A wealthy new historical past of our obsession with extracting Earth’s sources

Under a Metal Sky
Philip Marsden (Granta (UK, on sale) Counterpoint (US, 4 November))

Travel creator Philip Marsden lives at the river Fal in Cornwall, UK. About 3500 years in the past, after a bit of tin used to be added to copper and the Bronze Age used to be set in movement, huge amounts of tin from the mines inland made their means down this river, throughout to Europe and past. As copper had and iron later would, bronze revolutionised our lives. It formed how we…