Material World
The luxury of 'forgetting' about raw materials is over
The gist: Many have never heard of the geological sites where raw materials come from, or the production sites by which they become our everyday products. Material World details how everything we have and do rests on material supply and trade foundations which if removed or disturbed would therefore topple everything. And You-Know-Who is shaking the foundations.
Ed Conway’s Material World has been out for about 18 months and justly won numerous awards. I pick it up again here because the almost-hidden realm that it unearths is becoming much easier to see in the new Trump America world. And its implications more immediate.
Material World details the history, significance and contemporary production of each of six raw materials: sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium.
But dry it is not. It is a nerd’s behind-the-scenes frolic to the mines and machines and foundries and factories and blast furnaces and underground caves and shale wells and lithium salt lakes where stuff comes from, and whereby it inches along the value chain to towards the products and food and energy and transportation essentials of modern life.
What Conway is grappling with is how most people have never heard of these geological or production sites, nor understand their contemporary importance, because the material has become fashionably invisible. We think of ourselves in the knowledge economy, where value is created in ideas or designs or brands or strategies, and where unicorns arise from companies that literally make nothing.
The book persuasively reminds us all of that rests on material foundations which, if removed or disturbed would, well, topple everything. We’ve had the luxury of forgetting this, both because trade pathways have been internationally seamless and because sourcing and production efficiencies have demolished costs.
On a related theme, James Marriot in The Times this week comments on many of the unnoticed luxuries of the postwar liberal order that will be noticed when they are dismantled.
The luxury to forget about materials can be counted among them. As Trump moves to buy Greenland or sell Ukraine, underneath the populist patter is a cold-eyed valuation of the raw materials on offer: we demand half of all “economic value associated with resources of Ukraine,” including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure.”
In a divided, tariffed world, who actually owns (or can bully the owners of) the minerals and the factories matters. Some people are clearly seeing the rock that in fact holds up our lifestyles and well-being, and now maybe we can all see it.
But there is a problem. To follow the value chains that Conway reveals, how sand starts in France or Australia and make umpteen stops via Europe and the USA until it is finally emerges, for example, as silicon chips Taiwan, to say nothing of the tech and machinery in that Taiwanese factory that itself is a product of a world tour, or the chemicals in that factory that have made a separate multi-stop journey from Saudi Arabia or South America… is to understand that our world materials-production basis is more than just merely “international”. It exists as a global lattice, or not at all.
The point made here about autarky economics is not that it is economically damaging (obviously so) but it is actually, functionally impossible. No country or geographical block has all the pieces of any of the supply and production chains. Stripping back the veneer of national showmanship shows countries all integrally connected at the material level. To take an almost comic example: even US shale oil, it turns out, is of a type that cannot be processed at local refineries. It is sent to Europe.
Nevertheless, the more the world is politically carved up, the more matters of materials availability and supply chain localization and-or control will shape geopolitical actions.
Where does this all take us? It feels like there are broadly two scenarios. Either, despite tariff saber-rattling, the global materials-production lattice stays quietly open with a nod-and-a wink. Or we’re heading back to the 19th century where the scramble for materials and processing ownership, and control over the pinch points in supply, is the bully’s playbook and devil take the hindmost.