Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

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Fascinating, fun, and vitally important. A wonderful exploration of the world we've built yet somehow manage to ignore -- Tim Harford, bestselling author of HOW TO MAKE THE WORLD ADD UP A masterful exploration of how materials shape our world more than ever - economically, geopolitically and environmentally -- Diane Coyle CBE, Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge The details of these events, and of the tense negotiations that led up to them, are to be found in abundance in The Summit. Far more engaging, though — and no doubt more memorable — are the portraits Conway paints of Keynes and White. If you think people are necessarily boring if they study economics, you should read this book. It would be difficult to dream up two more fascinating people.

Goes straight on the ‘must-read’ list . . .Conway is one of the most adroit commentators on economics and business of our time.” ― City AM A stunning book that will transform the way you think about economics and life. Brilliantly written -- Matthew Syed, author of REBEL IDEAS Lively, rich and exciting . . . Full of surprises.” —Peter Frankopan, author of The Earth TransformedNot since Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics have I read a book which makes me want to reexamine everything. If you were to design the Material World it would look nothing like it does. There are so many single points of failure, modern life depends upon intricate supply chains and obscure corners of the Earth where they are mined. A top-down goal like reducing CO2 emissions at the nation level is very hard to square with a system that has evolved almost entirely bottom-up and where everything is interlinked almost as much as the atmosphere. Everything has an environmental price tag, for example, he tells us just how much concrete, steel, fibreglass, copper and fossil fuels go into constructing wind turbines, especially those off-shore. Full of colorful characters and fascinating connections, Material World shows how the seemingly simplest materials—from sand to salt to iron—require unbelievably complex refining and processing before arriving at their final form. With absorbing storytelling, Conway shows why we should not take the material world for granted. Fascinating and insightful, this book has changed the way I see the material world.” —Chris Miller, author of Chip War

The emergence of the American Dollar as the world's currency was not by accident. Prior to the three-week intense negotiations to set up the IMF and the World Bank to oversee an envisaged postwar world economy in 1944, the U.S. had established itself as the world's economic superpower. The emergence of the IMF and the World Bank which are jointly referred to as Bretton Woods institutions, however, formally finalises the Dollar's status as the preferred international currency of exchange. The book also offers a sobering look at the consequences of our consumption patterns, which is a topic of increasing concern in today's world. It encourages readers to contemplate the sustainability of our lifestyles and the need for responsible resource management.

The elevator pitch: this is the story of the modern world (and a bit of our history and some glimpses into the future) told through the eyes of the materials we couldn't do without. It's a bit of economics, a bit of geology, a bit of politics, material science and a lot of on-the-ground reporting from all over the world.

Ed Conway is a great thinker… Material World is an engrossing study of the basic substances on which we all depend. Anyone who cares about the resources which built our world and where mankind is heading must read this vital book.” —Adam Boulton, Times Radio In Material World, Ed Conway travels the globe - 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 - to uncover a secret world we rarely see. Revealing the true marvel of these substances, he follows the mind-boggling journeys, miraculous processes and little-known companies that turn the raw materials we all need into products of astonishing complexity. Ed Conway is a great thinker... Material World is an engrossing study of the basic substances on which we all depend. Anyone who cares about the resources which built our world and where mankind is heading must read this vital book -- Adam Boulton, Times Radio 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 epicjourney across continents, cultures, and 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. The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grids, 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 are still very much rooted in the material.Conway's gripping explanation of a world you didn't know needed explaining deserves this highest of accolades: Material World, once read, leaves us baffled that nobody ever thought of writing it before -- Matthew Parris Expansive, erudite, and edifying. A stunning insight into the materials that shaped our history and built the modern world -- Prof. Lewis Dartnell, author of 'BEING HUMAN: How our Biology shaped World History' Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future. • Finalist for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award A highly engaging and important look at the key materials powering our modern world, and how we feed our insatiable appetite for them -- Professor Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics at Harvard University and ex-Chief Economist of the IMF The biography of an element or material is now a familiar format – the story of sand is told in Vince Beiser’s The World in a Grain, while Mark Kurlansky has made a career of single-noun titles including Salt – and other authors (such as Bill Bryson in At Home) have recounted the secret histories of quotidian objects. Like Bryson, Conway delights in facts – did you know that most of London’s concrete is made with sand from the lost country of Doggerland? Did you know there are four tonnes of steel for everyone in the world? – but what distinguishes Material World is his access. Although he is very well informed, this is not a remote, academic analysis: he has been to the salt mines beneath the North Sea, the mineral railway of the Atacama Desert, the Chilean town being swallowed by the world’s demand for copper, and as a TV journalist (Conway is the economics editor of Sky News) he conveys a vivid sense of these places.

This is a properly fascinating balance of macro and micro scale revelations about the more practical, physical side of how the world works - and what that means for everything and everyone on the planet. The other issue was that Britain felt it needed to retain the sovereign decision on how much it might devalue sterling in the future to help British industry regain competitiveness in the postwar world. One can see that the Americans were correct in not letting these British concerns overly shape the design of the new IMF; broad international goals could not be subverted by parochial British interests. Churchill in particularly still clung to the hope that Britain would be able to keep and sustain its vast empire after the war—but literally Britain’s own sterling debts to the empire argued for breakup.

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The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grids, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that power our phones and 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.