The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power

The prologue opens with Winston Churchill changing his mind «almost overnight» in 1911: the young minister who had criticized excessive spending in the naval race with Germany moves to the Admiralty after the Agadir crisis and takes the risky decision to convert the British fleet from coal to oil. His line — «Mastery itself was the prize of the venture» — gives the book its title and its central thesis: throughout the twentieth century, oil would be the symbol of mastery and power.

Yergin sets out the book's three great themes: the rise of capitalism and modern business, the intertwining of oil with national strategy and global politics, and the society he calls «Hydrocarbon Man» — people who will never voluntarily give up their cars, their suburban homes and the oil-powered comforts of modern life. Written against the backdrop of the 1990 Gulf crisis, the prologue carries a sense of urgency.

Chapter one begins, unexpectedly, with an unpaid bill: Yale professor Benjamin Silliman Jr. has done $526.08 worth of work investigating whether «rock oil» could be used as an illuminant, but he hasn't been paid. His 1855 report becomes a turning point for the investors: it scientifically confirms that oil can be distilled into a high-quality lamp oil.

Yergin builds the context skillfully: whale oil is getting scarce and expensive, town gas is costly, and the machines of the industrial revolution need a new lubricant. From bitumen used as mortar in ancient Mesopotamia to the first European refining in Galicia and Romania and the glass-chimney kerosene lamp invented in Vienna, the reader sees step by step how demand for oil was born.

At the center of the chapter stands «Colonel» Edwin Drake — an unemployed former railroad conductor with no special skills, picked almost by chance by the banker Townsend, who happened to live in the same hotel. After money troubles, ridicule and technical setbacks, the well near Titusville strikes oil in 1859, and the cry «The Yankee has struck oil!» spreads like a gold rush. Drake himself never profits and dies in poverty — an irony Yergin presents as emblematic of the whole industry.

The chapter closes with the first boom: under the «rule of capture», owners of neighboring wells race to pump oil before anyone else can, prices collapse from $13.75 a barrel to a few cents, and wooden pipelines are laid despite armed resistance from the teamsters. Chapter two then opens in Cleveland in 1865, as John D. Rockefeller outbids his partner at a private auction — the first step toward a future monopoly.

• Each chapter opens with a concrete scene or character — history that reads like a novel
• An enormous source base: letters, archival documents, eyewitness testimony
• The structure (5 parts, 36 chapters, a chronology) also makes it usable as a reference work
• The Turkish translation dates from 1995 and some phrasing feels dated