Nature's Evil

TWELVE

Coal

Per unit of weight, the energy produced from coal is three times greater than from firewood; when a ton of coal – just a large pile – is burnt it produces roughly as much heat as firewood from an acre of forest. Coal is less of a fire hazard than peat, does not absorb water and thus does not need to be kept under cover. The burning of coal creates much higher temperatures, which are crucial for some tasks, but it also releases more impurities than firewood or even peat.

In England, coal had heated houses since Roman times. Dug from exposed seams or near the surface, it was not transported overland any further than quarried stone. In early modern England, it was called ‘sea coal’ – it always came to London by sea. From the pits and mines in northern England, flat-bottomed barges took coal along the River Tyne to Newcastle. Transhipped onto sailing vessels, it went down the east coast to the Thames. From 1550 to 1700, these shipments of coal increased at least twentyfold. The influx of Spanish silver led to dramatic inflation in London, but there was so much coal that its price did not increase: for a while, a peculiar equilibrium was established between the rising uses of silver and coal. The tonnage of English coal shipping exceeded the total tonnage of all the rest of the merchant fleet. The sailors who manned these ships formed the naval reserve in times of war. 1 Godforsaken parts of the country were seeing real money for the first time ever. Begun in open quarries, the extraction switched to mines; the costs grew, but so did the scale of the industry. Coal was compared to gold and the English countryside to Spanish colonies. As an anonymous author wrote in News from Newcastle in 1651:

England’s a perfect World! Has Indies too!

Correct your Maps: Newcastle is Peru! …

Let th’ naughty Spaniard triumph ’til ’tis told

Our sooty mineral purifies his gold. 2

The stability of coal prices was one of the great secrets of the British economy. The government was constantly preoccupied with maintaining grain prices, but coal prices were self-regulating. Coal production responded elastically to demand, and it all happened within the country – no customs were involved. Under pressure from the soaring price of firewood, almost all heat-dependent industries switched to coal – these included the manufacture of bricks, salt and soap, the burning of limestone, the refining of sugar and many other things. But breweries and forges were fuelled with charcoal; coal contained impurities that damaged metals and tainted beer. To produce 1 kilogram of pig iron required 8 kilograms of charcoal, for which 40 kilograms of firewood were needed. In the middle of the eighteenth century, British industry required about a million tons of firewood per year. Its price skyrocketed, and, although England and Scotland had excellent deposits of ore, they had to buy pig iron from Sweden and Russia.

In 1603, the aristocratic poet and naturalist Sir Hugh Platt proposed mixing coal dust and loam ‘according to the manner and making of snowballs’. In the fireplace, these balls looked ‘attractive’ and produced less ‘smoot’. Decades later, breweries in Derbyshire started using coke, which they produced by setting fire to heaps of coal mixed with clay; the new fuel was instrumental in the invention of pale ale and then cast iron. In 1709, Abraham Darby, a Quaker, first used coke for this purpose.

While blast furnaces were built taller and taller, coal mines were dug deeper and deeper. Groundwater had to be pumped out of them. From 1705 onwards, Thomas Newcomen, a Baptist preacher, found a way of pumping water up by burning coal under water-filled boilers. Steam rose, creating a vacuum in the boiler and drawing up the water from the mine. These ‘atmospheric engines’ used a lot of coal, but there was more than enough of that in the mines. In 1763 James Watt, the son of a Scottish shipwright, invented a more efficient engine. Watt created a laboratory at Edinburgh University and Adam Smith helped him in his negotiations with the administration. But there was no funding to develop the prototype. The project was finally realised when the silver manufacturer Matthew Boulton went into a business partnership with Watt. Their engines were very large; each one required a separate building with solid foundations several metres deep because any shift could put the engine out of action. In addition, all these steam pumps depended on a flow of river water to supply the boilers. According to the patent, Watt and his investor would receive a third of the coal which each machine saved. One of the explanations for the success of the Industrial Revolution is that England had established a patent law that enabled inventors to be generously rewarded. Unfortunately, Watt’s life leaves no room for illusions. He died a wealthy man, but, without Boulton and his mint, Watt would not have been able to register his patent. The creator of the first locomotive, George Stephenson, was the son of a fireman who had worked on a steam pump in one of the Northumbrian coal mines. His father was blinded in a mining accident, and probably this experience prompted George to come up with his first invention – a miner’s lamp which could burn without causing an explosion. In 1814 Stephenson mounted on wheels an improved version of the steam pump his father had looked after. All his technical experience was connected with coal mines, and the locomotive’s inaugural task was to transport coal from the mine to the river.

