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angled lens and to assume that because of huge increases of output at the time, that coal was a key player in the revolution. It is more comprehensive, however, to study the phenomenon of increased coal output more concisely through a microscopic lens because the best historians view historical aspects against the grain, as McCloskey does in his book The Economic History of Britain since 1700. His views urge a greater depth of research on the issue, and had inspired further contemporary research for this essay. The more recent research of Kenneth Pomeranz in 2000 indicates that McCloskey’s views are in fact worthy of consideration. He summarizes that Britain was abundant in deposits of coal and that these were easily accessible near populated areas, unlike other nations like China. This advantage of mineral deposition as opposed to inventive potential may explain Britain’s dominance in the revolution in comparison to other nations. However, it is more credible to go against the grain and view this idea in a reversed perspective. Coal deposits were undoubtedly more widespread in England, however the exploitation of these resources required dramatic technological advance, and this was accomplished through the introduction of steam power, utilized by the Newcomen engine in 1712. Therefore, it is plausible to state that the Industrial Revolution contributed to exploitation of the coal industry, rather than the coal industry fuelling the advancement of the revolution: “technological expertise was essential to Europe’s coal breakthrough,” and steam engines “spread rapidly and transformed an entire industry within a few decades.” It was the innovative minds of Britain’s population, the intelligence of science engineered by humans, which made vast movements in the Industrial Revolution; and the availability of mineral resources such as coal was a negligible contributing factor in comparison to this. Since invention was an economic
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activity, it was greatly dependant on the dynamics of business and profit. In the eighteenth century, Britain was a high wage, cheap energy economy which meant that the continuous rise in labour costs led to an increased incentive to invent technologies in order to substitute wealth for labour. The increase in demand meant an increase in output, but this same expansion of output could have happened at an earlier or later time in history had the conditions for demand been prominent. Factors which caused high rate of extraction were: income and population growth, tax reductions (which in turn reduced mining prices and prices to final consumers), and improvements in transport. This evidence suggests that the output of coal did not rise because of the development of technology – which would give it a leading role in the Industrial Revolution – but merely because of increased input utilization. Alternatively, one may argue that technological advances in the coal industry made coal extraction a less expensive endeavour, therefore the coal industry could only respond to demand increases because of these innovations. By the 1700’s further exploitation of mining sites required digging deeper shafts, and this was associated with excavation costs, haulage, drainage, and ventilation all of which depended on technological advancement. However, this is refuted by evidence that the sudden burst in the coal industry was due to the growth of London, and London’s expansion was due to a growth in international trade. Therefore it was both Britain’s national success in the global economy, and the abundant presence of coal on British land which resulted in exploitation of coal resources.
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Coal extraction had a mechanical process of haulage, drainage, and ventilation which may raise the question of whether there were any technological constraints in using newer technologies as opposed to older methods. If miners were forced to excavate without steam power the costs of coal extraction would not have been drastically higher in the 18th and even early 19th centuries than if older methods were employed. In fact, steam power did have a cost advantage but this didn’t appear until quite late, and up until the 1760’s (well into the Industrial Revolution) even the deepest mines were hauled using horse power. Therefore, steam imposed no direct advantage before the 1760’s because there was no technological constraint on haulage costs with eighteenth century technologies. Mine drainage was primarily accomplished with Newcomen steam engines by the 1760’s, yet horsepower did not impose a technological barrier because the advantage of steam power was purely of cost. Steam engines in 1750 were merely forty percent cheaper than most horse powered devices, therefore the introduction of steam power did not significantly revolutionize the industry at the time; and in effect coal was not a huge contributing factor. Steam power demonstrated little advancement to the coal industry, and other technological advances were proclaimed unessential to the advancement of the industry, as was an essential proclamation by one of the most influential British economists Sir John Hicks: “The real reason for the predominance of labour saving inventions is…a change in the relative prices of the factors of production is itself a spur to innovation and to inventions of a particular kind – directed at economizing…” In light of Hick’s theory, it can be generalized that the majority of the period between 1700-1869 was a time when British technology was at its beginnings of being put to use. Technologies were immature and engineers continued to improve
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them by economizing cheap British inputs. As a result, technology within the nation was more cost-effective, which was a dominant factor in the proliferation of the revolution as opposed to mere usage in industrial settings such as coal mines. Technology did not have a significant impact on the mechanics of coal excavation, and therefore coal did not boost its advance. On the other hand, it may be argued that there is a great deal of importance in taking into account the mutual reliance of technology with productivity and that they are not an inverse relation – one thrives on the other as Joel Mokyr brings up in his 1999 account on The British Industrial Revolution. However Mokyr is quick to refute this by stating that: “…it is unwarranted to expect that major technological breakthroughs will lead to more or less simultaneous increases in productivity. Most of the payoff to such breakthroughs occurs in the more remote future and is spread over a long period” (p. 25). The coal industry was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, but this does not constitute its importance in technological expansion, as Mokyr clearly indicates that the dynamics of scientific breakthroughs spread over a long span of time; it takes time to reap the rewards of innovation.
