How do oil and democracy mix? Oil is a curse, we are told, that causes corruption and war, but Carbon Democracy tells a different story. Timothy Mitchell rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the work of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world. He begins with the history of coal, which gave those who produced it the power to shut down energy systems, a power they used to build the first mass democracies. Oil offered the West an alternative source of energy, and a different form of politics. It helped create a denatured political life whose central object, the economy, appeared capable of infinite growth. It created democratic forces dependent on an undemocratic Middle East. And it left us with an impoverished political practice, incapable of addressing the crises of cheap energy and the carbon-fueled collapse of the ecological order.