This is an urgently readable history of the race for the world’s most elusive and contentious resource. This is the unexpurgated history of oil: from its birth to the spectacle of its rise as the indispensable ingredient of modern life. Now newly revised and updated, Crude is the story of the black gold that eclipsed King Coal, decisively won the Great War and propelled the West from the Industrial Revolution to the Plastic Age. Sonia Shah elegantly weaves together the science, economics, politics and social history of oil in her inimitable telling.