The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social StructurePaul Warde
On 30th September 2024, Britain used coal to generate electricity for the very last time. The age of coal as a source of power – both economic and political – is over. The speaker of the House of Lords traditionally sits on a sack of wool, an ancient representation of England’s trading wealth. In the 1860s, when Britons embarked on a brief but heated debate over whether they were running out of fossil fuels, it was commented that he should really sit on a bag of coal.
Everyone knows that the Industrial Revolution was based on coal. Everyone now knows the environmental consequences we have reaped from making a world from fossil fuels. Yet why have fossil fuels been so important? To understand this, we need to go back to the world that came before – the world that the historian Tony Wrigley called ‘the organic economy’.