf's position as a critical side of capitalism in the Middle East is shifting patterns of accumulation throughout the wider region and that helps us understand something about the region's contemporary politics. So what I'm going to do in these brief comments is just lay out some of the both the theoretical background to this and then some of the concrete examples of what I mean. So theoretically, the book is situated in debates over how to understand the relationship between global processes and the ways that class and state formation play out across the national, regional and other spatial scales. Many scholars have critiqued a tendency in much of the political economy literature, I'm not speaking here specifically about the Middle East but more broadly, for taking, for granted, the national or nation state as the natural geographical unit and vantage point of analysis. I take on board these critiques in the book and in contrast what I try to do is to move beyond such methodological nationalism to see how different spatial scales, in particular the regional scale, are produced through cross-border processes. So there are two angles that I approach this from. First, I ask what is it that we can learn about the global from the vantage point of the Gulf? If we look at the way that the global political economy is often discussed, the Gulf region is often completely left out in a lot of the critical literature on the global. Indeed, if we look at the term BRICS, for example, which has come under a bit more dispute, if you like, in recent years, but nonetheless the term BRICS terminology terminologically excludes the Gulf even though there are, I think, some very similar characteristics or comparisons we could draw. The Gulf is often reduced when it is mentioned in the critical political economy literature, is reduced simply to its role as an oil or hydrocarbon exporter. So what I was trying to do in the book is to say ask what is it or what can we learn about the global from the vantage point of the Gulf? And to that end, I argue that the flows of Gulf financial surpluses are an essential component to understanding the contemporary world market. That is a world market that is marked by persistent levels of over-accumulation, continued predominance of the United States and Europe as core zones of global power, but the emergence of new centres of accumulation in political rivalries emanating from China, East Asia and elsewhere. So what can we learn about the global from the Gulf in this context? This is not simply a matter of adding yet another case study to our understanding of global processes. It's about seeing the global in and through its relation to the Gulf by better understanding this relation, including most centrally what this means for the Gulf's wider regional neighbourhood, I think we can gain some new insights into the nature of global capitalism itself. So that's the first kind of spatial angle that I look at, this global Gulf perspective. Second, alongside this, I also try to integrate the Middle East as a whole into this analysis, arguing that the Gulf's location within the global has been articulated through shifting patterns of accumulation in the wider region. And I investigate this through a detailed mapping of major economic activities in the Middle East, including agriculture and agribusiness, real estate development, urban infrastructure such as power, water, transport and telecommunications, as well as banking and finance. And what I argue is that alongside the liberalisation of many Arab economies over the past decade, GCC based firms and capital groups have significantly expanded their involvement in these and many other sectors. This is not simply important in terms of the ownership of capital. It means that Gulf based investors have become a principal intermediary between the market and the wider population of the Middle East. Social and economic policies, not to mention political alliances, are deeply shaped by the dynamics of capitalism in the Gulf. I don't have time to go into too much empirical detail here, but I just want to give a few examples of what I mean here. So to take first the sector banking and finance, scholars working on other geographical contexts have utilised the concept of financialisation, the idea that financial markets increasingly shape the day-to-day lives of individuals, households and firms across the world. As with much of the global political economy literature, not much has been done on the Middle East. In this respect, it's mostly focused on the US, Europe, Japan and other large estates to some degree. But what I try to show in the book that this trend of financialisation is also observable in many parts of the Middle East. But it is not enough to understand this solely from the prism of the national scale. When we look at, for example, the rapid growth of consumer lending and real estate lending in Jordan over recent years, we need to place the development of Jordan's financial markets in the context of the region, the regional scale. Quite remarkably in this respect, GCC or Gulf-related banks hold more than 80% of all Jordanian banking assets. Financialisation, in other words, in Jordan, is not something simply about the increasing rate of financial markets in day-to-day life. It's also a spatial process that represents the increasing insertion of GCC capitalism into Jordanian social relations. Similarly in terms of urban development policies, between 2008 and 2017 nearly 40% of all large scale real estate projects across Algeria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia were owned, developed or built by a GCC-based company. The key tenets of urban planning across many Arab cities, i.e. things such as the privatisation of land and public housing, the shifting of rent caps, the extension of mortgage markets and the private provision of infrastructure services in cities are thus closely interlaced with the accumulation of Gulf-based capital. So when Beiruti residents challenged the reversal of long-standing rent control laws, as they did a few years ago, or poor Egyptians protest their eviction from informal housing communities in Cairo, they confront not simply aspects of national