Bibliography
Ball, Valentine, The diamonds, coal and gold of India (London, Trübner, 1881).
Barak, On, « Politique asymétrique du carbone à l’ère du charbon ottoman, 1820-1911 », in Charles-François Mathis and Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, Systèmes et transitions énergétiques. Les hommes et l’énergie du Moyen Âge à nos jours (Paris, Editions de la Sorbonne, forthcoming, 2019).
Briggs, Sir Asa, Victorian Things (Stroud, Sutton, 2003 (1st ed.1988)).
Brown, Benjamin H., The Tariff Reform Movement in Great Britain, 1881-1895 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1943).
Cavert, William, The Smoke of London. Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge, CUP, 2016).
Church, Roy, The History of the British Coal Industry. 1830-1913: Victorian Pre-eminence (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986).
Claeys, Gregory, “Utopianism”, in Gregory Claeys (ed.), Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Thought (London, Routledge, 2005).
Cook, Chris, The Routledge Companion to Britain in the 19th century (London, Routledge, 2005).
Cullingford, Benita, Chimneys and Chimney Sweeps (Oxford, Shire Publications, 2003).
Delumeau, Jean, La Peur en Occident (Paris, Fayard, 1978).
Howe, Anthony, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846-1946 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997).
Hunt, Tristram, Building Jerusalem. The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (London, Phoenix, 2005).
Jonsson, Fredrik Albritton, “Abundance and Scarcity in Geological Time 1784–1844” in Katrina Forester & Sophie Smith (eds.), Nature, Action and the Future: Political Thought and the Environment (Cambridge, CUP, forthcoming)
Kander, Astrid, Malanima, Paolo & Warde, Paul, Power to the People (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2013).
Kargon, Robert Hugh, Science in Victorian Manchester: Enterprise and Expertise (Manchester, MUP, 1977).
Lozé, Ed, Les Charbons Britanniques et leur Epuisement (Paris, Béranger, 1900).
Luckin, Bill, “Demographic, social and cultural parameters of environmental crisis: The great London smoke fogs”, in Christoph Bernhardt & Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud (eds.), Le Démon Moderne (Clermont-Ferrand, Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2002).
Maas, Harro, William Stanley Jevons and the Making of Modern Economics (Cambridge, CUP, 2005).
MacLeod, Roy, “Science for imperial efficiency and social change: reflections on the British Science Guild, 1905-1936”, Public Understanding of Science, 3:2, 1994, pp. 155-193.
Malm, Andreas, Fossil Capital. The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London/New York, Verso, 2016).
Marsh, Jan, Back to the Land (London, Quartet Books, 1982).
Mathis, Charles-François, « ‘Renverser le Roi Charbon’. Imaginer la transition énergétique en Grande-Bretagne, 1865-1914”, in Yves Bouvier & Léonard Laborie (eds.), L’Europe en transitions. Energie, mobilité, communication, xviiie – xxie siècles (Paris, Nouveau Monde, 2016), pp. 85-118.
Missemer, Antoine, Les Economistes et la Fin des Energies Fossiles (1865-1931) (Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2017).
Mitchell, Timothy, Carbon Democracy (New York, Verso, 2011).
Mosley, Stephen, The Chimney of the World (Cambridge, White Horse Press, 2001).
Sieferle, Rolf Peter, The Subterranean Forest (Cambridge, The White Horse Press, 2001).
Simonin, Louis, La Vie Souterraine : les Mines et les Mineurs (Paris, Hachette, 1867).
Supple, Barry, The History of the British Coal Industry. 1914-1946: the Political Economy of Decline (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987).
Thorsheim, Peter, Inventing Pollution. Coal, Smoke and Culture in Britain since 1800 (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2006).
Trentmann, Frank, Free Trade Nation: Consumption, Civil Society and Commerce in Modern Britain (Oxford, OUP, 2008).
