The Prize.

The Prize is oil. There is no other commodity that has so shaped the 20^thcentury as black gold. Daniel Yergin won the Pulitzer Prize for this book and it is well-deserved. Running up to 780 pages, this hefty volume traces the development of oil from the mid-1800s up to the Gulf War—from the very beginning when rock oil was first used primarily for light fuel, to internal combustion engines for automobiles, to moving whole militaries. Yergin on first sight appears to not handle the material as well, allowing readers to become lost in numbers and details; however, upon reflection, the vast amount of data that he had to compile and condense into a non-fiction book that is read cover-to-cover, as opposed to a reference book, is impressive. It was easy for me to lose track of what I had just read because of the numerous names to keep in mind. As the oil industry gets more complicated with the break-up of Standard Oil, the rise of overseas competitors, and eventually the proliferation of government intervention and judicial arbitration, the information gets unwieldy.

The book is comprehensive. I’m not sure if there’s a better adjective to describe it. It’s so comprehensive that I doubt Yergin intends his audience to remember the details, but to come away with a sense of how immense the subject matter is while also a lingering awe of its incomparable importance. He takes you through the different eras of world history: industrial revolution, the Russo-Japanese War, WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, the formation of Israel and the Middle Eastern states, the Suez Crisis, the 1967 War, the 1973 War, the Iranian Revolution, and the Gulf War, just to touch a few, and impresses upon his readers the integral role oil played in all these events.

I’m not exactly sure what I should try to convey about the book to you blog-readers since it’s just so big. I thought I would just leave a small observation. There is certainly a flattening of the playing-field that runs underneath the evolution of the oil industry. In the early stages of oil production, you have big names that stand out. Individuals whose personalities dominate the world stage: Rockefeller, Deterding, Gulbenkian, etc. However, as trusts are broken up, governments get involved, and oil-exporting states take the reins through nationalization, there is a decline in the amalgamation of power in the hands of a few. As companies go public, share holders have more say, board of trustees take a slice of the pie. Price controls were relaxed. In many ways, democratization filtered into the oil industry, whether for better or for worse.