What the Saudis have been doing when they locked up all the rich people and demanded their cash, one cannot be sure. But a useful framing of the issue is to think back to a European problem from before the U.S. was founded or even thought of. Just how does a feudal monarchy survive long-term if child mortality and frequent warfare isn’t killing off all the princes?
Of course, we’re not going to only think of Saudi Arabia in these terms. But it’s still illuminating to at least consider the issue.
Think of, in this manner at least, Saudi Arabia as being the personal creation of the first monarch, Ibn Saud. Similarly, many medieval European states were the creation of personal loyalty to the ruler, not to anything like a sense of nationality or country as we think of them today. That state will be monarchical, of course, but also feudal in many senses. The children of that monarch will have great economic power over the new country.
Which is where the problem comes in — as that royal family extends down the generations, that economic power is both spread among many more people and also becomes more of a burden upon the populace. Historically, this was ameliorated by the manner in which only one wife, at a time at least, could have only so many children. The rampant disease of the time would take nearly half of those, and standard warfare would take another good portion of the males. It wasn’t unusual at all for a European royal house to simply run out of people to inherit, which is an easy enough solution to the royal family simply overbreeding.
But that’s not quite how it happened in Saudi Arabia. Ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, was born in 1875. He had some 100 children through a varied count of marriages and concubines, 45 of whom were sons. Almost all of the sons had Islam’s allowed multiple marriages, and by the time we get to today’s great grandchildren of Ibn Saud we’re talking of many thousands of princelings – 9,000 at one count. Each of whom has, so it is said, an allowance from the state and so on. As such, being a member of that family confers economic privilege, and not being in the family has a few disadvantages.
That’s a problem in two ways. Who actually rules is now a matter of argument within that rather large number of people. And who should gain economic privilege, well, that needs to be limited in order to alleviate the burden upon the economy in general.
Which is where we get something that also used to happen regularly enough in feudal states: The dispossession of the unfavored part of the larger family. One way to do this is locking up all the rich people in a hotel and only letting them out after they’ve made amends.
Note I am not saying that Saudi Arabia is exactly a feudal state along the lines of a European medieval monarchy. I’m only saying there are some useful parallels. As the royal family and or the feudal aristocracy grows in size, it needs to be culled in some manner. In the old days, war and Crusades did nicely, but today some other solution must be found. As sometimes happened back then too, this may include simple dispossession of a part of the family in favor of those retaining that monarchical power.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