urban policy but also the ways that the priorities of urban development have become increasingly intermeshed with the tempo and dynamics of accumulation in the Gulf. We can also see the significance of the regional scale in relation to agriculture and agribusiness. In Egypt, for example, around half of all the food and agricultural companies listed on the country's stock exchange are either controlled or have significant ownership held by Gulf-based capital, almost half. Similarly, when we're looking at agricultural land, the operation of supermarkets and retail outlets in Egypt, storage facilities for grain, refineries for sugar and so forth, the Gulf plays a major role in all of these aspects of agribusiness in Egypt. Similar patterns can be seen in Jordan and Lebanon. These firms, we think of them often as Egyptian firms or Jordanian firms or Lebanese firms, they produce for their domestic markets, but as well they produce for exports to the Gulf. And in this sense, the mantra of food security, which is what all Gulf states put forward as their kind of agricultural policy, particularly post-2008, actually represent a reworking of agro-commodity circuits across the Middle East. Gulf food systems are realigning regional patterns of agricultural trade, the types of agro-community commodities produced and structures of ownership and control. Finally, my favourite example is the question of telecommunications. Here there's been a very significant shift across the region in the last decade in line with global trends towards the liberalisation of telecommunications markets opening up to foreign providers of telecommunications services. And GCC firms have been major beneficiaries of this. Of the 26 mobile licences present across the non-GCC Arab world, 14, or more than half, are either fully or partially owned by GCC firms. And for Iraq, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia, GCC-owned telecoms control the largest share of the entire mobile market. Now, you might ask why do I find this interesting? I think it is important not simply because of who might be profiting from the social calamity of Instagram selfies. But rather, these kinds of telecoms are playing a major role in shaping the nature of urban infrastructure. For example, we can see this in the concept of smart cities. And of course, state repression and surveillance across many urban spaces in the Middle East. When Moroccans and Tunisians access the internet, for example, they do so through five subsea cables connected to the global internet backbone. This critical infrastructure is predominantly controlled by Gulf firms and telecoms. So much of the content of this book focuses on these kinds of pan-regional trends. To be clear, I'm not saying that these patterns only involve the Gulf, or that all GCC states act in the same way and that there are no tensions between them. I look at these differences and I also compare the Gulf's involvement in the region with U.S., European, Chinese and other capitals. And also try to explore what this means for our traditional conception of the Arab national bourgeoisie. So the last two chapters of the book come back to the GCC itself and its political role. First in Chapter 7, I look at the oil price decline that began in mid-2014 and ask what this might mean for economic and social structures in the Gulf with a particular focus on Muhammad bin Salman and Saudi Arabia. And I examine the policy goals outlined in various vision strategies promulgated by all Gulf states in the wake of the oil price decline. Looking at what they might mean for Gulf citizens, what they might mean for the region's migrant labour workforce and the fortunes of the large Gulf conglomerates. As part of this analysis, I try to draw out a major point about the nature of crisis because very often the oil price decline is presented as a crisis for the Gulf. But I try to show that conjunctures such as these marked by shrinking oil revenues, budgetary pressures and severe economic downturn are being seized by the Gulf monarchies as an opportunity, crisis opportunity. A chance to rework class and state structures in a manner that deepens and extends pre-existing trajectories. In understanding how this crisis opportunity actually works and whose interest it ultimately serves, it's necessary to differentiate the social structures and forms of class power in the Gulf. And finally in the last chapter I look at what this critical assessment of crisis might mean to the numerous political and military conflicts currently racking the Middle East. The chapter looks at the contradictions and tensions in this period which have largely been shaped through the evolution of the Arab uprisings that shook the region so forcefully from 2010 onwards. So I look in this chapter at the contradictions between the different GCC states, specifically obviously Qatar and Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as well as the Gulf engagement in the wider region including the rivalries and shifting alliances between Iran and Israel. Very, very important. As well as interventions in Syria, Yemen and other Arab states. So I think, I'll finish here but I just wanted to make a point perhaps this is something we could further discuss in discussion but I think these trends are very important because they say something about where the Middle East might be heading given the numerous crises that we currently see today. If you look at the region's business press you'll be, it often seems to be quite out of kilter with the reality that we see on the ground. The business press heralding the reconstruction boom, the enormous profits that are going to be made and expected to be made in the coming period as some kind of political settlements occur in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. And I think it's very important to kind of understand the next few years, obviously we can't say where these reconstruction boom or these reconstruction agreements may head but I think it's very important to see the trajectory of these next few years in light of what the way that the regional scale has been produced over the last 10 years. Thank you. Well thank you for this invitation and congratulations on