Says Hashmeya Muhsin al-Saadawi, leader of the union: “If people are desperate enough, the government believes they'll accept anything to get electricity, including privatization”. Sometimes the language is highly abstract, particularly when discussing the almost perfectly abstract "science of economics".

Mitchell outlines how the transition from coal to oil as the main source of energy in most advanced economies in the mid-20th century led to the opening of certain political possibilities and dynamics, and the closing of others.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Furthermore, the argument that coal extraction enabled worker strikes and then that this equates democratic engagement has something very wrong with it. He shows that the age of coal more evenly distributed political power amongst the middle class as they were critical to the supply chain. After 9/11, there was a whole genre of literature trying to explain why the Middle East is so messed up.

In Mitchell’s own words, the importance of coal was not felt until the end of the eighteenth century, but political conscious already existed. If we're ever to curb such behaviour, and to regain some comprehension of our planet's preciousness, we need first to understand how it came about. In making the production of energy the central force shaping the democratic age, Carbon Democracy rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the theory of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world.In fact, many oil companies sought to prevent the development of oil in the Middle East out of fear of foreign competition. He starts with coal, and a critical problem it had, in that it was highly vulnerable to disruption by labor actions. Mitchell's narrative is vastly different from the more common approach taken by Daniel Yergin and others.

Mitchell argues that carbon democracy in the West has been based on the assumption that unlimited oil will produce endless economic growth, and he concludes that this model cannot survive the exhaustion of these fuels and associated climate change. In 1926, the General Strike took place when workers were able to exploit the vulnerability brought on by Britain’s dependence on coal.Not that it’s necessarily a drawback to the argumentative quality of the book, but just that it can get quite hard to read at times. The conclusion and afterward has a great analysis on peak oil, and global warming, as well as technical aspects for extracting unconventional forms of oil. Missing: what has been happening in the rest of the world, voices from the ground, politics of 21st century energy transitions. Some experts had predicted that in the 1970s, but the response to the “energy crisis” bought oil a new lease on life.

By the mid-eighteenth century, Great Britain had become a trading power, and it was merchants who benefited first. I do wonder however whether resources like oil were the cause of, which the author alleges I believe, rather than the means of expanding the power of the rentier class. The book has been influential in fields as diverse as anthropology, history, law, philosophy, cultural studies, and art history. To cop a phrase from Marx, rather than turning economics upside down, Mitchell sets economics on its feet.A very well told history of today's civilization predicaments, tied in to the story of coal, then oil. Endless growth, and democratic governments, and national welfare systems, are assumed on the basis of the 'economy'. The West is determined to kick away the ladder (in the sense of Ha Joon Chang) and is prepared to do whatever illogical actions to maintain an unequal status quo. In the Middle East, rival companies battled for control and began to define their interests as strategic, against a backdrop of political turmoil.