Material World; The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

Shortlisted for the 2024 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding

Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, & lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity & greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, & the battle to control them will determine our future. • Finalist for the Financial Times & Schroders Business Book of the Year Award

The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grids, the silicon chips & lithium batteries that power our phones & 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 are still very much rooted in the material.

In fact, we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. For every ton of fossil fuels, we extract six tons of other materials, from sand to stone to wood to metal. And in Material World, Conway embarks on an epic journey across continents, cultures, & epochs to reveal the underpinnings of modern life on Earth—traveling from the sweltering depths of the deepest mine in Europe to spotless silicon chip factories in Taiwan to the eerie green pools where lithium originates.

Material World is a celebration of the humans & the human networks, the miraculous processes & the little-known companies, that combine to turn raw materials into things of wonder. This is the story of human civilization from an entirely new perspective: the ground up.