ABSTRACT
‘Then came the wealth and the power, thanks be to God’, an Arab merchant remarked to me, commenting on the experiences of the 1970s. He might equally well have said: and then came the wealth and the problems, for as fast as a sudden massive influx of wealth solves one set of problems, it creates another. The latter are the more worrying to deal with in that they are new, often unforeseen, sometimes almost without precedent and therefore cannot be solved by example. A tidal wave of prosperity swept Saudi Arabia in the 1970s. I spent three of those years in Jeddah and it is on that experience that this article is based. The object is to provide an overall perspective of the differing aspects of social change occurring in modern Saudi Arabia.
