Crude Reality: Petroleum in World History (Exploring World History)
This engaging and thought-provoking book directs readers' attention to the vital role that petroleum occupies in today's global economy and geopolitical arena. Black has done a masterful job of explaining a complex topic with a clarity that makes his book well suited for supplemental reading in undergraduate classes and appealing to the general reading public. This is no academic tome. Rather, it is a skillfully articulated synthesis of recent scholarship and analyses that situate petroleum in an unvarnished and objective global perspective. Employing straightforward, nontechnical prose, Black guides readers through historical examinations of petroleum that discuss the resource's geology, engineering, exploration, production, transmission, refining, consumption, and the too-infrequently addressed subject of petrochemical applications. His conclusions are hard to ignore; the global society depends on fossil fuels at a time when the world's peak production of petroleum has likely already occurred. Summing Up: Essential. Public and undergraduate libraries should purchase this book.(CHOICE)With world oil supplies dwindling toward inevitable depletion before this century’s end—at least by some estimates—energy producers are scrambling to uncover hidden reserves as well as preparing to transition into an era of such renewable resources as wind and solar. With the aim of evaluating the crisis and looking ahead to a postpetroleum society, Black, a Pennsylvania State University environmental-studies professor, provides a well-written, comprehensive history of humankind’s 150-year love affair with the fossil fuel once dubbed 'black gold.' Not surprisingly, Black points out, first discovery and usage of oil dates back to ancient times when Babylonians and Persians drew it from open pits for medicinal and lighting purposes. Commercially viable drilling didn’t really begin, however, until the 1850s with the urgent demand for kerosene; and as automobiles and plastics have become ubiquitous, oil consumption has grown steadily to 87 million barrels a day worldwide. In analyzing modern, oil-related problems such as global warming and Middle Eastern wars, Black emphasizes the huge challenges society faces in shifting from petroleum to alternative energy sources.(Booklist)A general history of oil is certainly welcome and will prove to be of interest not only to scholars of the history of energy, but also to many non-specialists with an interest in out contemporary history and economy. . . . There is also no doubt that Brian Black . . . has made a most valuable contribution with this long history of oil from the classical world until today. The work is informative and useful, with a quantity of details rarely to be found in a single work. . . . The book is well written and always clear and easy to understand. It will certainly encounter the general interest of readers and make for worthwhile, fruitful reading enriched by many good photos.(Global Environmental Politics)Black provides a historical synthesis of the oil industry from 1730 to the present and covers a range of topics organized around the idea that humans created a 'petroleum culture' so complex that it often obscures relationships between our behavior as consumers of oil and the significant environmental, political, and social costs involved in producing oil. . . . Not since Daniel Yergin’s book,The Prize, has there been a synthetic account that grapples so thoroughly with the transformative effect of oil in world history. . . .Black . . . [provides] a . . . more condensed and readable account with a bolder and clearer analytical framework that offers an accessible entrée to the subject for non-experts of energy history and for scholars alike. . . . Black crosses national borders and moves swiftly over 250 years of industry development to present a story in which oil stars initially as 'black goo' but transforms over time with the aid of human accomplices into a powerful actor that drastically alters the world’s climate.(Environmental History)Crude Realitystands out . . . for Black’s skillful incorporation of environmental and cultural history into the more standard narratives focusing on the geopolitics of state and corporate development of global oil resources. . . . Black also makes an important and highly original . . . contribution by analyzing oil itself as a ‘critical actor, capable of shaping an entire way of life.’ . . . Regardless of precisely how much oil may be left, though, Black’s insightful book demonstrates that other ‘crude realities’ like environmental damage and global warming will likely favor those nations that move beyond oil and pioneer the cleaner alternative energy technologies of the future.(Journal of World History)Crude Realitybreaks the industry's past and future into four broad eras: 1750–1890, 1890—1960, to the present, and the era of climate change (starting around 1980). About one third of the text covers the infancy of the petroleum economy, before the internal combustion engine was widely commercialized. . . . [T]he early days of drilling in Pennsylvania and the Caucasus [are] interesting in their own right.(Southwestern Historical Quarterly)As we begin to imagine a world with less and less oil, Brian Black’sCrude Realityhelps us understand the petroleum era, which was amazingly brief yet profoundly transformative. I recommend this wonderful book to anyone interested in the biggest questions about the past, present, and future.(Adam Rome, University of Delaware)Brian Black is one of America's leading historians of energy and the oil industry, and this book provides scholars and the general public a splendid guide to those subjects. It is concise, thoroughly researched, wide-ranging in focus, and as relevant to our times as history can be.(Donald E. Worster, University of Kansas)We have long needed an environmentally oriented global history of petroleum, so Brian Black’s book is timely and welcome. A leading expert on the history of oil politics and economy in the United States, he has now expanded his scope to include the other major petroleum regions of the world, from Mexico to the Middle East and Indonesia, as each moved to center stage in the world’s strategic politics. He writes with a lively wit, yet conveys the gravity of the challenge we face now, the momentous decline in the fossil fuel era of history.(Richard P. Tucker, University of Michigan)A terrific book on what happens when a world founded on limitless growth collides with the harsh reality of a finite resource.(Ted Steinberg, Case Western Reserve University)