 Researcher Keith Fisher chronicles oil’s transformation from humble substance that seeped out of the ground, to killing machine for global war.
A Pipeline Runs Through It is a history of oil from ancient times to the start of the First World War. Oil has always been known about, and had various uses in antiquity, such as an adhesive or waterproofing agent. Oil seeps or springs gurgled the black stuff from the depths of the earth and it was collected for moderate use. It was in the mid-nineteenth century, when Americans discovered oil, and invented many more powerful applications for its use - lighting, heating, energy - that industrial extraction took hold. Due to its capital intensive nature, requiring enormous infrastructure for transportation, oil extraction as a capitalist project soon became monopolistic. The Standard Oil Company was the first big monopoly, and at one stage provided almost all American oil. The advantages of using oil was quickly taken up by developed economies. In the blink of an eye what had been a novelty, or luxury, turned into a necessity. The race for oil was on. Complicating factors even further was oil’s many benefits as a liquid fuel for military purposes. Once that was realised, then reluctantly digested by nations without access to oil themselves, the geopolitical carve up of the world became intense, almost desperate. It took a mere decade for the British to go from using coal for their army and navy, in which they were self-sufficient, to oil, in which they were utterly dependent. This would ultimately lead the country to costly and risky investment in the Middle East. Germany, a growing industrial power, now also needed to secure oil supplies. Suspicions grew between the two countries, especially the British, whose newspapers were flooded with anti-German propaganda. Keith Fisher has written a superbly researched history, exhaustively documented with large quotes from contemporary sources. In a way, it provides a cautionary tale on how new technologies change power dynamics in big, often violent ways. (Many indigenous peoples were dispossessed to secure valuable oil wells). It also shows how the past is prologue. Britain’s 1882 invasion of Egypt has many parallels to America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, both wars started on patently flimsy pretexts. A fascinating and indispensable study of a substance we all but take for granted. A Pipeline Runs Through It: The Story of Oil from Ancient Times to the First World War, by Keith Fisher. Published by Penguin. $39.99 Review by Chris Saliba  The Sapiens author looks into the past to warn about what our future might look like.
The publishing world is now releasing a steady flow of books about Artificial Intelligence (AI), some prognosticating doom, others predicting a supercharged future. Into this vexed subject steps Yuval Noah Harari, mega successful historian and philosopher, who has sold some 45 million books. Harari has long had an interest in information technology, and how it interacts and shapes society. His 2016 followup to Sapiens, Homo Deus, mused on what technology might have in store for the human race, and how our outsized desires could be our downfall. That book had a bemused tone at the folly of humans. Nexus takes on a more alarmed tone. The main contention of the book, which many may find hard to accept, is that more information does not lead us to the truth. Harari writes that information more often than not is about maintaining order. An alarming example is Stalinist Russia. The Soviet state was able to amass enormous amounts of information about its citizens and thus keep them in line. Or there is the invention of the Gutenberg press, which democratised information and made possible the European witch hunts. In 1486 the German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer published his bestseller The Hammer of Witches, which kicked off a bloodcurdling period in European history. On a more positive note the Bible, Harari contends, was a genius piece of information technology, as it kept an agreed upon set of “facts” that could hold society together. If Biblical facts were contested over time, there was a self-correcting function, in that scholars and clerics could write new interpretations, publish them, and generate a new point of consensus. The second part of the book, after the historical overview of information systems, concentrates on the future of artificial intelligence, its possible advantages and many dangers. In Australia, we have perhaps had a taste of the brutal effects of unregulated algorithms in the robodebt scandal, where many vulnerable people were sent incorrect computer generated tax bills. Harari argues that AI will become so complex, with its large-scale machine learning capabilities, that no human will be able to understand it. If society’s basic functions are run by incomprehensible AI, how will citizens have redress when things go wrong? In essence, Nexus argues for regulation and human intervention. Yuval Noah Harari’s great skill is as a communicator of complex ideas, drawing together different strands of history and weaving them together into a compelling pattern. The first half of Nexus, which deals with the history of information, ideas, society and politics, is brilliant. The second half, while raising many interesting points that the reader may not have thought of, flags slightly. As Harari is writing about the present and possible future, it feels like we cannot see the forest for the trees, stuck as we are in the midst of so much technological progress. Harari makes predictions about the future, but it is impossible to know what will pan out. A brilliant book, also a highly enjoyable read and one that will open your mind to a new way of thinking about information, technology and society. Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI, by Yuval Noah Harari. Published by Fern Press. $39.99 Review by Chris Saliba  Nick Bryant explains how America has always been a deeply divided country, and has little prospect of changing.
