The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [108]
Efficiency in the coal industry did not itself contribute significantly to rising productivity in Britain even in the nineteenth century. Cotton contributed thirty-four times as much as coal to productivity growth in industrialising Britain. Coal’s cost per tonne at the pithead in Newcastle rose slightly between the 1740s and 1860s, though the price in London fell because of lower taxes and falling transport costs. The miner’s safety lamp aside, coal used few new technologies after the steam-driven pump. Well into the twentieth century, the equipment of the typical miner consisted of a lamp, a pick-axe, wooden pit props and a pony. The great increase in coal consumption (five-fold in the eighteenth century, fourteen-fold in the nineteenth century) was the result mainly of more investment, not more productivity. Contrast this with the iron industry, where the amount of coal needed to smelt a tonne of pig iron and then refine it into wrought iron halved every thirty years. It took almost as much human muscle power to mine a tonne of coal in 1900 as it did in 1800. Not until opencast (strip) mining began in the second half of the twentieth century did the tonnage produced per miner really begin to rise steeply.
This is one reason that the coal industry, like all mining industries before and since, was characterised by dreadful working conditions tolerated only because of somewhat higher wages than could be got in farm labour. They were higher, at least initially, or else Scottish and Irish people would not have flocked to Tyneside in the nineteenth century. The wages of a coal hewer in the North-east of England were twice as high, and rising twice as fast, as those of a farm worker in the nineteenth century.
Without coal, innovation in England’s textile, iron and transport industry would have had to stagnate after 1800, when all that ferment of invention had as of yet had almost no effect on living standards. As the historian Tony Wrigley has put it: ‘Until almost the middle of the nineteenth century it was still reasonable to fear a fate for England similar to that which had overtaken Holland. Hence the prominence of the stationary state in the prognostications of the classical economists.’Wrigley made the case that it was the transition from an organic economy, which grew its own fuel, to a mineral economy, which mined it, that enabled Britain to escape stagnation. It was coal that gave the industrial revolution its surprising second wind, that kept the mills, forges and locomotives running, and that eventually fuelled the so-called second industrial revolution of the 1860s, when electricity, chemicals and telegraphs brought Europe unprecedented prosperity and global power. Coal gave Britain fuel equivalent to the output of fifteen million extra acres of forest to burn, an area nearly the size of Scotland. By 1870, the burning of coal in Britain was generating as many calories as would have been expended by 850 million labourers. It was as if each worker had twenty servants at his beck and call. The capacity of the country’s steam engines alone was equivalent to six million horses or forty million men, who would otherwise have eaten three times the entire wheat harvest. That is how much energy had been harnessed to the application of the division of labour. That is how impossible the task of Britain’s nineteenth-century miracle would have been without fossil fuels.
Now Lancashire could beat the world for both quality and price. In 1750, India’s muslins and calicoes were the envy of weavers everywhere. A century later, despite wages that were four or five times higher than in India, Lancashire was able to flood even India with cheap cotton cloth, some of it