Perhaps the most common explanation you’ll hear of Britain’s success in the Industrial Revolution is that it was all down to the presence of easily accessible coal deposits.

The most prominent and thoughtful proponent of this position is Tony Wrigley. I’ve been reading some chapters from his most recent book, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution.

He identifies a significant potential barrier to sustained modern economic growth in the form of energy capture. Essentially, the pre-IR economy was an ‘organic’ one - our access to the sun’s energy was largely mediated by the ability of plants to photosynthesise it, allowing us to then burn organic matter for heat.

The IR, however, depended upon Britain’s unique transition to burning fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are the culmination of a process by which the sun’s energy is collected by plants via photosynthesis, but then compressed over vast amounts of time by geology into more efficient sources of energy than mere wood.

Wrigley recognises that Britain had a Golden Age before the IR, but that the discovery of particular innovations allowing us to harness this energy towards manufacturing allowed us to enter a new economic phase free of organic constraints.

I have quite a few big problems with this theory:

The Dutch Republic was using peat to fuel its Golden Age, and (according to Wrigley himself) did not face any fuel constraints. If fuel constraints were not the barrier, why then did the Dutch Republic stagnate? Not only was peat apparently sufficient for the Dutch Republic, but even if this had not been the case, Newcomen steam engines were installed in the Netherlands at a relatively early stage from Britain to enable the extraction of coal from local sources. Economic logic therefore suggests that even if the Dutch Republic had come up against energy constraints as the barrier to growth, then these initially expensive coal mines would have become cost-effective. Even providing for the remote possibility that local extraction may have been too costly for the Dutch Republic (despite potential resource constraints), the importation of coal from Newcastle to the Netherlands seems as though it would have been relatively straightforward. Indeed, it may well have been cheaper to transport coal down the British coast and across the channel than having to initiate costly infrastructure projects to enable the transportation of Newcastle coal inland via canal to places like Birmingham. This is worth looking into. Looking further back in time, coal had already been extracted as a source of domestic heating in Medieval China, and even as far back as Roman times. Indeed, this extends to coal as an industrial fuel source too: Abraham Darby’s coke-burning cast-iron production from the very beginning of the 18th Century had already been anticipated in China at least as early as the 11th Century. It therefore seems unlikely that the mere presence and use of coal alone would somehow become a larger factor in Britain in just under a century when the Yellow River valley’s proto-industrialists had been using it for over 700 years! It seems as though something else must be behind this transition. Britain did not necessarily need its own coal - indeed, the alternative of importing coal from foreign countries has been shown to be not all that much costlier than domestic production. The coal hypothesis also fails to explain why much of Britain’s industrial coal consumption came from cities that were not immediately accessible to coal deposits. Costly infrastructure projects linking its supply to Manchester, Sheffield and Birmingham via canal (and later railway) were first required. If coal had been the spur to innovation-led growth, one would expect it to occur mostly on the coast (easily accessible from Newcastle’s collieries). The argument for coal also relies too heavily on particular innovations - it takes Watt’s separate condenser and his application of steam power to rotary motion for granted, while also placing it at centre stage as the most important innovation of the period. By treating innovation as exogenous to the model, the argument for coal cannot explain innovation itself. If we accept that the IR was all about the unprecedented levels and persistence of innovation in an economy, the presence of coal alone fails as an explanatory factor. Even if one were to treat Watt’s innovations as the product of fortuitous circumstance, the argument for coal cannot explain the other innovations necessary to make a fossil-fuelled economy possible. For example, coal cannot explain John “Iron Mad” Wilkinson’s iron-boring technique that made Boulton & Watt’s uniform steam boilers possible (it was originally designed with cannon in mind). The argument for coal also largely ignores the non-organic sources of energy for much of the mechanisation that made even the 'poster boy’ industries of the IR possible. Take cotton: John Kay’s flying shuttle, Richard Arkwright’s water frame, Edmund Cartwright’s power loom, and Samuel Crompton’s spinning jenny; were all designed with water-power in mind. In fact, the early applications of steam engines were to the supplementation and regulation of the flow of water for the driving of already existing and increasingly mechanised machines. Furthermore, despite their proximity, the presence of cotton mills in Lancashire and Shropshire pre-dated their use of nearby coal deposits. The presence of coal does not explain this growing rate of mechanisation, nor the process of innovation that made those machines possible. Even if we were to grant that Watt’s innovations were the most important for the IR, there is no guarantee that the early stages of the transition to a coal-powered 'mineral’ economy would have resulted in the necessary sustained growth. For example, Watt’s low-pressure engines could not be applied to vehicles: it took Trevithick’s high-pressure engines to make trains possible. If we were to look at the historical record (ie. a handful of innovations providing Golden Ages, soon being followed by stagnation), there might have been centuries between the two inventions (there was just under a century between Newcomen’s engine and Watt’s). Instead, there were only a few decades between them. Taking the last point even further, coal does not explain the way in which innovation could be sustained beyond coal’s usefulness to the economy. Even if we were to have all the innovations associated with coal alone, it’s perfectly plausible to assume from the historical record that we could have had a prolonged Golden Age from coal-power, but then stagnated again by, say, the 1870s. Coal does not explain the innovations that led to the electric motor, national electricity systems, nor to the use of oil in the internal combustion engine. More recently, it does not explain the recent advances in using solar power, tidal power, geothermal energy, nuclear fission or even natural gas.

From the above, I think a common theme emerges. We need to have explanatory factors that explain the causes of innovation, applicable to a wide range of industries. Otherwise, we cannot explain the unprecedented appearance and persistence of innovation-led, sustained and replicable economic growth. The presence and use of coal in Britain just doesn’t cut it.