publishing this really, really great book. I think it was definitely the most enjoyable political economy book I've read in a very long time even though there's so many tables and statistics but still it was exceptionally engaging and enjoyable. I think I wanted to start by talking a little bit about how I think important Adam's work has been generally to the field of Middle East studies but particularly because of this almost missing perspective of political economy. So I think this book and his other work are such important contributions because of the lack I think of especially empirical analysis and empirical data we have on political economy in the Middle East. I think this is especially the case with the Gulf which is a region that I think generally it's accepted has come to play a really prominent role in Middle Eastern politics and yet strangely there hasn't been a lot of research into what that means, how that's happened and how it actually plays out on the ground. I also wanted to thank Adam as well for this work and his other work because I think it's really played a central role in dislodging certain frameworks that have been very dominant in analyzing Middle Eastern politics and I think primarily the framework of communism and the transition paradigm which is essentially exceptionalizing Middle Eastern states especially Gulf states and seeing them as especially averse to democracy very slow on this global transition towards liberal democratic states and often centering things like culture, religion, values, norms and those types of explanatory variables and understanding that lack of democratization. So I think this work is really important and again driving home this point that the region is obviously complex and that political economy is really central as well to understanding the state of many of these countries. So I wanted to start by first kind of talking a little bit about the parts of the book that I especially found really interesting and really relevant to my own research on the Middle East but specifically Egypt. I think what especially struck me reading this book was again this attempt to place the Gulf within global political economy and global capitalism. I think it's interesting that there is like I said this broad understanding that countries like Saudi Arabia or the Emirates have come to play a major role but not necessarily placing them then on the same scale we might place China, Japan and these other big economic actors and I think the sort of some of the data that Adam presents is really fascinating and showing that actually many of these small Gulf states are more powerful in terms of their ability to influence economic sort of the global political economy today. For example the argument that again the rise of China or the rise of the East would have been unlikely or impossible actually without the rise of the Gulf happening around the same time. So I think those arguments where we start to see the Gulf as part of a bigger global picture rather than necessarily as separate from it was really interesting to me. I also found the attempt to analyze the Gulf outside of this category of oil really, really important. I think it's amazing that there's a book on the Gulf that does not use the concept of the rentier state which as many of you will know is almost impossible to find. And I think while oil is obviously central to many of the economic changes that have happened in the region, I think there has been a very strong tendency to again exceptionalize it and see it as the only thing that we need to look at in understanding the political economy of these states. I think added to that I was very again interested in this concept that Adam puts forward which is that we need to understand the capitalist classes that exist within these states. Again not necessarily a common way that scholars have approached the region. I think often with places like Saudi Arabia or the Qatar, all of these types of states. There is this tendency like Adam just mentioned to look at them through this lens of the royal family, the ruling family, these individual elites, almost a very tabloid style kind of approach to understanding politics. I think this idea of looking at capitalist classes is a much more comprehensive and interesting and much more grounded way of understanding the very complex tensions and negotiations that are happening in many of these states. And just to add to that it's also quite fascinating that many of these capitalist classes are made up of also individuals that are not part of royal families or ruling families as well as individuals that have connections to other forms of global capital. And I think this presents us with a very different understanding of these individual capitalist classes that is a much more transnational and grounded account of changes that are happening across the region. So what I wanted to do today very quickly is talk a little bit about how in particular the chapter on finance capital I found very interesting in relation to my own work in Egypt but then present two or three questions that I was curious about after reading the book that maybe you could engage with if you want to. No pressure. So I think what especially stood out to me in relation to other Arab states like Egypt so Lebanon, Syria, many Arab states and their changing nature and their changing relationship with these Gulf states is the role that finance capital in particular has played in completely restructuring sort of the neoliberal transitions that have happened across many of these countries. And I was very shocked and also depressed to find out the extent to which Saudi capital in Egypt for example has completely dominated not only most sectors but also sectors that I think have historically stood as important to be state controlled sectors. So the work that you've done for example in the agricultural sector, the production of food the production of infrastructure and so on it's really quite telling to see how much of those sectors have now completely dominated by Saudi capital. I also found it really fascinating to think in the case of Egypt how visible this transition has been as well. And I was wondering if that was something you