CRUDE HISTORY Tyler Priest Timothy Mitchell. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso, 2011. ix + 278 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $26.95. Matthew T. Huber. Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. vii + 253 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $25.00. One salutary feature of these oil histories from political scientist Timothy Mitchell and geographer Matthew Huber is that they avoid the word “crude” LQ WKHLU WLWOHV $IWHU D VHULHV RI ERRNV DQG GRFXPHQWDULHV LQ UHFHQW \HDUV ULIﾀQJ on this theme—crude politics, crude democracy, crude impact, crude awak- ening, crude world, crude domination, and crude reality—it is refreshing to see new contributions that frame the subject somewhat differently. Mitchell intends to trace oil’s “materiality” (p. 2), and Huber attempts to demonstrate its “ordinariness” (p. xi). Although they offer original observations on oil’s relationship to “democracy” and “freedom,” both studies nevertheless fail to dispel the impression that oil has almost magical powers to bless, or more often “curse,” societies. Crude in substance if not in name, these studies caricature rather than clarify the role of oil in modern history. Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy, which in the last few years has become a gate- way text into oil for many social scientists and cultural theorists, is anchored by one big idea: that modern democracy and mass politics are inseparable from carbon-intensive forms of social and economic development. The opening chapter on “Machines of Democracy” explains how the nineteenth-century emergence of industrialization, imperialism, and democracy were linked to the exploitation of coal, which provided energy in such exceptional quantity and density that it reordered social relations on a global scale. Coal liberated SRSXODWLRQV ﾀUVW LQ (QJODQG DQG WKHQ HOVHZKHUH IURP GHSHQGHQFH RQ ELRPDVV energy gathered from large areas of land. It also created demand for new sources of organic energy to provide industrial inputs and sustain industrial workforces, setting in motion agrarian and colonial transformations beyond %ULWDLQ DQG :HVWHUQ (XURSH Reviews in American History 43 (2015) 333–339 © 2015 by Johns Hopkins University Press