British journalist Nick Bryant has long had a love affair with the United States, a fascination that began when he was a teenager. He first visited the country in the late 1980s, armed with a student visa. He would later spend years living in New York covering the Trump presidency. Over his many decades as a journalist he has not only lived in the US, but studied its history. The Forever War mixes the personal experience of the outsider with impressive historical research. He argues that America’s current toxic political divide - a cold civil war threatening to turn hot - has strong historical antecedents. Moreover, America, Bryant argues, has never reconciled itself to its racist, fractured past. The culture war over critical race theory, he argues, is excessive. The reality is the country was built on a racist scaffolding. From enslavement, to Jim Crow, and in our own day, voter suppression. The picture Nick Bryant paints of America, past and present, is a carnival of violence and mayhem. Political assasinations, lynchings, mass shootings, children murdered at school, children unwitting killers themselves, handling guns they shouldn’t, in any rational world, have access to. And yet gun laws are deeply entrenched, in part due to a selective reading of the constitution. We often think of America as a premier global democracy, but this is a myth. In an exhaustive dissection of the electoral system, we are exposed to a deeply flawed democracy that aims more to stop people voting than encourage it. The vagaries of the electoral college system means American democracy is unrepresentative. This is a country where everything is politicised, especially cultural issues. The courts - even the supreme court - which should be impartial, are openly politicised as well. There is not much cheery news in The Forever War. Nick Bryant, a one time fan, describes leaving his New York apartment and travelling to JFK airport, but not looking back nostalgically to the Manhatten skyline, which he once thought was studded with diamonds. As the title suggests, America’s war with itself will continue on, its many historical issues unresolved. If violence does break out, Bryant suggests it won’t be a full blown civil war, but more like violent spot fires. The one half of liberal voters who believe in the evidence based law will keep the country from going off the rails. A sobering portrait of the real America so often obscured by its glossy, rich, wonderland-like side. The Forever War: America's Unending War With Itself, by Nick Bryant. Published by Viking. $36.99 Review by Chris Saliba  A tragic accident is told in harrowing, intimate detail.
In 2012, five-year-old Palestinian boy Milad Salama was scheduled to go on a school trip. His family lived in the impoverished town of Anata on the West Bank, where infrastructure such as roads and housing were of a poor quality. The bus traveled along the Jaba road - a road notorious for its safety issues. Conditions were bad on the day of travel, with an approaching storm making visibility difficult. An oncoming truck collided with the bus and seven children died. Help was late to arrive, which if it had come earlier could perhaps have saved lives. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama describes the events of that awful day. Through a brief biographical sketch of Abed Salama, Milad’s father, the reader also gets a short history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how occupation directly affects the lives of Palestinians. The genius of Nathan Thrall’s book is how it shows personal lives caught up in larger historical forces. With its focus on people and their relationships to each other, the book reads very much like a novel. A humbling book that concentrates on the pain and suffering of many Palestinian lives. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, by Nathan Thrall. Published by Allen Lane. $36.99 Review by Chris Saliba  Following on from Robyn Annear's Adrift in Melbourne, the historian brings more stories – both alarming and entertaining – of Melbourne's early years.