could speak about a little bit. So for example the visibility of the Gulf capital and things like advertisements in billboards, in real estate development, in the new shopping malls and gated communities that have opened up. And also in things like the emergence after 2013 especially which I think you do a really good job of also placing as within this legacy of Saudi and Emirates intervention into Egypt the emergence again of specific forms of businessmen or business families that are very clearly linked to certain forms of capital. And so I found it really fascinating to see that this political economy transition which I think often is understood through things like statistics or these you know, things happening on the Egyptian stock exchange is actually once you start to think about it a very visible shift that has happened in places like Egypt and is quite readily apparent I think to people that visit or in terms of what's happening to the actual urban and rural kind of landscape in countries like Egypt. I think a lot of that also has to do with this question of land and in Egypt of course this massive controversy a few years ago, is it a few years over these islands that were basically sold to Saudi Arabia and this was a very interesting controversy again because of this idea of land and its connection to the nation and what it means when land is being sold and yet at that moment there are also very interesting interventions being made in this debate around the fact that actually most a lot of Egyptian land already was sold right to Saudi capital or to Gulf capital. So what does it mean? What was different about these islands versus the way we might understand huge parts of New Cairo or 6th of October city that similarly we could understand through this lens of land being sold to Gulf investors or to basically capital coming from the Gulf. The other thing that I found really interesting that I wanted to note is this idea of time and temporality. So it's really interesting when you mentioned for example that the Gulf states also represent themselves to some extent as a break with their own past. And I think often when we think about Gulf capital it's something that seems to have happened so quickly suddenly in the 1970s or 80s we see this massive influx sorry this massive influx of Gulf capital into countries like Egypt that has literally transformed the region. But I was very interested again in this idea of how the Gulf understands this question of time and temporality and if you could speak a little bit more about their own understanding of themselves as part of this modernizing force in the Middle East. I think you touch on it a little bit towards the end especially but I was really sort of fascinated by how they also portray themselves as actors who are trying to lift the other Arab states out of this backward space that they're in and how in some ways they're also contributing to the very same sort of orientalist discourses that are used to portray them. Another question I had was to think a little bit about bringing together political economy with political sociology. So I think the political economy analysis is really interesting and strong but I was left wondering in some places about how these Gulf states understand their political and social projects. So in other words how do they understand the decisions that they're making and how does this fit into a wider project that they may have. So I was really struck for example often how when statements are made about new projects they're quite often linked to things like Arab history, Arab culture, Arab language, Islam, the role of preserving sort of Arab power in the global world and I was wondering in what ways the Gulf capitalist classes see themselves as trying to revitalize or put forward some kind of alternative political project that is still very much tied to these social, cultural and religious values and how this affects the way they relate to other Arab states but also how it affects the way they relate to the rest of the world. So do they see themselves as putting forward a project that is more than just clearly linked to political economic control but also questions of ideology subjectivity and so on. Finally last question if I have an extra minute. I think the other thing I was really interested in asking you a bit more about was this question of resistance. So you talked quite a lot about this question obviously of migration and the role migrant workers have played in building large parts of these cities in the Gulf states. I was wondering if you could expand a little bit more on how these Gulf capitalist classes understand the role of migrant workers but also how they account for or navigate the possibility of resistance that in some ways is always present or is always there but it seems that they don't necessarily see it as something that needs to be taken into account to any great degree. And linked to that how for example do they factor in resistance from other types of subaltern groups on thinking in particular feminist groups or how they responded to events like 2010, 2011. And linked to this idea of what they see their project as but also how in these very intricate political economic decisions or decisions that they make how they account for this possibility or impossibility of resistance. Is it something that is taken into account and to what extent? Great thank you. Thank you Sada. Folks there are a few chairs down here for people who are standing in the aisles if you want to brave coming to the front of the theater. There are a few chairs and other people can certainly move in if you'd like to squeeze on to the end. Let people settle in. Hi everyone. I'm incredibly honored to be asked by Adam to comment on his incredible book which like all of his other previous publications displays his best qualities and attentiveness to empirical detail married to a theoretical sophistication that is worn lightly, lucidly, clearly. A generosity towards what and whom he reads and incorporates that prevents him from straw manning arguments and putting forward a very strong and well supported argument without polemics. And encyclopedic knowledge of not only his immediate area of