Sir Edward Anthony Wrigley is a renowned historian primarily working on the demographical history of England between 1550 and 1900. His new book, The Path to Sustained Growth, emphasizes the importance of exploiting coal as a new energy source in the Industrial Revolution. His thesis is that “the possibility of bringing about an industrial revolution depended on gaining access to a different source of energy” (p. 3). In other words, the Industrial Revolution would not have happened in England if England did not have access to cheap coal. An informative account, Wrigley’s book strives to demonstrate that many aspects of the economy—population, agriculture, urbanization, energy, and transportation—were interconnected and affected by each other. However, it does not live up to the promises made in the Introduction and does not convincingly prove that coal was a primary driving force of it all.
Economic historians of many generations have debated the importance of coal in the Industrial Revolution. Coal and the steam engine are symbols of the Industrial Revolution in classical narratives as well as in the public consciousness. Many studies since 1980 give coal only a minor role. However, some studies, most noticeably those by Kenneth Pomeranz and Robert Allen, still put coal front and center. Pomeranz (Reference Pomeranz2000) argues that the fortunate location of coal in Britain, rather than differences in institutions, explains British success and Chinese failure. Allen (Reference Allen2009) argues that high wages combined with cheap coal gave huge economic incentives for an industrial revolution in Britain. Wrigley is also very much a coal partisan. He has emphasized the importance of coal in the Industrial Revolution in his past works, including Continuity, Chance and Change (1988), and more recently in Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (2010). The Path to Sustained Growth very much carries the same spirit.
As the title of the book suggests, what set the Industrial Revolution apart from all the previous historical events is that it led to sustained, exponential economic growth. Wrigley points out that sustained economic growth means ever-growing energy consumption. This is not hard to understand: greater output must come from greater input and energy consumption. According to Wrigley, pre-industrial economies were all “organic economies” whose energy consumption was largely constrained by the annual round of plant photosynthesis. Coal was a game changer. By using coal, people could tap into the stock of energy stored millions of years ago. The supply of coal was limitless, at least for that era, providing a basis for sustainable economic growth.
Wrigley further explains that the wide adoption of coal as a new energy source had two phases. In the first phase, which happened in England between 1600 and 1750, coal gradually replaced wood as the main source of heat energy. This, coupled with increasing agricultural productivity on both per acre and per head bases, helped to sustain urban growth in England. By the end of the first phase, England was unique in its high coal consumption, high overall energy consumption, and high level of urbanization. In the 1770s, the steam engine was invented to drain water from coal mines, which led to coal’s replacing animal and human muscles as the main source of mechanical energy. That profoundly changed manufacturing and transportation. The author regards the ability to derive mechanical energy from coal as the ultimate accomplishment of the Industrial Revolution.
The strongest point of the book is his careful documentation of changes in urbanization, demographics, and occupational structure in England from 1600 to 1850. Wrigley shows in chapter 3 that, compared with continental Europe, England experienced faster population growth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The faster growth was almost entirely due to remarkable and sustained growth in urban population (people living in towns with 5,000-plus inhabitants). Urban growth also meant there were more people working in secondary and tertiary sectors (chapter 4). Then, in chapters 6 and 8, the author uses hundred-level (a now-defunct administrative unit below county or shire and above parish) data to demonstrate that population growth was heavily concentrated in very few manufacturing hundreds; there was much migration from agricultural hundreds to manufacturing hundreds and retail trade and handicraft hundreds; and there was increasing spatial specialization of occupations. For economic historians on the economic side of the aisle, such quantitative evidence is convincing and thought-provoking, even if not all these changes were driven by or related to coal. His work shows that micro-level data in early English censuses are a rich mine, and it certainly invites more quantitative research using them.
As mentioned above, it is self-evident that coal played a big role in powering the Industrial Revolution. Therefore, to truly appreciate the importance of coal, we have to understand how coal affected the English economy before and during the Industrial Revolution. Granted, Wrigley documents the dramatic growth in the consumption of coal, its role in sustaining urbanization in England and in changing the industrial landscape and the population distribution of England from 1600 to 1850. But all of these can be driven by increased demand for coal rather than England’s possessing rich coal reserves or technological innovations in mining.
In fact, Wrigley suggests that labor productivity in coal mining did not increase from 1600 to 1900 (pp. 39–42). He also mentions that the use of coal as heat energy (the transition from wood to coal) involved no major innovation (p. 177). In his narrative, the invention of the steam engine and especially the steam locomotive was the crucial junction in the relationship of coal with the Industrial Revolution. It is at this point that one might hope for more evidence, and a more convincing argument. Coal has always been bulky and heavy. Why did it not precipitate the invention of the steam engine before the 1770s? If the transportation costs were high compared to the price of coal at pithead, and if other European countries without abundant coal could import it and quickly adopt the steam engine (chapter 9), does that not suggest that possessing natural resources such as coal is not essential for an industrial revolution?
It is certainly possible that coal played a major role in the earlier period before the invention of the steam engine. For example, coal might have influenced the direction of technological progress: having cheap coal might induce more coal-burning machinery. The book does not provide any evidence on that. Another way in which coal might have mattered was in sustaining the high level of urbanization; coal helped raise the overall income level in England. And high income might have given incentives to technological progress and an industrial revolution. But Wrigley does not entertain that Allenesque idea either.
We can all agree that when a society goes through an industrial revolution, it goes through a transition from being an organic economy to being an economy relying on fossil fuel. But the underlying driver of that transition may not be the possession of natural resources or the access to them, after all. Even if this book does achieve some of its goals, it ultimately falls short of showing that coal played a major standalone role in the English Industrial Revolution.
