The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [100]
The Coal Question
In 1807, as Parliament in London was preparing to pass at last William Wilberforce’s bill to abolish the slave trade, the largest factory complex in the world had just opened at Ancoats in Manchester. Powered by steam and lit by gas, both generated by coal, Murrays’ Mills drew curious visitors from all over country and beyond to marvel at their modern machinery. There is a connection between these two events. The Lancashire cotton industry was rapidly converting from water power to coal. The world would follow suit and by the late twentieth century, 85 per cent of all the energy used by humankind would come from fossil fuels. It was fossil fuels that eventually made slavery – along with animal power, and wood, wind and water – uneconomic. Wilberforce’s ambition would have been harder to obtain without fossil fuels. ‘History supports this truth,’ writes the economist Don Boudreaux: ‘Capitalism exterminated slavery.’
The story of energy is simple. Once upon a time all work was done by people for themselves using their own muscles. Then there came a time when some people got other people to do the work for them, and the result was pyramids and leisure for a few, drudgery and exhaustion for the many. Then there was a gradual progression from one source of energy to another: human to animal to water to wind to fossil fuel. In each case, the amount of work one man could do for another was amplified by the animal or the machine. The Roman empire was built largely on human muscle power, in the shape of slaves. It was Spartacus and his friends who built the roads and houses, who tilled the ground and trampled the grapes. There were horses, forges and sailing ships as well, but the chief source of watts in Rome was people. The period that followed the Roman empire, especially in Europe, saw the widespread replacement of that human muscle power by animal muscle power. The European early Middle Ages were the age of the ox. The invention of dried-grass hay enabled northern Europeans to feed oxen through the winter. Slaves were replaced by beasts, more out of practicality than compassion one suspects. Oxen eat simpler food, complain less and are stronger than slaves. Oxen need to graze, so this civilisation had to be based on villages rather than cities. With the invention of the horse collar, oxen then gave way to horses, which can plough at nearly twice the speed of an ox, thus doubling the productivity of a man and enabling each farmer either to feed more people or to spend more time consuming other’s work. In England, horses were 20 per cent of draught animals in 1086, and 60 per cent by 1574.
In turn oxen and horses were soon being replaced by inanimate power. The watermill, known to the Romans but comparatively little used, became so common in the Dark Ages that by the time of the Domesday Book (1086), there was one for every fifty people in southern England. Two hundred years later, the number of watermills had doubled again. By 1300 there were sixty-eight watermills on a single mile of the Seine in Paris, and others floating on barges.
The Cistercian monastic order took the watermill to its technical zenith, not only improving and perfecting it, but aggressively suppressing rival animal-powered mills by legal action. With gears, cams and trip hammers, they used the water to achieve multiple ends. At Clairvaux, for example, the water from the river first turned the mill wheel to crush the grain, then shook the sieve to separate flour from bran, then topped up the vats to make beer, then moved on to work the fullers’ hammers against the raw cloth, then trickled into the tannery and was finally directed to where it could wash away waste.
The windmill appeared first in the twelfth century and spread rapidly throughout the Low Countries, where water power was not an option. But it was peat, rather than wind, that gave the Dutch the power to become the world’s workshop in the 1600s. Peat dug on a vast scale from freshly drained bogs fuelled the brick, ceramic, beer, soap, salt and sugar industries. Harlem