Review: Ed Conway's 'Material World' Interrogates the Modern ... - Foreign Policy
Living in a Material World
One of the defining features of modern supply chains is a distinct lack of human beings.
The Chuquicamata mine in the Atacama Desert of Chile is one of the largest open-pit copper mines in the world. Copper is extracted by detonating explosives at the bottom of the mine. Specially designed trucks that are literally the size of a house then carry the ore out of the mine, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The ore is then crushed into sand. Then the sand is processed with a water and chemical bath and frothed to the surface, where it is thickened into slabs. Then the copper enters the supply chain. At refineries in China, it is mixed with other copper from around the world—Kazakhstan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere—in the process of becoming pure copper. Then it is fabricated into wire rods, tubes, and other forms used by electronics and construction firms.
The Chuquicamata mine in the Atacama Desert of Chile is one of the largest open-pit copper mines in the world. Copper is extracted by detonating explosives at the bottom of the mine. Specially designed trucks that are literally the size of a house then carry the ore out of the mine, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The ore is then crushed into sand. Then the sand is processed with a water and chemical bath and frothed to the surface, where it is thickened into slabs. Then the copper enters the supply chain. At refineries in China, it is mixed with other copper from around the world—Kazakhstan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere—in the process of becoming pure copper. Then it is fabricated into wire rods, tubes, and other forms used by electronics and construction firms.
Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization, Ed Conway, Knopf, 512 pp., $35, November 2023
Following this laborious process, copper makes its way into just about every area of our lives. Some 650,000 metric tons of copper is extracted each year from this Chilean mine, which seems like a lot before you consider that the very trucks that extract the rocks from Chuqui use even more copper than the typical 50 pounds found in a car. Even the phone in your pocket—or on which you are reading this—contains around 6 grams of copper. And an average single-family home is wired and piped with 439 pounds of the stuff. In fact, if we are going to effectively transition to batteries from fossil fuels, experts estimate that we somehow need to find a way to excavate another three Chuquis worth of copper every year.
A supply chain like copper's has been the stuff of writers' dreams since the mid-18th century. The idea that far-flung individuals, acting in their own self-interest, "can collaborate to turn seemingly unpromising, inert substances into things of wonder" has fascinated economists since Adam Smith marveled at the supply chain involved in the humble pin's production. For Ed Conway, author of Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization and economics editor at Sky News, the intricacy and invisibility of the modern supply chain are causes for both wonder and worry.
A worker looks at melting copper in the foundry of the Chuquicamata copper mine on Oct. 25, 2005.Martin Bernetti/AFP via Getty Images
Conway's book is rich in revelations about the six materials that make the material world: sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These revelations concern the different varieties and categories of sand; the number of busloads full of dirt excavated around the world per day; the chemical formulation of nitrogen in the air; the history of plastics. His research is presented in a digestible way. One particularly memorable description explains the creation of a polyethylene strand by thinking about spaghetti: "If you stick your fork into the pasta and pull it up, you will probably ensnare a whole bunch of other strands as they tangle together." Such analogies bring the scientific processes to life and are mixed with Conway's on-the-ground reportage from places like the Atacama Desert (copper, sand, salt, lithium), the Pilbara in Australia (iron), and from Cheshire, England (salt, oil-based plastics)—destinations that feature throughout the book as surprisingly productive of both the materials and the political and scientific innovations that have made them available to build the modern world.
The book offers a fascinating lens on the intricacies of the modern supply chain, the underappreciated science behind everyday objects, and the ways that subtle—and not so subtle—changes in governmental policies shift the role of these materials in the global economy. For instance, the Saltpeter War in the late 1870s and 1880s was a fight between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia for the explosive salt that was an essential material in gunpowder. The war over control of a saltpeter-producing Atacama Desert port to the Pacific Ocean resulted in Chile's annexation of a region with "some of the most important mineral resources in the world."
As this war highlights, the definition of "salt" is quite expansive in Conway's telling, as is "oil" in a later section. There are also frequent allusions to cobalt and other minerals that didn't make the cut. Conway's reasons for choosing his six materials is because "it is hard to imagine modern civilization without them"—and in this argument, he seems to explicitly assume his reader to be one of the millions of consumers in the global north, rather than the producers of the materials who are increasingly based in the global south. Conway fears that consumers have become disconnected from the importance of the supply chain; it is that lack of knowledge that he thinks makes the "developed" consumer economies of the world vulnerable.
Construction workers are seen as they work with steel rebar during the construction of a building in Miami, Florida, on May 17, 2019. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Tellingly, at one point Conway uses the amount of steel in a person's life as a measure of economic development. In wealthy countries, that amount is something like 15 tons per capita. But "the average person living in sub-Saharan Africa has less than a ton of steel per capita." Conway points out that those six materials, and the gains from those materials, "have not been evenly distributed." But if that's the case, then what exactly is the material world? If modern civilization in some countries looks very different—and, indeed, does not rely on these six materials—then what does it mean to say that modern civilization rests on the foundations made possible by these materials?
The answer might lie in Conway's fear that "the world's twin goals of decarbonization and development are heading for a collision." He asks, "as countries become richer and more prosperous, are they really to be denied the concrete or steel"—highly polluting industries—"the West poured and forged as it developed?" Are the demands of consumers in other parts of the world going to challenge the ability of people in the global north to maintain their access to consumer modernity?
Underlying the rich descriptions of places and processes is an urgent plea to understand the stakes in the energy transition away from fossil fuels. It is a transition that the world must embrace to prevent climate disaster. Conway seems a bit ambivalent about the relationship of the state to these processes. In describing the ways that access to these materials have caused the rise and fall of empires, proximity and possession seem to be vitally important. Venice becomes renowned for glassmaking because of its proximity to the raw materials: sand, soda ash, wood, and clay. The Allies ultimately win World War II because they had access to nearly limitless supplies of U.S. and Middle Eastern oil, while Germany was stuck refining coal into fuel. There is a warning edge in Conway's tone as he points out that "China's ascent to the pinnacle of steel production is much the same as its story elsewhere in the Material World: near-total dominance."
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But, like Adam Smith, who disliked the mercantilism and protectionism of the British Empire, Conway is just as fascinated by the way the global supply chain works together in free-trade harmony. As Britain found in the early 19th century—when coal kicked off its energy transition—supply chains could cross imperial and national borders, and everyone could be better off. Free trade was all well and good if it meant that the world's most powerful economies had the ability to provide their citizens with cheap consumer goods and, therefore, a high quality of life. But what if someone else had control over your population's standard of living? After a few decades of free trade, this question led to the scramble for resources and imperial control at the end of the 19th century, one that Conway is cautiously optimistic we can avoid this time around by a combination of "unmanufacturing" the core materials in old batteries and electronics at specialized refineries in the global north, recycling copper and steel, and sticking with global trade partnerships.
Conway's focus on consumers' standard of living as the measure of civilization gives the book a very different tone from the 18th- and 19th-century works of classical economics interested in the supply chain. For Smith, the example of the supply chain at work was the creation of a pin, which was "divided into about eighteen distinct operations." But Smith wasn't making the point that the pin was the foundation of the modern economy. The foundation of the modern economy was the organization of labor. The energy transitions facilitated by the materials and processes described in Conway's book have made human labor less and less necessary. This, in turn, made the production of former luxuries like glass and steel cheaper and more accessible to more people. The modern civilization made possible by the energy transition is a civilization of consumers.
