The Prize
by Daniel Yergin
Summary
Daniel Yergin tells the history of the oil industry from its origins in the 1850s through 1990, treating petroleum less as a commodity than as a force that has shaped wars, made and broken governments, and built entire national economies around what Yergin calls the age of Hydrocarbon Man. The book moves through more than a century of episodes, the early American oil rushes, the rise of Standard Oil and its eventual breakup, the discovery of Middle Eastern reserves and the rearrangement of colonial power that followed, the oil shocks of the 1970s, and the wars and diplomacy that have repeatedly turned on who controls a given oil field or pipeline.
Yergin spent roughly a decade researching the book, drawing on hundreds of books and articles, government archives and roughly eighty interviews with figures who had actually shaped the industry, including the former energy secretary James Schlesinger and the oilman Armand Hammer, and that reporting gives the book's sweeping narrative a level of specific, sourced detail that a shorter or more purely academic history could not match. The book balances that scholarly grounding with genuine narrative drama, following individual oilmen, diplomats and rulers as characters whose personal decisions repeatedly changed the industry's direction.
At more than nine hundred pages, the book asks real commitment from a reader, but it moves briskly for its length and rewards anyone trying to understand how deeply oil has shaped modern geopolitics rather than treating it as a purely economic story. It suits general readers, policy readers and students of international relations equally, and its publication four months after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait gave the book an immediate, unplanned relevance that helped make it a bestseller.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Yergin the 1992 award for general nonfiction for a book Simon and Schuster had published in December 1990. That year's other finalists were Andre Dubus's essay collection Broken Vessels and Mary and Thomas Edsall's Chain Reaction, on race and taxes in American politics. The book's publication landed between Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the start of the Gulf War, a coincidence of timing that turned a lengthy history of the oil industry into urgent current reading for a wide audience.
A PBS documentary series based on the book, narrated by Donald Sutherland, aired in 1992 and 1993 and reached an estimated twenty million American viewers, extending the book's reach well beyond its readership alone. Yergin returned to the subject two decades later with a sequel, The Quest, published in 2011 and covering the industry's more recent history of energy security, climate policy and new producers.