interest but a much more expensive historical and geographic milieu. In this I remember conversation we once had over probably too much wine about what he liked to read and we bonded over the fact that he was a great fan of Peter Brown. Peter Brown for people who don't know is a late antiquities historian who does nothing with the golf today. But it says something about Adam's incredible early addition to his expansive knowledge that he reads these extraordinary texts in which allow him to frame his arguments in a much longer or situate his argument in a much longer history. In some ways this book is a culmination or a continuation of his two previous books. His first book specifically dealt with the emergence of capital accumulation and class formation and state formation of the golf itself and his second book, The Lineages of Revolt, is about the prehistory, if you will, of the 2011 Iowa Pricings. And by bringing these two things together in this book he does us a great service because now he actually allows us to focus the way that surplus oil wealth or petrodollars from the golf countries are recycled. Now we know that they're often recycled into armament, purchase of armament Saudi Arabia, UAE, all of them are some of the biggest purchases of our arms from European and US and other states. But in a way what this book does is it shows us where else these petrodollars are recycled, which other sectors and perhaps very importantly which countries of the Middle East. I mean we know about the football jerseys that Barcelona and Paris and German and Man United and Arsenal and all of these guys wear, which carry the logos of various golf countries but it is really important also to talk about where this money goes closer to home. Some of the areas where this money goes, this capital goes, are of course traditional industrial sectors such as aluminium steel and cement and downstream hydrocarbon production which Adam attends to. He also talks about agrobusiness, retail various other forms of infrastructure and utilities investments again beyond the golf itself in the broader Middle East. Now one of the things that was I really enjoyed reading was where Adam was talking about the investment of golf capital in urban development, urban projects and essentially development, city development or building trade. What I can best describe this and this is not what Adam would use, he's a supreme rationalist, this is my way of describing it is the way that capital investment in I'm sorry I mean that in a positive way. The way that capital investment in real estate in a great deal of the Middle East actually functions as a kind of magical thinking. Now what I mean by magical thinking here is the kind of thing that Marx meant when he talked about money being a kind of fetish object. In the sense that there is an element of magic about this, an element of self reproduction which does not necessarily lend itself to clear explanation, to clear rational or logical arguments or the reproduction of capital itself is a fundamental element of that and to emergence of capital out of capital in ways that don't quite make sense. So there's an element of reality about this. Anybody who's here from Beirut and I see a few will know that there are all these buildings rising in Beirut enormous multi-story towers, most of which are completely empty at night, the towers are completely dark and yet they become repositories of golf capital. Actually we don't have to even go that far if you look at the shard which was built with Qatari investment we know that more than half the building is empty, not rented, not used. So there's an element, this is the element of fetish and magic that I'm talking about. This is not capital, we're producing capital in ways that are productive or noticeable or visible, but actually capital investing in these fixed objects that have a magical quality. Of course this is not limited to the golf, that's exactly how Trump made his money. He's a terrible businessman, doesn't make any money and yet by investing in buildings he buys enough credibility to actually get credit from the banks and therefore perpetuate a kind of a magical thinking in the New York scene. But this is also happening and I think that some of what Adam writes about in his incredibly lucid and very clearly detailed way about investment, golf investment in these buildings is quite illuminating and perhaps draws a veil on some of that magic or rips the veil on some of that magic. The second area which I'm glad Adam himself wanted to point to is telecommunications. And part of the reason that I'm really interested in the question of telecommunications is because I see a continuity in the way that golf money is going into internet and mobile infrastructure today with past infrastructures of communication that were transformative. Not in a technologically deterministic way, but as a fundamental element of capital accumulation in previous years. My students in infrastructure, in my infrastructure course know that I'm kind of obsessive about underwater cables and telephone cables and data centers and internet and in part this is not only because of course without these technologies the forms and the extent and the intensity of capital accumulation wouldn't have been quite as it is today, but also because they are profoundly political projects. Adam points to the fact that Morocco and Tunisia are connected to the right undersea cable through infrastructures that are owned by Saudi, I believe you said, golf capital by the UA capital itself, but there are of course those kinds of infrastructures also exist in Palestine for example, where the mobile networks in Palestine and Lebanon and elsewhere have at least investors that are coming from the golf and therefore have, they hold an inordinate amount of control over those infrastructures. Now this is not only the power to cut off internet or mobile telecommunication at a time when you need it, we know Egypt did that in 2011, it is also the power to listen in. And anybody who has read the work of artist, geographer Trevor Paglen or seen it on television knows that in fact it's the solidness of the concreteness, the reality of these infrastructures, not that