Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

"Each chapter in the book deals with a different material—sand, iron etc. It looks at the ways in which it was originally discovered, how it was manipulated, how it became part of human technologies, and indeed the basis of certain aspects of human civilization. He’s a very engaging writer who knows how to communicate and uses vivid imagery. It starts with a dramatic explosion in an opencast mine in Australia that he’s gone to see. It’s just inconceivable for an ordinary person to think of the volume of dirt that’s being blown up in order to get at the seams of the mineral they’re mining. There are many things the book is trying to do and succeeds in doing very well. One is a sense of the scale of human excavation across the world and through history, and how it began to emerge. He has a strong sense of history: for example, how the Phoenicians came upon the secret of glass. As he says, a lot of that may be rather mythical: how these fishermen decided to light a fire on a beach and came out with glass. He covers that and takes it further. The other aspect is that we just don’t know how much this material is part and parcel of everything we use all the time. It’s not just the age of iron or the age of steel or whatever. If we look around our room, our house, our lives, we realize how much it’s in everything we have and use. That leads to an interesting and slightly depressing ending, which is that while all our attempts to create a greener technology for the exploitation of resources to lower carbon emissions are worthwhile, we should not ignore just how much material is used. To build a wind farm involves not just a lot of energy but also a lot of material—and that’s got to come from somewhere. The reason the book seemed to fit so well into the way we’re thinking of the prize, is that for global cultural understanding one has ask, ‘What’s the impact on the environment and the people who live in the places where these materials are extracted?’ And that, as he makes clear, has been devastating, in many ways. The book is ostensibly organized by the materials, but it’s actually about the human beings who mine them, use them, exploit them, and exploit other human beings to try and get more of them. It’s not a polemical book. It’s a book of power that makes you think about the materials we take for granted. Each one has a genealogy, if you like, it comes from a particular place, and we don’t always know about those places and the conditions under which it’s being extracted. There has been some very good journalism about how rare earths are mined, and what happens to the people who mine them. We get a strong sense of that from this book."

"What I like about this book—and he makes this point very clearly—is that this is stuff that you can see. Ed Conway is a journalist for Sky News and of course TV journalists are always looking for things that can be filmed. Our review of the book pointed out that it’s a shame that there aren’t more pictures in it. He’s trying to paint a picture, and you want to see what he’s seeing, which is the extraordinary effort that goes into mining the six vital materials that he focuses on: salt, sand, iron, copper, oil, and lithium . He doesn’t underplay the environmental risks being run in order to get the materials that make up our daily lives, but this is a book that says, ‘Yay! Capitalism does things that actually make the world work.’ He’s clearly in awe, if you like, of the extraordinary human ingenuity that goes into producing these materials and then transmuting them into the things that we use day to day. From that point of view, if there’s a book on this list that doesn’t fit the template of outright scepticism about the world of business, this is probably it. This is the one that says, ‘There are risks here, and these need to be handled, but look at human ingenuity!’"