It's probably true that with a coal regime, more democracy emerged because English coal miners had leverage over a structurally important component of state function. Moreover, I believe there are problems with the internal logic of the book in part because the book fails to account for coal and oil energy systems overlapping and what implication that has for energy vs democracy.

Educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he received a first-class honours degree in History, Mitchell completed his Ph.According to Mitchell, there are a few reasons for these differences: oil, as opposed to coal, requires a smaller workforce; oil extraction is done by workers on the surface as opposed to coal, and therefore they are under constant supervision; oil transport through the use of pipelines and oil tankers eliminated the need for railway energy transport; and lastly, oil could be easily shipped across oceans as opposed to coal, creating a world market that essentially outsourced energy production. the long-term maintainance of unresolved conflicts as a strategy of planned instability in the Middle East. This book is well worth reading, though I still question the amount of emphasis placed on energy as *the* basis of democracy/capitalism.

In making the production of energy the central force shaping the democratic age, Carbon Democracy rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the theory of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world. Mitchell's narrative is vastly different from the more common approach taken by Daniel Yergin and others. At the same time, scarce Marshall Plan steel was sent to construct the Trans-Arabian Pipeline to help promote the use of oil instead of coal in the new European economy. This corporate model was exported to Europe through the Marshall Plan after World War II and undermined the power of the left in Western Europe, as Europe shifted from coal to oil. The cold war provided the justification for vast spending on weapons, as arms as well as oil companies became dependent on alliances in the Middle East.

He began his argument with the nineteenth century in Britain and the importance of coal to the rise of working-class demands for political rights before moving to an analysis of the development of the oil industry in the Middle East and the uncertain future the industry faces today. It had taken those things to wrest control from the monarchy (half a century of turmoil in the English Civil War, the Restoration of 1660, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688).