Nature's Evil

Waterwheels could not be stopped. This was a big advantage of steam engines: they could be stopped and then started again at will. But these steam engines were equally dependent on the river flow, which supplied water for their boilers. During the course of one whole century, factories used steam engines merely to supplement waterwheels: engines maintained the water level in the dry season by pumping water back to the mill pond, while the machines were still driven by waterwheels. Right on the eve of the transition to steam, the Scottish hydraulic engineer Robert Thom created radically new projects which could have increased the power of water-driven factories by an order of magnitude. His designs were intended to hold water in huge reservoirs in the upper reaches of major rivers and channel it by aqueducts to man-made storage ponds; dozens of factories would have been built lower downstream. These dams and aqueducts did not constitute an alternative to coal energy; in fact, they were feasible only thanks to local coal – it could fire an unlimited number of bricks. Thom intended to change the course of the Clyde and planned several other large dams. His projects were discussed in Parliament and in the London newspapers, but there was no appetite for them. These projects presupposed a profound reworking of the property laws. * Reservoirs and aqueducts were conceived as corporate possessions under government control, leasing water and land to private producers. 3

The ‘invisible hand’ which led to the development of capitalism was of another breed. Industrial capitalism was not created for such experiments; on the contrary, it strived to free itself from the control of both nature and the state. The factory owners preferred steam engines. They were expensive and unreliable sources of energy, but they were in private ownership. As happened with other resource shifts, the victory of steam engines over watermills came for political – not economic – reasons. By the middle of the nineteenth century steam engines had displaced obsolete waterwheels in the production of all important commodities, from coal to textile to metals, and the goods made from them.

Ghost acres

By 1700, more than 2 million tons of coal had been extracted in England, Scotland and Wales, and coal provided half of all the energy consumed in the country. By 1850, coal extraction was thirty times higher, and its share in the energy balance reached 90 per cent. This exponential growth was comparable to similar explosions in the consumption of sugar and cotton. Brought from either underground or overseas, these new commodities created millions of ‘ghost acres’, as Pomeranz called these – virtual but vital – land appropriations. The energy output of a mine per square foot of its surface area is hundreds of times greater than the output of the best farm or plantation. With unprecedented efficiency, coal-fired, coke-smelted products of British industry were traded for food, timber, metals and oil, and also for foreign labour and knowledge. In 1865 Jevons wrote: ‘Coal in truth stands not beside but entirely above all other commodities. It is the material energy of the country – the universal aid – the factor in everything we do. With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of early times.’ 4