In Market Orientalism: Cultural Economy and the Arab Gulf States, Benjamin Smith sets out to define and illustrate a phenomenon that he terms “market Orientalism,” which he argues characterizes mainstream thinking about emerging markets globally. He argues that market Orientalism consists of four main elements: (1) emerging markets are understood through deeply historical modes of thought and practice about cultural others, (2) the idea that the world is divided into regionally defined markets, (3) emerging markets are seen as not yet modern and thus immature, and (4) emerging markets are seen as obscure or lacking transparency and are thus impenetrable. Market Orientalism, Smith suggests, is a useful heuristic for understanding how the very notion of “emerging” markets are “imaginative geographies, in Edward Said's sense of the word: practiced spaces that are ranked, structured, theorized, assembled, and sometimes punished in ways inseparable from earlier forms of dealing with supposedly ‘backward’ economies and peoples” (p. 9).

Through a case study of narratives about the Gulf Arab states, Smith argues that market Orientalism defines the way the region's cultural economy has been written about and imagined in mainstream English-language media since the 1930s. His analysis draws on publications originating in the United States such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as a handful of other international sources in English, including the (London) Times and The Economist. In considering these texts, Smith traces certain tropes about the Gulf and its people, for example, the commonplace image of locals putting resource revenues to use in allegedly ill-informed ways. If their public sectors are imagined as bloated, their people are also stereotyped as displaying the immodesty of the nouveau riche: “Squandering their supposedly great fortune, Gulf Arabs frequent hotels, boutiques, and jewelers in the toniest parts of the toniest cities that were built to serve celebrities and corporate elites, all the while wearing ‘traditional’ dress” (pp. 88–89).

In taking a text-based approach, Smith is explicit at various points that his analysis is ultimately less about the Gulf and more about these Anglophone authors’ worldview and the publics they are writing for “at home.” While this methodological qualification is essential, the book unfortunately offers little insight into who these authors and actors are, their political agendas and aims, as well as the structural constraints they face (e.g., relations between authors, editors, and newspapers). The result is that in focusing on narratives alone, the analysis can often feel rather apolitical or depopulated, and key questions about the wider political structures that shape Orientalist ways of knowing and relating to the Gulf remain unfortunately unexplored.

Reflecting a common style in academic geography today, the first three chapters are heavy on theory. While obviously referencing and extending Edward Said's treatment of orientalism, Smith positions the book as part of the geographic literature on “cultural economies,” which he shows structure feelings and hierarchical ways of thinking about various world regions. Smith also tries to make connections with political geography and the literature on critical and feminist geopolitics in Chapter 7, though the effort is largely unsuccessful because the thin engagement with that vast body of work results in the author being unable to engage its critical insights in a meaningful manner. The book is strongest where it retains its focus on the field Smith seems to know best: cultural economy. This literature posits that “all that we call ‘economic’ is always already inflected by that which we call ‘cultural’” (p. 8), and Smith positions the book as an effort to refocus conversations in the field to better account for the role of spatial imaginaries that both shape and arise from intersections between “economy” and “culture.”

Chapters 4 and 5 describe prevailing narratives about the Gulf region in two historical periods: 1932–72 and 1973–82. Here, Smith lays the foundation for his first argument about market Orientalism, namely, that it has deep historical roots firmly planted in post/colonial encounters. These two chapters are ultimately an exercise in textual deconstruction of the sources described above. The analysis is highly predictable for anyone familiar with the basic contours of Said's work on Orientalism, but it is nonetheless valuable to understand how Western tropes about the Gulf region were produced/constructed/imagined and, in some cases, how, when, and where they originated. For example, one of the common critiques of Gulf economies is that they are insufficiently “diverse,” being so reliant on fossil fuel revenues. Planning for the region's “post-oil” economic future is a staple of the most current discussions about the Gulf, but Smith shows that calls for “diversification” had already begun in the 1950s (p. 117). At the time, diversifying meant industrialization, whereas today it is largely articulated through the language of “knowledge economy” development around education, research, and technology. These narratives, Smith argues, belie the actually diverse economic realities on the ground, but nonetheless serve to perpetuate the interests of those producing the narratives—whether these were the industrialists of the 1950s or the management consultants of today. Raising such an awareness about these tropes as clichéd Orientalism is indeed the strongest and most important contribution of this book. Politically, this is important because, as Smith notes, academics and other ostensibly critical scholars can and do fall into the trap of repeating them—often (but not always) unwittingly.

Following a similar critical orientation, Chapters 6 through 9 do less deconstructing and more constructing. Though he would likely reject such a characterization, Smith ultimately tries to “correct” certain false narratives about the region. For example, in Chapter 6, he pushes back against the narrative that regional leaders are incapable of cooperation by explicating two successful cases of cooperation: the formation of the United Arab Emirates and of the Gulf Cooperation Council. In Chapter 7, Smith refutes the idea that geopolitics in the Gulf region is simply about competition over the control of oil resources, but rather that it actually encompasses a wide array of actors, interests, and imaginaries concerning not only warfare and Great Power politics but also about “culture” (a point that critical geopolitics scholars have in fact been making since at least the early 1990s).

Smith's thesis that market Orientalism has long characterized English-language accounts of the Gulf region is straightforward, but the argument is often difficult to follow. In part, this is due to the sprawling structure of the book. The author makes numerous important and insightful points along the way, but these are often lost on the reader, who is asked to do a great deal of work to follow the overarching line of argumentation. Part of the difficulty may also rest with the prose, which feels simultaneously labored and rushed, alternating between an academic and stilted style at some points, casual and flippant at others. A distilled set of arguments in half the number of pages might have resulted in a less cumbersome and more accessible theory of market Orientalism—a phenomenon that Smith convincingly defines and critiques.