Verne, Jules, Les Indes Noires (Paris, Hetzel, 1877).
Warde, Paul, “Low carbon futures and high carbon pasts: policy challenges in historical perspective”, History & Policy, 1 December 2010.
Warde, Paul, Energy Consumption in England & Wales, 1560-2004 (Naples, CNR, 2007).
Wrigley, E.A., Energy and the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, CUP, 2010).
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Notes
John Williams, The Natural History of the Mineral Kingdom (Edinburgh, Ruddiman, 1789), pp. 172-173.
Paul Warde, Energy Consumption in England & Wales, 1560-2004 (Naples, CNR, 2007).
E.A. Wrigley, Energy and the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, CUP, 2010).
William Cavert, The Smoke of London. Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge, CUP, 2016).
See Fredrik Albritton Jonsson “Abundance and Scarcity in Geological Time 1784–1844” in Katrina Forester and Sophie Smith (eds.), Nature, Action and the Future: Political Thought and the Environment (Cambridge, CUP, forthcoming). I also thank warmly Fredrik Albritton Jonsson for sharing some extracts of his on-going work on the issue of coal shortage on which the previous paragraph relies.
The Times, 31 October 1849, p. 4.
See Rolf Peter Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest (Cambridge, The White Horse Press, 2001), chapter V and p. 189.
Jean Delumeau, La Peur en Occident (Paris, Fayard, 1978), pp. 38-39.
Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question (London, MacMillan, 1865).
There are many studies on Jevons’s life and ideas. See for instance Harro Maas, William Stanley Jevons and the Making of Modern Economics (Cambridge, CUP, 2005). More recently, Antoine Missemer, in Les Economistes et la fin des Energies Fossiles (1865-1931) (Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2017), has brilliantly highlighted the originality of Jevons’s theories in the context of these worries about coal exhaustion in Britain.
Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question, op. cit., chapters I and XI.
The Times: “Editorial”, 13 June 1866, p. 8; “the coal question”, 26 June 1866, p. 12; “Letter to the editor; coal”, 27 August 1866, p. 12.The Economist, 6 January 1866. The Saturday Review, 16 June 1866. Quarterly Review, “The coal question”, April 1866, pp. 435-472.
Colliery Guardian, 24 February 1866.
Colliery Guardian, all through the year.
Colliery Guardian, 26 May 1866, pp. 386-87.
“The coal panic”, Colliery Guardian, 23 June 1866, pp. 464-465.
Sir Warrington Wilkinson Smyth, Treatise on Coal and Coal Mining (London, Lockwood & co., 1873 (3rd edition)), p. VII and p. 237.
Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the several matters relating to coal in the United Kingdom, General Report (London, HMSO, 1871), pp. XII-XIV.
Even though there was a form of rationality to the massive use of an abundant and powerful fuel like coal, such a shift away from more renewable sources of energy was not a necessity (see Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital (London, Verso, 2016) for instance): Britain became indeed addicted to coal in the sense that its dependence seemed to escape any form of control and was partly noxious (be it only on a sanitary level).
Roy Church, The History of the British Coal Industry. 1830-1913: Victorian Pre-eminence (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 48-62. With an index of 100 in 1900, prices went from 50 in 1870, to 75,4 in 1872, and 119,2 in 1873.
Select Committee on Dearness and Scarcity of Coal, Report (London, HMSO, 1873), p. IX.
Charles Mackay, “Old King Coal”, Illustrated London News, 1 January 1859, p. 12.
See for instance Leeds Mercury, 14 December 1866; The Preston Guardian, 5 April 1873; “Letters to the editor”, The Times, 19 October 1872.
Fun, 1 March 1873.
The phrase is used in the article “The coal famine”, The Freeman’s Journal, 26th February 1873, p. 5, avowedly taken from a letter written to the Pall Mall Gazette.
“The High Price of Coal. Meeting in Nottingham Market-Place”, The Nottinghamshire Guardian, 28 February 1873, p. 10.
