“[W]e should be able to raise the whole power and efficiency of the Navy: better ships, better crews, high economies, more intense forms of war power – mastery itself was the prize of the venture.” –  Winston Churchill, talking of his decision to switch the British fleet to oil power in 1911

The Prize is one of the few books I’ve read I would describe as definitive. In it, Daniel Yergin tackles the history of the oil industry, and in scope, scale, and command of the subject he is unparalleled. It well deserved its Pulitzer.

Interpreting the history of the last 150 years through the importance of oil is somewhat disturbingly effective, a fact that Yergin makes the most of. World War 2, for example, he argues was won and lost due to the difference in oil supplies, forcing a German invasion of Russia and, in the Battle of the Bulge, leading to German tanks literally running out of fuel and grinding to a halt. The general lesson is perhaps that oil supplies have affected international policy for almost every nation state in the modern era, and almost no major event in the last century is left untouched by Yergin’s, as it were, oily hands.

The book is an impossible one to summarize in a few paragraphs, and I don’t propose to try. From Greek Fire, a mix of lime and petroleum used by the Ancient Greeks as an unquenchable war machine, to the first oil well, drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859 in order to make medicines and kerosene, through the breakup of Standard Oil and the world wars, to OPEC oil politics and Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, Yergin explains history while exploiting his historian’s gift for finding interesting or amusing anecdotes in everything. I wasn’t aware, for example, that it took 1-3 kamikaze planes to destroy an aircraft carrier, or that President Carter referred to energy conservation as the moral equivalent of war (a quote from WIlliam James). Somewhat less grandly, I also wasn’t aware that the first motels were rented as often as 16 times per night (I leave to the imagination a nocturnal activity requiring 1/16th of the night), as they were valued for their convenient, by-the-highway location.

At 895 pages and seven years in the making, the book is hardly a light read. Nothing of its scope could be. It is however a fascinating read, and for anyone interested in the history of energy or global geopolitics, it is essential reading.

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