Megan Black's The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power is a historical study of the United States’ Department of Interior and all the ways it was involved in not interior but exterior matters. It is a rich and detailed account of how the exploration, management, and conservation of minerals were central to the development of the United States imperialism. By tracing the interiorizing of external lands, first from the closing of the frontier in the 19th century, to US involvement in Latin America and the Middle East, to the oceans by the expansion of the continental shelf, and finally to outer space, Black describes Department of Interior as a machinery that wrests domestic space from foreign space. 

It is not an easy or straightforward story to tell. Black offers a detailed description of the Department's internal contradictions, tensions, disagreements between its different heads, members, and services. Through its tensions with the mandates of the United States Geological Survey and the Department of Agriculture about who gets to manage what kinds of lands, the Department of Interior continually reinvented itself over its 150 year history, constantly finding new places to interiorize. 

The power of this book lies in the way it challenges the idea that mineral exploration and management is only ever about the minerals themselves, their exchange value or (pretense of) use value. One of Black's major contributions is that she focuses on the way the US extends power by providing thespadeworkfor extraction by curtailing risks of investment. In doing so, Black offers (in my opinion!) an excellent counterbalance to contemporary studies of extraction which tend to focus on actually existing extraction, but forget all the mediations of power and technology that precede it.