In this new history of Melbourne by much loved writer Robyn Annear, the overarching theme is street corners. Before home entertainment – radio, television, the internet – people took to the streets to keep themselves amused. The streets were loud, noisy, crowded, exciting and dangerous. Drunks, chancers, larrikins, sex workers, snake oil merchants and pickpockets, among other unsavoury types, thronged the inner city. Life was lived very much in public in the 19th century, which could create problems such as marauding gangs (the larrikin phenomenon) and street congestion: people hung around street corners in large numbers and simply didn't move on. The sheer volume of people that would turn up for public meetings and flamboyant street performers could easily reach the thousands. Many street corners carried their own pet names and reputations. “Puppy-Dog corner”, as it was known during its heyday, on the corner of Swanston and Collins, was a hangout for foppish young men who liked to ogle passing young women. While Corners of Melbourne ostensibly sticks to street corners as its theme, the book ranges over subjects such as city sanitation (or lack thereof), rudimentary water systems and shoddy buildings, some simply collapsing under their own poor construction. The sections of the book dealing with toilet waste are stomach churning. Human waste (and all sorts of other garbage) was often simply dumped in what are now public parks. Men relieved themselves in alleyways (Melbourne didn't get its first public urinal until 1859) and the urine ran freely in the streets. In summer the smell was intolerable. Robyn Annear brings her usual wit and eye for a cracking good story to Corners. The book is full of characters and incidents gleaned from the newspapers of the day, including The Argus and The Herald. There's never a dull moment in this gritty yet humorous history which manages to truly bring the streets of early Melbourne alive. An interesting place to read about, but one which you may not want to visit! Corners of Melbourne, by Robyn Annear. Published by Text. $35 Review by Chris Saliba  In a work of peerless research, David Marr shows how Australia was won by the rifle, the carbine and the sword. Not by peaceful settlement.
In 2019, journalist David Marr was asked by his uncle about a mysterious person in their family. Marr's great grandmother, Maud, was still alive when he was in his twenties, but he'd lost contact with her since the age of eight. What had happened to her in the intervening years? What Marr's research found was that Maud's father Reg, and his brother Darcy, were part of Australia's Native Police. They essentially cleared the land of its Indigenous people so squatters could run their sheep. In Marr's portrait of early Australia, the country is little more than a brutal money factory. Official word from the English Crown and Parliament was that the native inhabitants were to be left alone. The English knew it was their country; they also knew it was being usurped. These fine words from the mother country, however, evaporated upon Australian shores. No vigorous laws protected Aboriginals or their right to Country. In the early years of the colony, Aboriginal people weren't even allowed to give testimony in court, ensuring the law worked to advance white interests. Public concern in protecting Aboriginals was lukewarm at best. The mood was one of turning a blind eye to atrocities committed, allowing the Native Police to do its unspeakable work. It was in everyone's best interests to secure as much land as possible. Killing for Country quotes extensively from the contemporary record of letters, journals, memoirs, newspapers and parliamentary record. (The book is a triumph of research.) It seems clear that everyone knew what was going on. Through the newspaper reports of the time, it was part of public discourse and couldn't be ignored. Terrible mass killings were taking place, but there was no one – no laws, moral authority or public outrage – that could stop it. Perhaps one of the greatest tragedies is that land use could have been negotiated and much bloodshed avoided. Early pastoral leases actually stipulated shared land use between settler and traditional owners – but none of this was ever observed. It was rather a brutal land grab. David Marr's book makes for ugly, confronting reading. Even those who have read much about Australia's Frontier Wars may still be shocked by how pervasive and widely known the killings were. How little was done to stop it. And ultimately, that this was the method by which the early colonies established themselves, paving the way for modern Australia. Killing for Country, by David Marr. Published by Back Inc. $39.99 Review by Chris Saliba  What has happened to capitalism in the age of the internet?
Yanis Varoufakis is an interesting mix of lived experience and academic theory. He was the Greek Minister for Finance when Greek government debt needed renegotiating with creditors during the country's 2015 fiscal crisis. Since then he has written several books on economics, the latest being Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. It is written as a letter to his father, who was active in left-wing politics. The book centres around a question his father had asked him during the early days of the internet: will this new technology kill capitalism? The answer to that question is complicated, as you'd imagine. In essence, Varoufakis says that the internet has created a group of mega rent seekers. For example, Google Play and the Apple Store use third party creators to create products to put on their platforms. Google and Apple merely hoover up the rents from these poor workers – proles, as Varoufakis calls them – for allowing them to use their digital shop front. Worse still is the situation for the “serfs”, everyday users like you and me who give our data free to the big tech companies to monetise. In short, we've all made a Faustian pact with the internet. We've garnered all these digital free goodies, but we've had to sell our souls in the process. Technofeudalism is the story of concentrated power on steroids. The big tech companies offer the notion of “choice” - but there is none, really. It's either use their products or go without life's basic necessities such as banking, shopping, government and health services etc. Many authors have now tackled this subject, most notably Jaron Lanier and Shoshana Zuboff. Varoufakis offers an idiosyncratic history of capitalism, using Greek myths to get his point across. The result is a highly original yet contentious treatise on the state of the world's finances (much time is devoted to American debt and Chinese surpluses), written from an almost radical left-wing point of view. Many will find much to argue and wrestle with here, but also a range of thought provoking ideas to consider, coming from an original and unorthodox thinker. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, by Yanis Varoufakis. Published by Jonathan Cape. $36.99. Review by Chris Saliba  A new biography of Rupert Murdoch concentrates on his early years.
