Energy and Civilization
Energy as the base layer of all progress.
Smil reconstructs the entire arc of human history through a single lens: how much energy a society could capture, convert, and deploy. Every leap in institutional complexity — agriculture, industry, the digital economy — follows a prior leap in energy density. It is the most rigorous version of the argument that infrastructure precedes everything else, and it is the book to return to whenever a conversation about technology gets too abstracted from the physical substrate underneath.