it's a mobile set of radio frequencies, but that there are actually cables under water, makes them very vulnerable to being tapped, to being listened to, and if you own the cables then you don't even need to tap them, you have access to that data. So this is a fundamental form of surveillance capital that the golf is accumulating in ways that echo but also surpass past forms of telecommunication accumulation. Finally both because you and Sara mentioned your chapter on financialization I won't go into it too much, but I wanted to draw out two minor points that again were of interest to me. One of the things that you point out in your chapter on financialization is the importance of public-private partnerships and in some ways I think that the fact that the golf has used public-private partnerships as a modality or promoted them as a modality of investment in lots of places also points to the ways in which it's sometimes not quite easy to distinguish between the state and private business in the ways that we do, that the boundaries between them are blurry and something like a public-private partnership actually shows those blurry boundaries in really fascinating sorts of ways. Now that was one of the things that I was interested in. The second thing that I was interested in of course was you mentioned the financial growth in management consulting and other kinds of managerial services that come along with financial financialization. Now for all my sins I'm a repentant management consultant. I was before I became an academic I worked as a management consultant not for McKenzie so at least or the other one that worked for Pentagon. I didn't do anything so evil but what is interesting is of course that the rise of these management consulting firms is interesting not only because of the reports they produced. McKenzie for example wrote the 2030 vision for Saudi Arabia. There were rumors that they actually cut and pasted from some other place and there was like Lithuania left in the cut and paste document which should tell you exactly how much those management consulting services we used to offer to companies that really exorbitant prices are actually worth. Lithuania and Saudi very similar economies but what is also of course I'm being facetious here what these management consultings do and have done historically is have been at the sort of the leading edge of implementing of expanding of bringing forward capitalist ideology and practice of being instruments for the globalization diffusion of a set of managerial practices that end up forcing people into obeying certain sets of standards rules and regulations that often still despite the globalization of capital in all sorts of places still a lot of these rules and standards emanate from the North Atlantic and I think that this also has to be taken into account because the vast majority of the consulting firms that provide the advice to the financial firms are still primarily and fundamentally although they have offices everywhere they are ultimately headquartered in the North Atlantic so I think that that also was of great interest to me and the way that you incorporated them as part of the process of financialization I think also shows something about the comprehensiveness of your critical vision of the area now. Okay I have like 15 questions so I'm going to ask you two. The first question is for us academic nerds Sarah commented at the end of her talk that she was or maybe it was at the beginning that she was very happy to read a book that didn't send her oil but as somebody who's just written a book about transport a transport taking place in the Arabian Peninsula how do we provincialize oil? Because ultimately the fundamental beginning of the processes of capital accumulation expansion etc or perhaps not the beginning but the fundamental acceleration of that process happens with the discovery exploitation and export of oil in the 1930s but especially from the 1950s onwards but also how do the transformations that are happening now and I'm not just talking about regular fluctuations in the price of oil. How do the transformations that are happening now in the structure of global oil production going to affect this? What I'm talking about is the fact that in the last couple of years the US has surpassed Saudi Arabia and Russia as the largest producer of oil in the world it has done so because of fracking. It's still not the world's biggest exporter because it consumes most of its own oil but the very fact that the US is now producing a huge amount of the oil that it needs I'm curious about whether this affects the processes of production of oil that produce the kind of surplus value that goes into these investment funds and capital investments particularly of the sovereign wealth funds perhaps not so much of the capitalist and so I'm curious about that and the second question that I have is you begin your book with the story of Muhammad bin Salman flying to Japan to set up SoftBank as a kind of a mega venture capital firm of a sword. But interestingly what has been happening is I'm really interested in SoftBank because of all the really dodgy investments they're making in all sorts of technology in the US again because I was just a weird techie but I'm really what I've been following the news actually in the last two or three days there's been a lot of really interesting news coming out about the SoftBank. One of them has been that the rating agencies are actually rating SoftBank really poorly and saying that its investments are pretty bad and then there's also a news item came out in Wall Street Journal last night that the PIF the Saudi sovereign fund and Mubadela are not happy at all about the prices SoftBank has been paying for some of these venture for some of these tech firms that it has been buying so that was really interesting to me because in some ways that says that there is a kind of a limit that emerges out of both political and economic circumstances to the power of these massive sovereign wealth funds with their enormous reserves of dollars that they can go in and plonk down and transform places and I was wondering if you could possibly talk a little bit about those limits Thank you very much