Nature's Evil

Coal mining fuelled the Industrial Revolution but was less affected by it than many other industries, or even farming. The productivity of miners rose very slowly. In the seventeenth century, an English miner hewed and carried to the surface 200 tons of coal per year. By 1913, when extraction was at its absolute maximum in Great Britain, the average productivity equalled 260 tons per year. The productivity per head of British farmers during this time quadrupled. For all the capital investment and technological ingenuity, miners’ labour did not lend itself to the specialisation which would have guaranteed growth in productivity, measured per person.

The area to the west of Birmingham was known as the Black Country; it was completely smothered in coal dust and soot. Friedrich Engels, who visited English mines in the early 1840s, wrote: ‘The working-man lies on his side and loosens the coal with his pick; … The women and children who have to transport the coal crawl upon their hands and knees, fastened to the tub by a harness and chain (which frequently passes between the legs), while a man behind pushes with hands and head.’ 6 The miners worked in small groups, cut off from communication with the surface. A mistake by a fellow worker could lead to your own death. Though life at sea was no less dangerous, sailors felt more in control of their situation. Fear and co-dependence fostered a feeling of solidarity among workers, which was stronger in the mines than in any other industry. A textile entrepreneur, Engels had more involvement with textile workers, but he admired the collective activities he observed among the English miners. Nevertheless, he found the cradle of the workers’ movement in the Lancashire textile factories rather than in the mines of the Black Country. The Communist Manifesto refers not to mines but to factories, and its authors saw the proletariat as made up of factory workers. But if there was a spectre haunting Europe, it was the spectre of a miner.

Alfred Marshall, the father of economic geography, explained the advantage of the great industrial agglomerations by the economy of scale: the bigger they were, the more efficiently they worked and the cheaper the manufactured goods. The growth of these new towns benefited from a common labour market, the exchange of knowledge and shared delivery routes; but their location was defined largely by the sources of raw materials. By weight, more coal is needed to produce a unit of metal than ore; therefore ore was brought to the coalfields rather than the other way around. The metal-producing complexes in the Ruhr, Silesia, the Donbas, Pennsylvania, the lower Urals grew up next to coal mines. Later, refineries and petrochemical industries grew up in the same coal-based centres rather than moving closer to the oilfields. Without city walls or embankments, these coal-and-metal agglomerations developed differently from old towns. Dominating the industrial world, they never became capital cities. The authorities stayed with their old fiscal-military capitals, avoiding too close a contact with coal and colliers: it was better to keep at a distance from them, dirty and restless as they were.

Every continent had its coal mines, and almost all coal was used domestically. It was delivered from the mines to the factories but was rarely transported over long distances. In this, coal was very different from colonial raw materials, such as sugar and cotton, and from oil and natural gas. The new protectionist economy of the late nineteenth century, in which both wealth and population were enclosed within national borders – the ideal of Friedrich List, Otto Bismarck and Sergei Witte – was based on coal. But the labour-intensive coal industry lent itself to organised political activity in which workers themselves played a leading role – strikes, unions and social-democratic movements. In England the organisation of trade unions in place of the old guilds occurred first among the miners and then among the textile workers; miners spent the greatest number of days per year on strike, followed by metal workers and then textile workers. The geography of coal, distributed throughout the northern hemisphere – at least one or two coalfields in every large country – made the great political societies dependent on mining centres. Their geography localised social relations; while the working class was concentrated in Birmingham, the Ruhr, the Donbas and Pennsylvania, the business and bureaucratic elite widened its influence in London, Berlin, St Petersburg and New York. Never before – neither in the era of sea trade nor in the era of water-powered factories – had the political powers in the capitals been so vulnerable to social activism in the national or colonial peripheries. Concentrated in mining and industrial agglomerations, the organised proletariat acquired a unique source of political power: the strike.