Mitchell (Middle East, south Asian, and African studies, Columbia U.) investigates the deeply intertwined histories of carbon-based fuels, workplace organizing in the context of new kinds of social labor aimed at extracting and converting them into useable energy, and through all of these the emergence of modern democracy in the last two hundred years. He focuses less on oil-money per se than on how social power was materially arranged around these natural forms of wealth and their transformation. To this end, he starts with the rise of mass politics and coal in the US and Europe in the 19th century. He then examines the origins of the oil industry in the Middle East, attending to the role that struggles for control of raw materials played in World War I and the resulting League of Nations aimed at capturing Middle East oil. At stake for Mitchell is also "the making of the economy as a new object of politics." Later chapters unpack the international financial infrastructure developed in the 20th century to curb the threat of oil speculations by banks, but also the transformation of flows of energy after the 1973-74 "oil crisis" and the political formations Mitchell says attend to these flows. A concluding chapter speculates on the political ramification of the end of low-cost carbon energy, arguing that the socio-technical understanding of this situation offered by the book promise better ways of overcoming the challenges this poses for our survival. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)