Energy and the English Industrial Revolution

This is an incredibly eloquent and well organized view of the demographic changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom. In many ways it is the "missing link" that economists - who hand-wave shamelessly about the demographic transition - need to read. As do environmental and climate scientists who are concerned about energy and climate change. A masterly piece of scholarship that needs to be read by a broader scientific audience.

Connects well to content and information about the rise of the industrial revolution (or perhaps the idea of an evolution taking place over time) with that of theorist Adam Smith and his observations in Wealth of Nations. Highly recommended for anyone with interests in technological determinism and the history of energy more broadly.

a++

I’ve made a strong case in my book “When trucks stop running” and the energyskeptic website that we will eventually return to wood and a 14th century lifestyle after fossil fuels are depleted. So if you’re curious about what that lifestyle will be like, and how coal changed everything, this is the book for you. One point stressed several times is that in all organic economies a steady state exists. Or as economists put it, that there were just three “components essential in all material production; capital, labor, and land. The first two could be expanded as necessary to match increased demand, but the third could not, and rising pressure on this inflexible resource arrested growth and depressed the return to capital and the reward of labor.” Then along came coal (and today oil and natural gas), which for a few centuries removed land as a limiting factor (though we’re awfully close the Malthusian limits as well, population is growing, cropland is shrinking as development builds over the best farm land near cities, which exist where they do because that was good crop land). In today’s world, energy set the limits to growth, but in the future land once again will. So will the quality of roads, how many forests exist whose wood can be gotten to towns and cities, and so on. So if you’re in a transition town group or in other ways trying to make the future better, perhaps this book will give you some ideas. If this world is too painful to contemplate, read some books about the Amish, which would be an ideal society for me minus the religious side of it.

Mr. Wrigley has written a very impressive book on the English industrial revolution. Actually this book is a trailblazer for economic history and the importance of energy and energy development in economic growth. Mr. Wrigley begins with the concept of an organic economy. In the organic economy land is the source of all food, natural resources, and energy. Quoting Mr. Wrigley "All industrial production depended vegetable or animal raw materials. This is self-evidently true of industries such as woollen textile production or shoemaking but is also true of iron smelting or pottery manufacturing, although their raw materials were mineral, since production was possible by making use of a source of heat and this came from burning wood or charcoal. Thus the production horizon for all organic economies was set by the annual cycle of plant growth." The amount of energy absorbed by plants from the sun from photosynthesis set the ceiling for productive capacity. Thus economic production was limited. Most people lived in squalor and poverty without luxuries or much medical care. When populations grew living standards fell due to the production constraint. Then malnutrition and disease reduced population to a supportable level. The English industrial revolution, by developing the coal industry, and obtaining greater and greater quantities of energy from coal broke free from the constraint of plant growth and escaped the organic economy. From greater quantities of energy it was possible to build better transportation, develop new industries, and provide better lives for the populace. Low cost and available coal energy made possible the steam engine, the railroad, and many other labor saving innovations. These inventions made more goods available to the population and further improved the lives of the population. Interestingly, the escape from the organic economy remained unseen by the Classical economists. Classical economists Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus all accepted as the given the constraints of the organic economy. Thus the limits set by the supply of land figured in the economic models of all these economists. It was only later that economists did not accept land as a severely limiting constraint on production. It is to the credit of Mr. Wrigley that he describes the Classical economist's theories with respect to land and energy in some detail. Mr. Wrigley goes into great detail on the English population statistics and demonstrates how the rising quantities of energy coincided with the growth of the new industrial cities and the capital London. He demonstrates that increasing non-plant based energy supplies were a necessary condition for industrial growth and rising living standards. He details the revolutions in the transport and consumer goods industries. In essence Mr. Wrigley has done excellent service in debunking the eco freak argument that hydrocarbon and nuclear energy are bad and the world can rely solely of renewable energy. The solar and wind based renewable energy are very much dependent on the solar output and solar induced air wind streams. Thus hydrocarbon fuels and nuclear fuels such as uranium and thorium are the only real sources of human development and prosperity. I took off one star from this book, however, for two reasons. One reason is that Mr. Wrigley complacently accepts the anthropogenic global warming hoax involving carbon based fuels. This false theory is propounded by politicized global elitists and has been refuted by genuine scientific data. The second reason is that Mr. Wrigley ignorantly assumes that hydrocarbon fuels come solely from degenerated plant and animal life. This theory has been rigorously refuted by Thomas Gold in this book The Deep Hot Biosphere : The Myth of Fossil Fuels . Notice that other planets such Saturn"s moon Titan have extensive hydrocarbon fuel surface deposits without a history of plant and animal life.

When people use the term "magisterial", this is the kind of book they mean. It is an education in how to use data and statistical analysis to evaluate a variety of simultaneously shifting social dynamics. But what makes this book important is not the rethinking of the Industrial Revolution it provokes, but the profound question it forces on the reader about whether it is possible for a society like ours to live "organically" again in the aftermath of the fossil fuel explosion this book narrates. I came away from reading this book more pessimistic about our prospects than from 50 books I have read on climate change, etc.

Let me save you the trouble of struggling through this book. The main point is that prior to the industrial revolution, the economy was based solely on what value could be gotten from the land. That meant that if you wanted to make high-energy resources like metal or glass, you had to devote some significant land to making firewood. If you wanted to support giant populations, you needed to devote more to food. Land used for food can't be used for firewood simultaneously, so the pre-industrial revolution economy was limited by the amount of resources that could be gotten from the land. Enter coal. Coal allowed us to use energy stored long ago to propel our economy beyond the limits of the land. It entirely changed the way the economy operated, and was the reason that so many inventions from cities, to mass manufacturing, to mass transportation became possible. This would be a great book if it had a great editor. As written, it is a chore to wade through, and doesn't provide enough payoff for the effort in my opinion.

As the title conveys the book concentrated upon energy sources utilised during the Industrial Revolution, which were very comprehensivelly dealt with. This covered a wide range of energy sources from the use of horses and human energy, to energy from coal utilising steam power. The style adopted was eminently readable, and was comprehensive and informative.