Mineral Kingdoms

Chip War meets Guns, Germs, and Steel in this sweeping and urgent discussion of how mineral wealth fuels prosperity and might, revealing that, for more than 5,000 years, the world's most powerful nations have controlled the critical minerals of their day—and how China's current, massive mineral advantage will threaten American hegemony for decades to come.

Whether it’s President Trump’s aggressive posture towards South America, his controversial mineral deal with Ukraine, or his dangerous fixation on Greenland, critical minerals have become a cornerstone of the second Trump administration’s foreign policy. While this fascination with minerals—the building blocks of the technologies driving modern life—appears to be a purely recent phenomenon, the significance of these metals to the world’s most successful civilizations and empires goes back millennia.

In Mineral Kingdoms, David Landry, professor of political economy, argues that in the perpetual quest for global supremacy, control over critical minerals has actually separated geopolitical winners and losers since before ancient Rome. Indeed, as Landry shows, the rise and fall of civilizations often rests not just on economic power and military might, but on the minerals that underpin both. Nations that win the critical minerals of their day gain in strength, while those that don’t, weaken—and right now the US is losing on an unprecedented scale. With a book of surprising relevance and scope, Landry makes the case that:

• From Assyria and Rome’s regional empires to the Spanish and British conquests of huge swathes of the globe to the atomic age, great powers’ fates have been closely linked to their ability to secure minerals. • In the current race to control critical minerals, what China and the US are vying for isn’t just the raw materials needed to make batteries, magnets, or semiconductors—it’s the very future of global power.

More than a retrospective provocation, Mineral Kingdoms also wrestles with the defining resource competition of our age. And drawing on more than a decade of research and the most comprehensive data on Chinese-owned mines to date, Landry argues that China is further ahead of America on the minerals front than almost anyone outside Beijing realizes—an edge that could define the 21st century. The result is at once a riveting history on how minerals were central to the ascent of nearly all dominant civilizations and an alarming reminder that our past, present, and future is written underground.