“The High Price of Coal”, The Times, 1 April 1873, p. 7.
William Cavert, The Smoke of London, op. cit., chapter 7.
Bill Luckin has demonstrated that this was also the moment when more attention was given to atmospheric pollution, after the focus of previous years on water. See Bill Luckin, “Demographic, social and cultural parameters of environmental crisis: The great London smoke fogs”, in Christoph Bernhardt and Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud (eds.), Le Démon Moderne (Clermont-Ferrand, Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2002), pp. 219-238. Peter Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800 (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2006), chapter 5, also underlines the importance of the late 19th century in the changing attitudes to pollution and coal.
PM Gladstone first refused the idea of such a committee on the 7th of February 1873, to finally accept it under pressure from the House of Commons on the 21st.
Duke of Richmond, Hansard, House of Lords, 6 February 1873.
Select Committee on Dearness and Scarcity, Report (London, HMSO1873), pp. VII-XII.
Ibid., p. IX.
Leeds Mercury, 25 February 1873.
Mr Mundella, the MP who had proposed that the Committee be set up, or Mr Liddell, the MP who seconded the motion: Hansard, House of Commons, 21 February 1873
Mr Liddell, Hansard, House of Commons, 21 February 1873.
See for instance: The Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 24 September 1873, p. 3; “Dear Coal”, The Times, 29 September 1873, p. 11; “Dear Coal”, The Times, 7 October 1873, p. 7.
I have found no trace of such a committee in the archives I have consulted.
Sir Warrington Wilkinson Smyth, Treatise on Coal and Coal Mining, 1873 (3rd edition), p. VI.
William Rathbone Greg, “Rocks Ahead; or, The Warnings of Cassandra. Part II”, Contemporary Review, 24, June/November 1874, pp. 41-43.
Sir William Armstrong, “The Coal Supply”, Presidential Address to the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, A. Reid, 1873).
Fun, 1 March 1873, p. 92 and 26 December 1874, p. 14. “Coalinoor” is a pun about the “Koh-i-noor”, one of the biggest diamonds ever found, and one of the jewels of the crown.
The Spectator, 11 October 1873.
Antoine Missemer, Les Economistes et la Fin des Energies Fossiles (1865-1931), 2017, pp. 53-54.
Roy Church, The History of the British Coal Industry, p. 56.
See Peter Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution, op. cit., and Francis Albert Rollo Russell, London Fogs (London, Stanford, 1880).
Jan Marsh, Back to the Land (London, Quartet Books, 1982).
Charles-François Mathis, « ‘Renverser le Roi Charbon’. Imaginer la transition énergétique en Grande-Bretagne, 1865-1914 », in Yves Bouvier & Léonard Laborie (eds.), L’Europe en Transitions. Energie, Mobilité, Communication, xviiie – xxie siècles (Paris, Nouveau Monde, 2016), pp. 85-118.
See Gregory Claeys, “Utopianism”, in Gregory Claeys (ed.), Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Thought (London, Routledge, 2005), who distinguishes between dynamic and static (or frugal) utopias.
Henry Hussey Vivian, Hansard, House of Commons, 12 June 1866.
Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Consumption, Civil Society and Commerce in Modern Britain (Oxford, OUP, 2008).
William Ewart Gladstone to the Lord Provost of Glasgow, 22 February 1873, in Henry C. G. Matthew, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. VIII, July 1871-December 1874 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 290.
Roy Church, The History of the British Coal Industry. 1830-1913: Victorian Pre-eminence (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986), table 1.3, p. 19.
The Nottinghamshire Guardian, 7 March 1873.
The Nottinghamshire Guardian, 28 February 1873, p. 2.
“The Committee on Coal”, The Times, 1 April 1873, p. 7.