Rupert Murdoch’s influence is ubiquitous, yet the man himself remains oddly opaque. Contradictions abound. During his university days, he toyed with left-wing politics, but soon moved to the right. He painted himself the outsider, but quickly became the establishment. As Murdoch once said candidly: “Monopoly is a terrible thing, until you have it.” Journalist Walter Marsh’s new biography of Murdoch concentrates on the mogul’s formative years in Adelaide at the helm of The News, especially its controversial coverage of the 1959 Stuart royal commission, which brought Rupert and his editor, Rohan Rivett, close to a jail term for seditious libel. The book also works as a dual biography of his father, Keith. Murdoch senior started as the editor of the Melbourne Herald and was soon engineering a series of ambitious business deals that sowed the seeds of the Murdoch empire, but left him overdrawn and overstretched. Rupert clearly inherited his father’s penchant for high stakes and risk taking. Young Rupert is a scrupulously well-researched history that examines the power of the press in the twentieth century, and its influence on politics. Rupert Murdoch remains largely elusive, yet new research shows glimpses of a man under pressure and unable to enjoy his success. Readers interested in Australian politics and publishing will find much to satisfy here. Young Rupert: The Making of the Murdoch Empire, by Walter Marsh. Published by Scribe. $34.99 Release date 1st August. Review by Chris Saliba This review first published at Books + Publishing.  How tiny germs made the world as we know it
According to Jonathan Kennedy, a teacher in global health, pathogens have played a bigger role in historical events than we give credit for. History's narrative arc is usually described as one of great men and superior civilisations, the world mere putty awaiting the hands of god. But what if it was pathogens – smallpox and malaria for example – that have really given conquering armies their competitive edge? Jonathan Kennedy argues that this is very much the case. From the fate of Neanderthals to the American Civil War, pathogens have played a major role in aiding one side against the other. Societies with no immunity to introduced diseases didn't have a hope. The most famous historical example is the Spanish conquest of the Mexica and Inka Empires. The population was brutally swathed by smallpox, allowing the Spanish victory with only a few hundred soldiers. The mosquito-borne virus yellow fever allowed immune Haitian rebels to win independence from Napoleon's France. French soldiers didn't stand a chance against the virus. Pathogenesis provides example after example of killer diseases changing the course of history. Kennedy even argues the Medieval plague helped kick start the capitalist revolution. By drastically reducing the number of farmers, it gave them more bargaining power and the incentive to maximise profits. Written in lively and engaging prose, and weaving in amusing literary allusions from Genesis to Tolkein, this is a compelling history that will appeal to readers of Sapiens and Guns, Germs and Steel. Pathogenesis, Jonathan Kennedy. Published by Random House. $35 Review by Chris Saliba  Anthropolgist David Graeber argues pirate culture laid the foundation stones of The Enlightenment.
In this posthumous work, Pirate Enlightenment, or The Real Libertalia, anthropologist and activist David Graeber (1961 - 2020) makes the case that when rogue English pirates in the late 17th and early 18th centuries sought refuge in northern Madagascar, it led to a cultural and political fusion with the Malagasy people that was a forerunner to the Enlightenment. There was much fascination with pirate lore at the time and in 1724 A General History of the Pyrates was published in London (its rumored author was Daniel Defoe). It included a description of an egalitarian Madagascan pirate state called Libertalia. Libertalia was pure fiction, but another Madagascan state, the Betsimisaraka confederation, established in 1712 by the son of a British pirate and Malagasy queen, maintained an egalitarian government for close to 40 years. The historical pirate record is thin on the ground, and Graeber uses the verbs “seems” and “appears” a lot when trying to flesh out his arguments. Even though Pirate Enlightenment is more wish fulfillment than anything else, Graeber’s intellectual energy and curiosity can never be in doubt. A fascinating thought experiment that will have readers scrambling to do additional research of their own. Pirate Enlightenment, or The Real Libertalia, by David Graeber. Published by Allen Lane. $35 Review by Chris Saliba |
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