Nature's Evil

Coal was the real bedrock of the Industrial Revolution; it could still have happened without coal, but it would have been very different. Coal is a topical resource that required little land but much labour and capital. Thanks to them, a limited number of mines, concentrated in only a few counties, allowed two-thirds of the British Isles to be used for agriculture and the growth of towns. If all the heating energy expended in 1750 had been provided by firewood, it would have used up 4.3 million acres of coppiced woods, or 13 per cent of British territory; in 1850, it would have required firewood from 150 per cent of this territory. 5 It is possible, of course, that some of the firewood could have been brought from across the North Sea. But then England would have been very different. Instead of controlling the price of grain and encouraging manufacture, the efforts of the state would have been focused on the protection of forests, at home and overseas, and probably on nationalising them. The growth of the population and, in particular, the growth of towns would have been checked in just the way Malthus foresaw. Colonial efforts and imperial wars would have been conducted not in the southern seas but in the near north – in Scandinavia, Prussia and Russia. This would have been a different empire – not mercantile but cameral. Protecting the forests from its own and foreign subjects, it would have relied not on the invisible hand of the market but on a police state, similar to the governments in those German princely states which depended mainly on their forests. Coal played an indirect but decisive role both in the deforestation of land and in the emancipation of labour. Coppicing is very laborious: without coal, millions of people would have been busy collecting brushwood and cutting wood, and thousands with guarding or replanting trees. Without coal, the increasing British dependency on imported grain would have been unaffordable.

But there was coal. Extraction was increasing, but the proven reserves were increasing even more rapidly. Jevons, who knew all about coal, got one thing wrong: coal did not run out – in fact, it never will run out. Coal-powered engines changed life on five continents. The railways played the same role for coal as sailing ships played for sugar and tankers play for oil: they were the defining element of a mono-resource economy. All sectors of industry that processed raw material into goods – metal, textiles, pottery, chemicals, food – went over to steam. Powered by coal, new locomotives and ships carried coal and goods that were produced thanks to coal. Machines became increasingly efficient, but they consumed increasing quantities of coal; Jevons’s paradox was working at full strength. The next breakthrough was the production of electricity from coal-fuelled power stations. One of the last victories of man over nature, this liberated his energy from any dependency on location. Another victory was the switch back from deep mines to modern quarries – open cast mining – which made the extraction of coal cheaper and safer for men but even more costly for nature. With coal, capitalism scored some of its biggest wins but also created its most thorny problems, social and ecological.

Coal-powered steam engines brought about a military revolution on the railways and the high seas. Bloody wars in the coal era raged for many reasons, and not necessarily for coalfields themselves; but the preponderance of steam-driven ships was equivalent to possessing superiority of firearms in medieval times. Although bigger and faster, steamships did not have the same autonomy as sailing ships. The British Royal Navy possessed coaling stations for refuelling their steamships everywhere from Ceylon to Florida. This imperial solution created new problems. Coaling stations were vulnerable to attacks from the mainland. Coal deliveries were at risk from protest action in mining towns. The strategic decision to switch the Royal Navy to oil was taken by Winston Churchill when he was first lord of the Admiralty. Oil gave more speed and autonomy to ships but meant they had to rely on oil supplies from Persia, Pennsylvania or Baku. On the eve of the First World War, the Germans were building new destroyers with four engines, two powered by coal and two by oil. The British approach was simply to add oil to coal, mixing the two fuels in the firebox. Either way, it was a tricky balance between exotic oil, supplied by foreign lands, and domestic coal, which was in the hands of the unreliable miners. Neither fuel was guaranteed; but the risks were different, and hedging bets was a winning strategy.

Strikes