A fluent and timely account of the semiconductor industry’s geopolitical centrality, but one that sometimes mistakes narrative momentum for analytical depth.
Chris Miller has written a brisk, readable history of the chip as the hidden infrastructure of modern power. He is at his best when tracing how a once-obscure engineering niche became the fulcrum of military capability, consumer capitalism, and strategic rivalry between Washington and Beijing. For readers coming to the subject fresh, the book offers an excellent map of the terrain: the peculiar geography of fabrication, the concentration of advanced manufacturing in East Asia, and the extraordinary leverage enjoyed by a handful of firms and states.
What I admire most is Miller’s clarity. He explains a notoriously technical subject without patronising the reader, and he has a sound instinct for where politics, industrial policy, and engineering genuinely intersect. The book’s core argument — that semiconductors are the decisive strategic commodity of the twenty-first century — is persuasive. It is not a fashionable overstatement but a serious claim about dependence, vulnerability, and the way technology shapes the distribution of power. In that sense, the book is sharply relevant, especially for countries in the global South that are often treated as spectators in these struggles but will nonetheless feel the consequences in prices, access, and supply chains.
Yet for all its competence, I do think the book is less searching than its subject deserves. Miller is strongest on chronology and industrial drama, weaker on structural analysis. He tells us impressively how we got here, but less convincingly why certain political economies have been able to sustain advantage while others have not. The role of labour, state capacity, and uneven development appears, but only in outline. For a book about a foundational technology embedded in global capitalism, there is surprisingly little sustained reflection on the distributional effects of chip power beyond the US-China contest. That narrowing is a real limitation, not a minor stylistic quibble.
The prose is efficient and the pacing rarely slackens, but the very smoothness of the book sometimes blunts the complexity of the issue. Large claims are moved through with confidence, yet not always with enough caution about contingency, uncertainty, or the possibility that today’s chokepoints may shift. I also felt the book could have done more to interrogate the political costs of the industrial policies it implicitly endorses. It is one thing to say supply chains should be secured; it is another to ask who pays, who is excluded, and which regions remain permanently downstream. That question matters greatly outside the Atlantic world, and Miller only partly faces it.
Even so, this is a very good survey, and in a field full of woolly techno-prophecy it has the virtue of sobriety. It is not quite a deep political economy of semiconductors; it is a sharp, well-assembled account of their strategic importance. I would rather read a book with Miller’s discipline and some analytic thinness than one with grand theory and no empirical grip. On balance, he has written an important and useful book — just not a definitive one.
Who should read this
Read this if you want a clear, serious introduction to the geopolitics of semiconductors and the industrial logic behind them. Specialists in political economy or industrial strategy will find it useful, but they will also notice where the analysis stops short.
A personal note from Adebayo
I came away impressed by Miller’s command of the material, but also slightly irritated by how often the book treats the chip war as a contest between great powers rather than a wider story of uneven global development. That irritation, I think, is healthy: it means the book has done enough to provoke serious argument.
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