Water power

For heating, coal was irreplaceable; but steam engines powered by coal were in competition with an older source of energy – the waterwheel. Invented in Asia, the waterwheel was used there to raise water and irrigate the fields. The use of water energy in the processing of matter was the greatest difference between the European economy and its oriental rivals – China, India and the Islamic Levant. Joined by a shaft to a waterwheel, wooden mechanisms raised water, milled grain, sawed timber, cut and polished stone. Waterwheels raised ore from the mines, crushed it, powered bellows for smelting furnaces, and hammered metal. Complex machines powered by waterwheels spun and wove fibre. As early as 1086, the Domesday Book, a survey of all the landed property in England, recorded 6,000 waterwheels. These watermills were very expensive structures. The wheel was not particularly complicated – it was the hydraulic technology needed for directing water onto the wheel that was tricky. A weir raised the level of the water and flooded the land upstream. Circumventing the dam, a narrow wooden trough, a ‘mill race’, channelled water onto the wheel. Cogwheels converted the movement of the wheel into the back and forth movements of bellows, saws or hammers. The huge construction creaked, shook and swayed. But the wooden wheels could function for as much as twenty years and were more reliable than the first steam-powered machines. Their disadvantage was their dependence on the water level in the river and therefore on climate, season and the lie of the land.

Many of these mills have survived – they were built to last. Situated on river banks and ponds in the centres of our busy – formerly industrial – towns, most of them have been converted into much loved residences. But, in fact, the majority of watermills were floating. One or two wheels were installed on a barge which was moored by rapids, and a mill of this type could grind wheat or saw planks for a decade. Cheaper than fixed mills, they didn’t need dams and didn’t depend on the water level.

Even a simple mill for grinding grain released fifty to sixty people, principally women, from exhausting manual labour. Transforming the economy, mills, with their dams, ponds, locks and aqueducts, also changed the ecology. One piece of land was flooded, a second drained, a third turned into swamp. New towns sprang up on fields and forests around the factories. Producing dry, tradable commodities with a minimal investment of labour, such mills were centres for the concentration of capital. Prepared to invest large sums and wait for long-term returns, powerful landowners, for example monasteries, turned their lands and rivers into sources of capital. From Strasbourg to Bologna and from Tampere to Luhansk, many inland European towns owed their rapid growth to water-powered factories.

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

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

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.

The strike of 1842 in Great Britain was one of the first such occurrences in history – and one of the largest. The action started among the miners and spread to the textile workers. Half a million workers joined in the action – one in every two workers. The strike was broken by force: the authorities used arms against the strikers, and 1,500 of them were arrested. In 1844, 40,000 coal miners again went on strike, leaving Newcastle without coal. These strikes played a pivotal role in the development of the Chartist movement – the organised struggle by miners and industrial workers for democratic rights. In 1908, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain won the right to an eight-hour working day for all underground workers. 7

As mines went deeper, they became more dangerous. In 1896 the roof of the Twin Shaft Colliery in Pittston, Pennsylvania, caved in, with the loss of fifty-eight workers, most of them recent immigrants. The following year the colliers at the Pennsylvania mine of Lattimer, also migrants from Eastern Europe, went on strike. The local sheriff gave the order to open fire and nineteen miners were killed. These events strengthened the United Mine Workers, the most important organisation of its kind in America. In 1902, American miners went on strike for six months. In 1905, miners’ strikes stopped production in the Ruhr Basin in the German Empire and the Donetsk Basin in the Russian Empire. In 1906, there was a disaster in the Courrières coal mine in France, when more than a thousand miners died in an explosion; a general strike followed in Paris. The greatest disaster of all happened in 1942 in the Benxihu mine in China, which killed 1,500 people.

The Mitchell thesis

The political scientist Timothy Mitchell sees the industrial reliance on coal as the key to understanding the social-democratic movement which defined the politics of the late nineteenth and twentieth century. There were four factors involved in the miners’ active role in the class struggle, and these arose from the natural characteristics of coal. 8 Seams of coal are found near the surface only in a small number of coalfields. The labour-intensive task of extraction concentrates the workers round the mine. The difficulty of transporting coal brings ancillary trades close to the mines, thus increasing the concentration of the proletariat. The nature of the work in the mines fosters a sense of solidarity and autonomy among the workers. In his remarkable book Carbon Democracy , Mitchell asserts that the different forms of fossil fuel have different political characteristics. The energy switch from coal to oil determined the political switch from social democracy to neoliberalism. Mitchell’s empirical examples are limited to Great Britain and the Middle East; his conclusions need to be tested in Eastern Europe, Russia and China and on a broader range of different kinds of carbon fuel – coal, oil, gas and shale.

