The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [107]
Until 1800 most of the raw cotton spun in England came from Asia. But Chinese and Indian cotton growers either could not or would not increase their output. They had little fresh land to exploit and little incentive either: the zemindar landlord or the imperial bureaucrat took the profit of any productivity increase. Instead it was the southern states of America that took up the opportunity. From producing an insignificant quantity of cotton in 1790, America became the world’s biggest producer by the 1820s and by 1860 was growing two-thirds of the world’s cotton. Cotton accounted for half of all American exports by value between 1815 and 1860.
Slaves did the work. Cotton was a labour-intensive crop, in which a single man could sow, weed (again and again), harvest and clean the product of just eighteen acres, and there were few economies of scale. In land-rich, thinly populated America, the only way to expand production was to kill the market in labour altogether: to force the workers to work for no wage. As the economist Pietra Rivoli puts it: ‘It was not the perils of the labour market, but the suppression of the market that doomed the lives of slaves.’ The affordability of cloth for the English working class was made possible by the buying and selling of captured Africans.
King coal
So far fossil fuels have played only a small part. Now imagine what would have happened next if Britain had possessed no accessible coal reserves. Coal exists all over the world, but some British coal fields were close to the surface and close enough to navigable waterways to be cheaply transported. The cost of transporting coal overland was prohibitive until the railway came along. It was not that coal was a cheaper source of power than the alternative – coal took a century to compete on price with water power in factories – but that it was effectively limitless in supply. The harnessing of water power soon experienced diminishing returns as it reached saturation point in the Pennines. Nor was there any other, renewable fuel that could supply the need. In the first half of the eighteenth century, even the relatively tiny English iron industry was close to moribund for lack of charcoal fuel on a largely deforested island. What timber there was in the south of England was in demand for ship building, which bid up its price. So in search of charcoal to feed their forges, the iron masters left the Sussex Weald and moved to the West Midlands, then to the Welsh Marches, to South Yorkshire and eventually to Cumberland. Imports of wrought iron from well-forested Sweden and Russia met the growing demand from the mechanisation of the textile industry, but even these imports could not meet the needs of the industrial revolution. Only coal could do that. There was never going to be enough wind, water or wood in England to power the factories, let alone in the right place.
This was the position in which China found itself. In 1700 it had a vibrant textile industry, perhaps equally ripe for mechanisation, but it was a long way from coalfields, and its domestic iron industry was dependent entirely on charcoal, whose price was rising as forests retreated. Part of the problem was that Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, where the coal was, had been depopulated by barbarians and plague in the three centuries after 1100, so the country’s demographic and economic centre of gravity shifted south to the Yangtze valley. Because none of the coal reserves were close to navigable water, China’s iron industry gave up its early experiment with fossil fuel. The price of iron rose in China, discouraging inventors from using it