See for instance Benjamin H. Brown, The Tariff Reform Movement in Great Britain, 1881-1895 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1943), pp. 8-11; or Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846-1946 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 172-175. See also, for a contemporary comment: George Medley, The Reciprocity Craze (London, Cassell, 1881).
“The High Price of Coal and Provisions”, The Times, 26 September 1873, p. 8.
See Hansard, House of Commons, 14 February 1873, col. 469-471.
Sir Alfred Wallace, “Free Trade Principles and the Coal Question”, Daily News, 16 September 1873.
See for instance Tristram Hunt, Building Jerusalem. The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (London, Phoenix, 2005), chapter 8.
Antoine Missemer, Les Economistes et la fin des énergies fossiles, op. cit., p. 50.
Andreas Malm is working on a sequel to his book Fossil Capital , provisionally entitled Fossil Empire.
On Barak, « Politique asymétrique du carbone à l’ère du charbon ottoman, 1820-1911 », in Charles-François Mathis and Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, Systèmes et Transitions Energétiques. Les Hommes et l’Energie du Moyen Âge à nos jours (Paris, Editions de la Sorbonne, forthcoming, 2019).
Valentine B all, The diamonds, coal and gold of India (London, Trübner, 1881), p. 94.
The Times, 4 mars 1873; William Rathbone Greg, “Rocks Ahead”, art. cité. Sir Warrington Wilkinson Smyth, Treatise on Coal and Coal Mining, op. cit., p. 247 also describes a situation akin to such a paradox.
Sir William Armstrong, “The Coal Supply”, op. cit., p. 8.
Paul Warde, “Low carbon futures and high carbon pasts: policy challenges in historical perspective”, History & Policy, 1 December 2010. Online: http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/low-carbon-futures-and-high-carbon-pasts-policy-challenges-in-historical-pe. For a presentation of the technical and economic reasons for this diminishing trend, see also Astrid Kander, Paolo Malanima & Paul Warde, Power to the People (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 232-247.
“The coal famine. Economies and remedies”, The Engineer, 21 February 1873, p. 115.
Robert Hugh Kargon, Science in Victorian Manchester: Enterprise and Expertise (Manchester, MUP, 1977), p. 200.
The Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 20 April 1874, p. 6 mentions more than 50,000 visitors to the exhibition.
Sir Rowland Hill, “High Price of Coal. Suggestions for Neutralising its Evils”, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 36:4, 1873, pp. 565-579. The speech was actually read by Hill’s son in law. See also Sir Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Stroud, Sutton, 2003 (1st ed.1988)), pp. 269-271.
Quoted in The Alnwick Mercury, 1 March 1873.
It is true that it ignored the fact that Britain’s power depended on its comparative low coal prices on an international level.
Louis Simonin, La Vie Souterraine : lesMmines et les Mineurs (Paris, Hachette, 1867) ; Jules Verne, Les Indes Noires (Paris, Hetzel, 1877).
Ed Lozé, Les Charbons Britanniques et leur Epuisement (Paris, Béranger, 1900).
See Astrid Kander, Paolo Malanima and Paul Warde, Power to the People, op. cit., p. 274.
Benita Cullingford, Chimneys and Chimney Sweeps (Oxford, Shire Publications, 2003), p. 15-16.
820,000 people were employed in coal mines in 1900. Chris Cook, The Routledge Companion to Britain in the 19th century (London, Routledge, 2005), p. 208.
Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy (New York, Verso, 2011).
See for instance Stephen Mosley, The Chimney of the World (Cambridge, White Horse Press, 2001). Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital. The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London/New York, Verso, 2016), chapter 9 also insists on the fascination for coal and its power in the Victorian society.
Roy MacLeod, “Science for imperial efficiency and social change: reflections on the British Science Guild, 1905-1936”, Public Understanding of Science, 3/2, 1994, p. 166.
It appeared from 1922 to 1947.
See for instance Barry Supple, The History of the British Coal Industry. 1914-1946: the Political Economy of Decline (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987).
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