Miners were the first to call national strikes, but revolutions happened far away from them, in the capital cities. Still, the miners’ power to block coal supplies brought to a halt railways, power stations and arms factories. In 1926, the British Trades Union Congress called a general strike in which 1 million miners stopped work. Nevertheless, coal prices were falling, leading to redundancies and unemployment. The Second World War increased the demand for all kinds of raw material; then there was a new slump. One of the reasons for both world wars was the conflict over the Ruhr Basin – a gigantic cluster of coal mines and industrial towns in the border region between France and Germany. Under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, the Ruhr was put under international control, but in 1923 it was again occupied by French troops. Without raw materials German industry ground to a halt; the country was afflicted with hyperinflation. In 1936, Nazi troops occupied part of the Ruhr: thus the new war began. At the end of the war France nationalised its coal industry, including the occupied Ruhr. In 1951, thanks to an initiative by Jean Monnet, the éminence grise of European integration, the French government proposed to create a European Coal and Steel Community. In order to make war ‘not merely unthinkable but materially impossible’, the new body took direct control over the Ruhr. Realising Keynes’s old ideas in the long-suffering centre of European industry, this transnational organisation took responsibility for raw materials, leaving ready-made goods to private or national players. The Coal and Steel Community originally had six member countries; then it turned into the Common Market and then into the European Union. The Ruhr Basin was the cradle of new post-war Europe, and joint control over raw materials became the primary purpose and justification of the Union. 9 The age of oil has changed this perspective.

In 1946 the new Labour government nationalised the British coal industry. The new state monopoly was vast – it included almost a thousand mines, employing 800,000 men. The planned economy increased output, but the demand for coal was falling because of competition from oil. Run by electricity, new mining machines increased the productivity of each worker, and at the beginning of the 1970s the number of miners fell threefold. Between 1984 and 1985 many pits downed tools in protest against colliery closures, leading to the longest miners’ strike in Britain’s history. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called the miners ‘the enemy within’; her allies were oil and gas, which had been discovered off the North Sea coast. The ‘Dutch disease’ would soon follow, but meanwhile the sun set on the social-democratic age of coal, and the neoliberal age of oil dawned.

The resource switch turned out to be difficult, but those who had dreamt of ridding themselves of coal and miners were lucky with oil and oilmen. From 1981 onwards, Great Britain exported more oil than it imported. Oil and gas improved the balance of trade, reviving long-forgotten mercantile ideas. Unlike the coal industry, with its ever-present unions and long-term contracts, the oil industry thrived on free trade. As ships switched to diesel fuel and power stations to gas, mines were privatised or closed; the last deep mine in England closed in 2015. The mining towns of Great Britain have become some of the poorest places in Europe.

The mines and miners played a leading role in the liberation movement in Eastern Europe. The key moment in Solidarity’s struggle in Poland was the 1981 strike in the Silesian mine of Wujek, which ended with the shooting of demonstrators – nine miners were killed. The first legal strike in Soviet history occurred in 1989 among miners in the Kuznetsk Basin in Siberia. When ‘reforms’ failed, miners were more active and cohesive than other workers. But no strike can prevent an economic slump. Having oil and gas as alternatives, the government could ignore the threats of the miners and, moreover, squeeze their whole industry until their power was undermined and forgotten.

Nowadays, coal is extracted mostly from open pits; working on the surface is less labour-intensive and less dangerous but causes more damage to the environment. Open pits have changed the tradition of mining collectives: no danger underground, no solidarity on the surface; no solidarity, no strikes; no strikes, no power. In the 2010s, coal produced about a third of the energy harnessed by humankind, but it is responsible for fully half of carbon emissions. Per unit of energy, coal emits much more carbon than does oil or gas. Mines and coal power plants also produce more pollution than almost any other industry, and this pollution is connected to the aerosol spread of viruses; in 2020, mining areas of Poland, for example, suffered much more severely from COVID than other regions. Produced largely by coal, our ecological crisis continues the miners’ strikes by other means, and of course the earth’s strike will be more effective. By 2015 the coal sector of the American economy had already lost three-quarters of its capitalisation. Eurasia still depends on coal, but things are changing. Great Britain has pledged to close all its coal-fired power stations by 2025, and Germany, by 2038. It has been calculated that, in order to keep global warming within its internationally agreed limits, 92 per cent of the known deposits of coal will never be extracted or burnt.

Note

Notes

1 Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution . 2 Nef, ‘An early energy crisis and its consequences’. 3 Malm, Fossil Capital ; Reynolds, Stronger than a Hundred Men . 4 Jevons, The Coal Question , p. vii. 5 Pomeranz, The Great Divergence ; Jones, Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution ; de Vries, European Urbanization . 6 Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 , p. 248. 7 Gregory, The Miners and British Politics . 8 Mitchell, Carbon Democracy . 9 Gillingham, Coal, Steel, and the Rebirth of Europe ; Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe .