Paul Warde

In the 19th century , no-one doubted the significance of Britain’s use of coal in underpinning its economic and political power – foreign neighbours envied Britain’s resources and mining industry long before the term ‘Industrial Revolution’ came into widespread use. In more recent decades, understanding about how burning fossil fuels has led to climate change puts a new complexion on this epochal shift. It is not only associated with bursting the constraints of the organic economy, but also bringing new hazards on a global scale. What happened in Britain takes on a new significance. 

While deposits of coal are far from universally spread around the globe, they are not that rare, including in the heavily commercialized economies found in Europe and south and east Asia in the ‘pre-industrial’ period. The burning of coal for fuel has a widespread history; in medieval China, and in Europe, in certain localities, episodically from classical times. But it had never become the dominant fuel harnessed to an expanding economy. So why did the transition to dominant coal use, to a fossil-fueled economy, happen in Britain when it did?  

Peter Paul Rubens, Old woman with a basket of coal.

Persistent myths

One explanation for the switch from alternative sources of fuel to coal was simply that the earlier ones became scarce. This assumes that there is a ‘ladder’ of energy forms, with societies being forced to move onto the next rung when the old rung has been destroyed. As the dominant fuel in Britain was mostly firewood (although the burning of peat, and turves – dried clods of earth that were thickly penetrated by flammable roots – was also very common in many districts), it is easy to assume that the rise of coal is associated with the woodlands being felled. This was connected to the idea of a ‘timber famine’: many 16th-century sources provide evidence about the poor state or destruction of woodland, and concerns about shortages of wood. Indeed, such concerns can be found right across Europe in the Reformation period and after. 

However, work by historians has suggested that the ‘neglected’ woods were the result of poor management rather than overuse and, perhaps unsurprisingly, those used most were actually managed more sustainability as a valuable resource. Woods were ‘grubbed up’ not to burn the trees, but because it was more lucrative to rent the land for farming. In truth only about 15 percent of England and Wales was wooded by Domesday. Much firewood came from hedgerows and pollarded trees, and probably only a few percentage points at most were shaved off the national total land area in subsequent centuries. 

Arthur Melville, The Faggot Collector. Falmouth Art Gallery.

The disappearance of wood is not, then, a plausible cause of the rise of coal, and has not been considered such by historians for a long time. Some have looked, instead, for a particular trigger for the rise of coal, rather than a response to scarcity: the dissolution of the monasteries incentivizing new landowners to make use of their assets, or the development of industries generating demand and innovation. Yet coal use was too widespread, and in the end developed too gradually, for these explanations to be plausible. The search for the cause perhaps tells us more about the desire for certain kinds of explanation, than it does about the evidence to hand. 

When and where?

The coalmining industry has attracted important scholarship over the 20th century. To understand the transition away from organic to fossil fuels, some clear estimates were needed of the use of both sources of thermal energy. Only then could the timing of change, and its causes, be appreciated. Here we must distinguish between identifying national trends and local transitions. In practice, nearly everywhere conducted a ‘mixed’ economy of fuels, as we still do today: no area universally uses gas, or electricity, or firewood. However, we must remember that the national transition is composed of local transitions occurring at different speeds and at different times. 

Once these parameters are established, we can think about explanations. Why would one prefer to burn coal rather than wood? Are they essentially the same, delivering heat, one derived from growing plants and one mined from under the ground? In practice they are not, because they have particular qualities as fuels. In fact, there are also important distinctions within them, between different qualities of coal and firewood.     

The first quantitative estimates of the total coal and wood supply available nationally were made in studies at Campop in the early 2000s. Estimates of wood supply were produced by calculating the total available sustainable annual supply, derived from the area of woodland, its productivity, the length of hedgerows cut for fuel, and estimates of trees that could be pollarded (where branches are periodically harvested and then regrow). Rather than wood supply declining, it actually rose to peak in the middle of the 18th century. Nevertheless, this slow growth in supply probably hovered around 0.1 percent per year. 

Sydney Curnow Vosper, Interior with Large Fireplace. Royal Watercolour Society.

In contrast, the output of coal was growing at well over 1 percent per year, and during the reign of James I (1603-24) possibly as much as 3 percent per year. Compounded over time, and continuing well into the 19th century, such growth rates meant that the supply of coal surpassed the supply of firewood during the 1660s and 1670s.  

By the time George III came to the throne in 1760, the population used two and a half times more coal than wood, and by the start of the 19th century, around ten times more. Given that about a tenth of the country was wooded, this implies that were the coal supply to be substituted with firewood, the entirety of England would have had to be covered in trees dedicated to and carefully managed for firewood. The fossil fuel economy had well and truly arrived.

Prices

These trends are also visible in price. There was no national ‘price’ for wood or coal. Both are heavy to transport, and once they are conveyed any distance, the price is dominated by transport costs. The late 16th and early 17th centuries were a period of general price inflation, but over that period in places where the fuels could ‘compete’, such as in London, wood prices clearly rose faster than coal.  

By the second half of the 17th century this kind of price competition ceased, because anywhere with good transport links to a coalfield used coal as its predominant fuel, but beyond the reach of waterways and the meagre supply of good roads, firewood was predominant. This gave a distinct geography of fuel use which stayed in place until the later, large-scale expansion of the canal network.  

After the reign of Charles II, the continued rapid relative expansion in coal use is not to be explained by the geographical spread of the fossil fuel economy, but the more rapid growth of the population and industry in those regions that already used coal. This was partly driven, of course, by those regions enjoying the benefit of cheaper fuel. This was rarely a case of fuel-intensive industries like metallurgy or salt-making. As Britain’s textile industries became more important, long before they shifted into mechanized factories, so did the requirement for heating homes for relatively sedentary labour across the year. Cheap coal thus helped underpin their expansion – as was pointed out by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.

William Bradley Lamond, Woman Mending. Maggie’s Dundee.

The great coalfields of the north-east, with their close link to the east coast trade and the demand of London, have received most historical attention. However, these mines produced fairly consistently about half of English and Welsh output between 1560 and 1700. This shows that overall growth was equally fast elsewhere, and towards the end of the 17th century it was particularly marked in the west Midlands and south Wales. The same factors were in operation everywhere. 

Advantages of coal

A bone-dry ton of firewood has a similar heat content to a ton of coal. However, it is not easy or cheap to make wood ‘bone-dry’, and it takes many months. In practice, most wood has a rather high moisture content. It is usually cut from relatively young trees or coppiced ‘springs’ of wood. The wood is only cut during certain seasons of the year, when the tree is dormant and the moisture content is lower, both to accelerate the process of drying and because, as any woodcutter knows, greenwood is harder work to cut (although easier to carve). 

No-one wants to cut up a huge tree trunk for firewood, especially in an era long before the chainsaw, and these huge trunks being comparatively rare, they were more valuable for construction timber or planks. However, the practical and labour-saving habit of cutting small, irregular pieces of wood into even smaller pieces meant that when it was piled up, a considerable amount of air was left in the heap. A cubic metre of stacked wood does not contain anything like a cubic metre of solid wood.  

Coal does not face any of these issues. A coalminer could work most of the year round (unless bad weather closed the mine) and cut more fuel per hour, and thus was more productive than a woodcutter. Coal does not need drying. The smaller, more rounded pieces mean that coalheaps are largely composed of actual coal. Of course, mining creates costs, especially as mines get deeper. They must be drained of water, and ventilated, and coal lifted to the surface. Fortunately for producers and consumers of coal in this period, British coal seams generally lie close to the surface, and did not begin to present major challenges of drainage until the 18th century.  

Vincent Van Gogh, Coal Shoveler.

All these factors meant that if other things were equal, coal was cheaper to obtain and cheaper to transport than wood. A wagonload of coal contained much more heat energy than a wagonload of wood, where the combustible woody fibres shared space with a lot of air and water. This made coal cheaper to both extract and to move to markets. 

Although coalmining’s impact on the surface was not negligible, it did not provide substantial competition for agriculture, and indeed the rent to be got from a mine was far higher than that of a field. In contrast, woodland competed directly with agriculture and thus tended to grubbed up in periods of rising food prices. If it was to survive, the rental value of woods had to compete with rising rentals from farmland, pushing the price of wood up further.  

