Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

This was neither the first nor the last time a country would import knowledge and equipment from overseas in an effort to build out its industrial base. People have been doing this forever: George Ravenscroft would never have worked out how to make clear, crystal glass without help from the artisans he had smuggled back from Venice. In the late nineteenth century Scottish-born industrialist Andrew Carnegie would import the Bessemer convertor into the U.S., helping cement his dominant position in the sector. Eyebrows were raised in the early 2000s when a Chinese firm bought a ThyssenKrupp steel plant in Dortmund and transported it brick by brick to a site on the lower Yangtze River. But the Chinese were merely doing what the Russians, Americans and indeed most countries had done since humans first discovered how to make iron: importing knowhow and then building an empire on top of it.