Carnegie and Rockefeller feature in this engaging history of how the use of natural resources has underpinned greed and dramatic industrial development
Its hard to throw a rock without hitting an object that has changed the world in someones eyes. Hunt through book shops and there you will find titles on all manner of purportedly world-changing items: maps, bags, equations, dresses, eruptions, diagrams, shoes, tea cosies, the banana and cod.
They might all be justified. Just as any experience changes the brain, so any product or resource can be said to have changed the world, given a broad enough definition of what it means to change. Perhaps somewhere in London or New York a publisher is mulling a book proposal on the global impact of party balloons, paperclips or marshmallows.
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