Material World
The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • Finalist for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award
Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium.
These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations and fed our ingenuity and our greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future.
The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grid, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that power our phones and cars: though it can feel like we now live in a weightless world of information—what Ed Conway calls “the ethereal world”—our twenty-first-century lives…
ED CONWAY is a writer and broadcaster. He is the Economics and Data Editor of Sky News and a regular columnist for The Times and Sunday Times. He has written two critically acclaimed and bestselling books and has won numerous awards for his journalism. He lives in London.