To imagine worldly events in the absence of a particular factor is a potent tool within the historian’s craft. To debate the significance or insignificance of the coal industry on Britain’s Industrial Revolution is taken to a whole new level of analytical thought by imagining coal as a missing factor in the revolutionary web. For this reason, this essay will now examine eighteenth century Britain in absence of coal mining as an element. If the same quantity of coal reserves had only been located in Scotland, Ireland, or the Netherlands there would be insignificant losses to English national incomes. The national income paid to the owners of coal reserves was 0.1% in
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1710 and only 0.2% in 1860 which indicates that Britain’s income from possession of coal reserves was a very small share of the national income. The actual absence of coal in Ireland, the Netherlands, and Northwest France does not explain why the Industrial Revolution did not take place in those regions. Being recipients of coal suppliers meant that these nations paid higher prices for coal through much of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. McCloskey argues that firewood, water power, and wind power would have sufficiently supplied the energy needs of the eighteenth century economy with the hypothetical absence of coal. In the 1860’s 22 million tons of coal was used domestically in heating, cooking, and lighting – a consumption valued at 2% of GDP. If this amount of energy was replaced by firewood and oil, it would be equivalent to a calculated 25 million acres of land per year, which accounts for nearly the entire 26 million acres of British farmland. Thus England could have relied on its own energy supplies, paving a very different economic path for the nation. Throughout the Industrial Revolution, there was much wood available in the Baltic region, and the Baltic was a key supplier of timber by the nineteenth century. Therefore, the Baltic regions could have certainly supplied sufficient amounts of timber to replace energy from coal for domestic uses as late as the 1860’s. If this was the case, international trade relations would have in turn strengthened the British economy - and increased global relations was a feature previously described in this essay as a leading cause of the Industrial Revolution. For this reason, an assumption can be made that the absence of coal may have even flourished the Industrial Revolution, based on previous historical patterns in British history.
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English coal mining during the Industrial Revolution caused very negligible growth in the nation’s productivity. The huge outputs of coal were due to reasons outside of the industry, therefore there is a little indication of technological revolution in coal mining. The supply and demand nature of its output makes it a resource with equivocal importance in any timeframe of history and is not limited to the era between 1700 and 1869. There are proved to be no technological constraints which hinder the usage of old vs. new technologies in coal extraction with regards to the newly innovated steam engine in opposition with old-fashioned horse power. By imagining the deletion of coal mining productivity within eighteenth century Britain, there are very modest, if any, detrimental effects to the progress of national economy yet may in theory benefit it by expanding global relations. The perception of Britain’s possession, extraction, and utilization of coal as an imperative constituent in the progress of the Industrial Revolution is evidently refuted.
Works Cited
Berg, Maxine, and Helen Clifford. Consumers and Luxury. Manchester University Press, 1999. Print.
Church, R. The History of the British Coal Industry, vol. 3, 1830-1913. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.
Habakkuk, H.J. American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1962.
Hausman, W.J. ‘Market Power in the London Coal Trade: The Limitation of the Vend, 1770-1845.’ Explorations in Economic History, 21, 383-405.
McCloskey, D. ‘The Industrial Revolution: 1780-1860.’ The Economic History of Britain since 1700, pp. 103-128. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Mokyr, Joel. The Economics of the Industrial Revolution. Savage: Rownman and Allanheld Publishers, 1989. Print.
Mokyr, Joel. The Lever of Riches. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Print.
Nuvolari, Alessandro. The Making of Steam Power Technology: A Study of
Technical Change during the Industrial Revolution. Eindhoven: Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, 2004.
Parker, William. Europe, America, and the Wider World. 1. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. eBook.
Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Raistrick, A. “Mine Draining in the 18th Century,” Mine and Quarry Engineering, 1938
Wrigley, E.A. Energy and the English Industrial Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. eBook.
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