Aperture Book of the Month - December 2025

Ed Conway, 'Material World: A Substantial Story of our Past and Future'. W H Allen, London, 2023

This is a truly remarkable book. In an age obsessed with the ethereal – with data, cloud computing, and digital finance – it is easy to forget that the vast edifice of modern civilisation is built upon, and utterly dependent on, brute physical matter.

Ed Conway’s ‘Material World’ serves as a powerful and necessary corrective, dragging the reader back to the geological, industrial, and human infrastructure that underpins contemporary life. We've thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, which is our Book of the Month for December 2025.

“The six materials described in this book are not scarce. They have fueled the prosperity of empires. They have helped us to build cities and to tear them down. They have changed the climate and may, in time, to help save it.”

Conway, the Economics Editor for Sky News, fuses deep economic analysis with intrepid narrative journalism, structuring his immense inquiry around six foundational materials: Sand, Salt, Iron, Copper, Oil, and Lithium. His central thesis is ambitious: to reveal the true, hidden cost of modernity and expose the profound vulnerability inherent in relying on the narrow geographic chokepoints where these materials are extracted and processed. ‘Material World’ is not merely a history of commodities; it is a global, ground-level reckoning with the physical reality of human consumption and strategic power. But it also hints at the future, and the use of these elements in a new era of sustainable exploration and provision.

The Pillars of Civilisation

The book’s structure is its greatest conceptual triumph. Conway organises the work around a series of ‘journeys’, each based on a remote location where one of the cardinal materials is sourced. This approach allows him to shift effortlessly from macroeconomics to granular, often startling, detail. It’s engaging, compelling, and fascinating.

“In 2019, the latest year of data at the time of writing, we mined, dug and blasted more materials from the Earth's surface than the sum total of everything we extracted from the dawn of humanity all the way through to 1950.”

Conway’s journey to a hyper-saline plain in Chile to explore salt reveals its historic and continued importance, not merely for flavour, but as the essential feedstock for the global chemical industry, a material that controls life-sustaining processes from water purification to the production of plastics. Similarly, the segment on sand, the single most consumed material on Earth, takes the reader to the quarries and dredging operations that fuel urban expansion, highlighting the material’s critical role in concrete and microchips, and detailing the alarming black-market trade driven by its scarcity.

The chapters on iron and copper provide a vital bridge between the historical industrial revolutions and the present. Iron, and by extension steel, represents the 'mass' of modern life – the skeleton of skyscrapers and the engine block of transportation. Copper, meanwhile, serves as the nervous system, essential for conducting electricity and information. Conway effectively demonstrates how the immense, often invisible, infrastructure required to extract and refine these metals determines national wealth and dictates global supply chains.

“When politicians talk lazily about re-shoring, it often betrays a deep ignorance of what is happening out there in the material world. The deeper one delves, the clearer it is that each of these supply chains is interwoven with another. We are in a web, not a chain.”

The latter sections address current geopolitical flashpoints. The analysis of oil is less about the energy source itself and more about the logistics, revealing how the global flow of this resource is managed by an intricate, fragile web of pipelines, shipping lanes, and strategically vital straits. Conway concludes with lithium, the ‘white gold’ of the electric vehicle transition, exposing the critical contradiction of the green revolution: solving one environmental problem often involves exacerbating another, as the clean energy transition demands exponentially greater material extraction. Nitrogen, through the Haber-Bosch process, is both the silent killer and saviour, feeding billions through synthetic fertiliser but driving massive ecological change via runoff and pollution.

And so, the political flashpoints of the world emerge: Taiwan, Venezuela, DRC, Ukraine and Bolivia top the list. Morocco and Western Sahara get an honourable mention. The motivation for the type of global competition we see emerging today is laid bare…

Material Shock and Geopolitical Vulnerability

A core theme of ‘Material World’ is the vulnerability of the hyper-connected, hyper-specialised global supply chain. Conway masterfully connects the geological scarcity or concentration of these materials with the political instability and economic risks faced by consumer nations.

He makes clear that access to materials is now the primary lever of geopolitical power. When discussing rare earth minerals (which, while not one of the core six, are intimately linked to lithium processing), Conway highlights ‘China shock’ – the systematic manner in which Beijing has gained near-monopoly control over the processing stages of critical minerals. This control does not require physical ownership of extraction, the power lies in the downstream industrial capacity. For a Thucydidean strategist, this centralized control represents the ultimate material interest, creating a permanent strategic chokepoint that Western nations ignore at their peril.

“In much the same way as we talk today about petrostates like Saudi Arabia or Russia, the battery age is giving birth to a new breed of Electro states: countries like Chile, Argentina, Australia and, of course China, which will dominate the extraction and refining of the required materials.”

This discussion dovetails directly with the writing of geopolitical realists such as Tim Marshall and Robert Kaplan. Marshall's ‘Prisoners of Geography’ emphasises how physical terrain dictates national ambition and vulnerability. Conway takes Marshall’s spatial analysis and translates it into a material one. Our freedom is not only constrained by mountains and rivers, but by the handful of remote ports, processing plants, and deep-sea mines that keep the whole system running. And their control… Meanwhile, Robert Kaplan’s work, particularly ‘The Revenge of Geography’ reinforces Conway’s central argument that material and geographical constraints are fundamental, often ignored, determinants of power. Kaplan’s realist framework would see the race for lithium or the control of the South China Sea (a key chokepoint for iron ore and oil shipments) not as ideological battles, but as inevitable power struggles driven by the immutable realities of resource location and access. Both Kaplan and Conway argue that the 'hardware' of the planet fundamentally dictates the 'software' of international relations, reminding readers that fate is often geological.

Comparative Materialism: Conway and Smil

In terms of intellectual pedigree, ‘Material World’ stands firmly in the tradition of Vaclav Smil, the Czech-Canadian scientist whose extensive body of work – notably ‘Materials and Man’s Fate’ and ‘How the World Really Works’ – insists on the primacy of material flows over abstract economics. Smil is the high priest of physical reality, meticulously quantifying the sheer volume of concrete, ammonia, and steel required to maintain modern life.

Conway complements Smil’s rigour with something often missing from the latter’s dense, quantitative studies – a human element and a gripping narrative. Where Smil provides the statistical terror, Conway provides the sensory experience. By visiting and invoking the source – the stifling heat of a salt flat, the grinding noise of an iron ore mine – Conway successfully translates the incomprehensible scale of consumption into visceral human terms. While Smil is essential for understanding the scale, Conway is essential for feeling it. And he is hugely successful in doing so.

‘Material World’ is also a valuable counterpoint to the optimistic narratives of techno-futurists. It argues that the ‘weightless economy’ lauded by Silicon Valley is a dangerous fiction. Everything digital requires a physical shell. Every gigabit of data flows through a copper wire. Every server farm is powered by electricity generated using turbines forged from iron and cooled by specialised fluids. Conway’s work thus aligns with the ‘Big History’ approach, exemplified by David Christian, which anchors human civilisation in material transitions (from stone to bronze to iron), framing the current epoch as defined by the unprecedented and ultimately unsustainable consumption of non-renewable geological resources.

Critique and Conclusion

The book’s greatest strength is its narrative drive and structure, but this also presents a minor weakness. The selection of the six is necessarily reductive, leaving out other crucial elements like phosphates, rare earths, or aluminium, which might be argued to deserve similar attention. However, this is less a flaw and more a pragmatic necessity to keep the work manageable.

For some, while the book excels at diagnosis, it offers limited prognosis. Conway is primarily a chronicler and an alarm bell, not a policy architect. He clearly articulates the ‘material shock’ and the looming ‘terrestrial terror’ of a world scrambling for finite resources, but the solutions – circular economies, material substitution, or dramatic de-growth – are left largely unexplored, as they fall outside the book’s self-defined scope. Conway is adept at signposting them, nonetheless, and the signposts he provides are .

“These six substances helped us survive and thrive. They helped make us magic. They can do it again.”

In conclusion, ‘Material World’ is an exceptional piece of economic journalism, characterised by extraordinary clarity, meticulous research, and a compelling global perspective. It forces the reader to confront the hidden material sacrifices made daily for the sake of global connectivity and comfort. It makes the global economy inescapable, utterly destroying the simplistic and reductionist argument to ‘nationalise’ supply chains. In its ability to educate and entertain simultaneously, it stands as a landmark work alongside the best of Smil and Marshall, yet provides a unique and indispensable human voice. It is a vital atlas for anyone seeking to navigate the complex, fragile, and inherently physical future of the 21st century.