In Kuwait Transformed, A History of Oil and Urban Life, Farah Al-Nakib tracks the urban development and historical transformation of Kuwait Town from its founding in 1716, to its rise as an independent port town engaged in trading, shipping and pearling, to the launching of its oil industry in 1946. With oil revenues, a massive state-led modernization project was initiated to make Kuwait ‘the best planned and most socially progressive city in the Middle East.’ This initiative would span the next four decades and would transform Kuwait in irreversible ways, altering the pre-oil urban landscape and social practices of everyday life in Kuwait. Al-Nakib recounts the history of urban space and how these spaces dictate social behaviors and interpersonal relations in Kuwait. She identifies the patterns and practices of everyday life in the former urban center of Kuwait Town, prior to oil, in the late nineteenth and traces their changes beginning in the early twentieth centuries, to the contemporary ‘modern’ contracted urban planning, suburbanization and privatization of post-independence era Kuwait.

The structure of the book is a well-organized and coherent eight chapters. The first three chapters discuss the pre-oil years and the different social and economic functions during that period. The next four examine the coming of oil and how suburbanization de-urbanized Kuwait's traditionally urban society. And the last chapter reevaluates the current state of affairs and the new generations desire to recapture their city. As background to this structure, Al-Nakib claims that being a Kuwaiti herself “gave [her] some latitude to be critical— perhaps even somewhat idealistic— in [her] analyses” (X). Her inquiry “began as instincts” because, at its core, this book is a deeply subjective attempt to make sense of her own society via the tools of scholarly research. Al-Nakib's forthright “subjectivity” becomes an ethnographic lens with which she builds a legitimate framework for the urban dilemmas facing Kuwait today. She explains how several historical processes have made Kuwaitis insular, xenophobic and divided in the contemporary moment, a far cry from their maritime past.

As the first Gulf City to encounter oil, Al-Nakib shows how Kuwait transformed almost overnight from an active port town, with a welcoming charm and cosmopolitan networks, to a suburbanized and segregated society defined by a chain of districts. Al-Nakib further highlights the rationale and causes for the de-urbanization of the original Kuwaitis. The discovery of oil created economic development and subsequent urban destruction of Gulf City. This caused a mass exodus to government planned suburbs built with different intentions than a port city for a trade economy. She reminds the reader that Kuwaitis once enjoyed a pluralistic coexistence, that all Kuwaitis were immigrants themselves coming from the Najd, Iran and Iraq, making diversity a celebrated phenomenon. By contrast, today's xenophobia is broadly based on the government's definition of citizenship laws established in the early 1960s in response to rapid economic development. The sources for the historical background of the book are reports from different Western, primarily, British elites in the early twentieth century, and western urban planners in the post-independence era.

Al-Nakib implements Henri Lefebvre's “regressive-progressive approach” to historical research on the production of space. She classifies it as an urban historical study, building on Fuccaro's study on Manama, Bahrain, to dispel the myth of ‘exceptionalism’ that has taken over popular and academic discourse on the Gulf's oil urbanization. Al-Nakib claims that her book “opens up that dialogue” (20) between the pre-oil and modern periods to investigate how the coming of oil affected the continuous process of city formation and the practice of urban life in Kuwait.

Al-Nakib concisely dismisses the myths of exceptionalism that remain popular in scholarship on the Gulf. She does this by explaining that Kuwait does have a past, a cosmopolitan one, and that the ruling elite's simplistic national narrative of oil becoming the “rags-to riches” story of Kuwait is not entirely accurate. “Kuwait had a long history of borrowing from the Indian Ocean cultures” (9). “Kuwaiti society before oil was characterized by its hybridity, its acceptance of difference, and its curiosity and desire to explore the unknown” (72). Rhoads Murphy claims “port functions made a city cosmopolitan, which did not necessarily mean sophisticated but rather hybrid” (72). Kuwait's prosperity in the late eighteenth century onward supported immigration from the Najd, Iraq and Iran (27). While the majority of the town were Sunnis from the Najd, there was notable religious tolerance of Jews, comprising 0.5% of the population in 1904 (74). Al-Nakib's narrative explaining the hybrid culture in Kuwait prior to the establishment of its modern oil economy makes the consequential “de-urbanization” of the city all the more compelling.

This text would be suitable for several course curricula. An urban studies class of any kind would benefit from this book as a recent case study. General Islamic history and societies modules could also build on its in-depth analysis of the history of a vibrant, often forgotten corner of the Middle East outside of the lens of war and diplomacy. Most specifically, courses that explore the history of Arab cities would also benefit from the scholarly additions of this text. Middle East studies courses on urban development tend to examine capital cities like Cairo and Beirut, which were cosmopolitan centers with pivotal relations to Europe. Kuwait's relationship to its neighbors, India and East Africa, is equally valuable as an equally dynamic city-state with a different cultural context. Al-Nakib's book therefore provides much needed depth in the history and consequences of urban development in the Middle East region.