There is consequently no mystery to the rise of coal use in Britain. It was simply cheaper to get hold of – provided you did not live too far from the mines. Coal seams are very broadly scattered across the country (aside from southern England, East Anglia, and the Scottish Highlands). Ports could be reached by sea. Hence once there was demand for more fuel as the population rose, and the infrastructure of ports and wagonways from mines was in place, coal use could rapidly expand. Indeed, in many mining metallurgical districts like south Yorkshire and the west Midlands, woodlands survived because they provided material for pit-props, rails and wagons.  

Constraints and challenges

There were still constraints on the expanded use of coal. An oft-remarked one is the need for a chimney to provide a draught, as coal is less easy to light and be kept burning than wood. The ‘great rebuilding’ of England from the second half of the 16th century, with increased incorporation of chimneys, thus expanded its use, although it is not correct that coal cannot be burned without a chimney. Consumers did think coal smelly and smoky, or at least a kind of smoke they were less accustomed to. Nevertheless, such reservations appear to have been relatively short-lived, and this was another problem solved by a good chimney.  

Vincent van Gogh, Tiled Roof with Chimneys and Church Tower.

Where both fuels were available, the rich preferred to continue to use some wood (but often a mix). The rural poor, with less cash to spend but also more time because of limited earning opportunities, were more likely to stick with firewood (or peat or turf or other fuels) when they could collect it for free. Industrial workers, for whom time was money and who worked more continuously, preferred to buy fuel, which pointed them towards coal.   

The availability of coal did make it possible to expand some industrial sectors more rapidly without pressure on prices. Coal was used to burn lime, important for construction, and also for ameliorating acidity in the soil and hence enhancing agricultural production – a process that went hand in hand with industrial development. Salt-making and brewing were major consumers of coal, accelerating the commercialization of the food, drink and chemical industries, which would all become staples of British industry – more enduring than textiles. 

However, coal could not be used for everything. ‘Impurities’ in coal – that is, the presence of gases released in combustion – prevented its use in some important metallurgical processes until late in the 18th century. Only once such problems were resolved could Britain enter its great age of iron, as engineer and machine-maker to the world. 

The increasing depth and geological complexity of mines (both for coal, and the metal mines of the south-west) meant that drainage increasingly became an issue. This was for a long time the sole purpose of steam engines, to drive pumps, and it does seem that the commercial development of steam engines was consciously done to resolve these problems and turn a profit. Indeed, at first pumps were so fuel intensive to run they could only pay if sited on top of a coal mine, where fuel was almost free, and that only made sense if they were to be employed in the mine itself.  

Like climate change, the historically dramatic and irreversible consequences of working out a way to turn thermal energy into motion turns out to have origins in a rather everyday problem. 

Expertise in the more efficient and widespread use of coal developed, not because the British were especially innovative (during this period they imported metal workers and miners from Germany, silk and linen workers from Italy and France, and long continued to obtain engineers from France). Rather, the British developed particular innovations in technology using coal because they had a lot of coal and a large coalmining sector. 

One might think that the rise of fossil fuels – that in retrospect seems so important for the fate of not just the British economy, or the modern world, but the future of every species on the planet – requires some special explanation. It turns out the reasons are extremely prosaic, and require no special British genius or circumstance. Britain simply sheltered a commercialized economy, as did some other parts of Europe, which happened to be near accessible surface coal seams, at a moment when relatively modest developments in infrastructure could make it accessible to much of the population. The fact that at this time, this combination was globally rather unique, does not mean that the causes have to be particular or special. If one wishes to draw a lesson for enabling successful current and future energy transitions, it may be that the same logic will apply to them too.   

Further Reading 

• Allen, B., The British industrial revolution in global perspective (2009).
• Cavert, W., The smoke of London. Energy and environment in the early modern city (2016).
• Hatcher, J., A History of the British coal industry. Volume 1. Before 1700: towards the age of coal (1993).
• Kander, A., Malanima, P., and Warde, P., Power to the people. Energy in Europe over the last five centuries (2013).
• Warde, P., Energy consumption in England and Wales (2007). https://www.histecon.magd.cam.ac.uk/history-sust/energyconsumption  
• Wrigley, E. A., Energy and the English industrial revolution (2010) .
• Find more historical energy data at www.energyhistory.org  

Tags: coal, economic history, energy, firewood, fossil fuels, industrial revolution, organic economy, wood

| This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2025 at 12:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.