The basic pattern of civilization over the past ten thousand years has been relatively simple: begin farming, and as the act of farming makes future farming impossible because of its ecological consequences, expand into neighboring territories. In “The Age of Exuberance,” we discussed how this pattern had set the large-scale narrative of European history. By Plato’s time, Greece was already beginning to fail agriculturally. By the fifth century, Europe had run out of lands to expand into, resulting in the collapse of the Roman Empire. Throughout the High Middle Ages, populations were balanced against famine and plague, until Columbus’ discovery resulted in an “age of exuberance,” that came with new lands to expand into and cultivate.

While the colonists themselves reaped much of the nutritional advantages of the New World and healthy soil, the intended purpose of the colonial enterprise was to move the wealth of the New World back into the Old. Populations in Europe also boomed, supported by imports from the New World, and New World crops that could grow in the Old (like potatoes in Ireland).

The problem I’ve glibly labeled “peak wood” brought down many ancient civilizations. These timber crises are very similar to the current “peak oil” theory in several ways. Forests still existed in all cases, but they were increasingly far away, and the energy cost of going out that far, chopping down the trees, and dragging them back to the nearest population centers, outweighed the energy the wood provided as a fuel. This is what happened to Cahokia, and at the end of the Bronze Age, and many other times throughout history. Sixteenth century Europe began to face a similar timber crisis, but where other civilizations had collapsed, Europe in general—and Britain in particular—had an alternative available. Though inferior, as the cost of timber rose, it became increasingly attractive.

Coal was used in the Middle Ages by blacksmiths, but few others; the black fumes were readily recognized even before the Industrial Revolution as an intolerable annoyance.

From the earliest times there was considerable prejudice against coal because of the black smoke and fumes that it caused, especially since domestic medieval fires tended to be open affairs. In 1257 Queen Eleanor was driven from Nottingham Castle by the smoke and fumes rising from coal fires in the city below (there was a coal mine within a few miles of the city). In 1283 and 1288 there were complaints about air quality in London because coal was now being used in lime-kilns. In 1307, a Royal Proclamation forbade lime-burners to use coal in parts of south London:

An intolerable smell diffuses itself throughout the neighboring places, and the air is greatly infected, to the annoyance of the magnates, citizens, and others there dwelling and to the injury of their bodily health.

This proclamation did not work, and a later “commission of oyer and terminer” had instructions to punish offenders “with great fines and ransoms” for a first offence, and to demolish their furnaces for a second offence. Economics won out over comfort, however, and London was to remain polluted by coal fumes for another 600 years. Shakespeare’s Master Seacole was grubby and dirty, and Queen Elizabeth once stayed away from London because of the “noysomme smells” of coal smoke. The London Company of Brewers, sensitive to the Queen’s displeasure, offered to burn wood rather than sea-coal in their breweries close to the Palace of Westminster, since the Queen was “greately greaved and annoyed with the taste and smoke of the sea-cooles.”¹

The price of timber vs. coal in London, 1400-1800 CE. From Allen, 2006. [PDF]

As timber prices continued to rise, the price of coal remained constant, making the transition impossible to avoid. The reprecussions of the new type of fuel would be vast.

Throughout most of civilized history, the ruthless economics of overpopulation meant that labor was cheaper than fuel. Timber crises were common, and overpopulation was endemic, so the economic atmosphere actually opposed technological innovation. After all, that would consume a limited resource (fuel), in order to save an abundant resource (manual labor). With the shift from timber to coal, part of this equation began to change. The other part was the high cost of labor in London, even though it had an enormous population. The key lay in the basis of that population in international trade from its New World colonies.

In pre-industrial Europe, real wages moved inversely to the population. … [T]he real wage rose in Britain and Italy after the Black Death of 1348/9, which cut the population by about one third. As population growth resumed, the real wage fell in most of Europe between the fifteenth century and the eighteenth. The Low Countries were an important exception to this trend. Real wages fell in rural England in the sixteenth century, but London bucked the trend in the same way as Antwerp and Amsterdam, and, indeed, as we have seen, living standards rose generally in southern England from 1650 onwards. Why were England and the Low Countries successful?

The superior real wage performance of northwestern Europe was due to a boom in international trade. The English boom began with the export of ‘new draperies’ in the late sixteenth century. These were light woolen clothes made in East Anglia and exported to the Mediterranean through London. Between 1500 and 1600, the population of London grew from about 50,000 to 200,000 in response to the trade-induced growth in labour demand. During the Commonwealth, Cromwell initiated an active imperial policy, and it was continued through the eighteenth century. In a mercantilist age, imperialism was necessary to expand trade, and greater trade led to urbanization. Between 1600 and 1700, London’s population doubled again, and by 1800 it approached one million. In the eighteenth century, urbanization picked up throughout England as colonial trade increased and manufacturing oriented to colonial markets expanded. Between 1500 and 1800, the fraction of the English population living in settlements of more than 10,000 people increased from 7% to 29%. The share of the workforce in agriculture dropped from about 75% to 35%. Only the Low Countries, whose economies were also oriented to international trade, experienced similarly sweeping structural transformations. In the eighteenth century, the Dutch and the English had much more trade per capita than other countries in Europe.²

The Industrial Revolution occured in Britain because, for the first time, it was human life that was expensive, and fuel that was cheap. That combination meant that for the first time, technological innovation was worthwhile, and the Industrial Revolution—indeed, the entire technophilic mindset—followed from this unique constellation of factors. The goal of the Industrial Revolution was, as much as possible, to replace expensive workers with inexpensive machines. The notorious working and environmental conditions of the Industrial Revolution followed naturally from its premise.

Britain’s success led to an era of global domination, largely through trade. This also put the pressure on the rest of the world to “catch up” with Britain as an industrial power. The cities of the northeast in the United States, for instance, made a very successful move towards industrialization because they, too, had cheap fuel and a large, expensive work force based in cities. In the American South, the situation was different. The growing sociological tension eventually led to the United States Civil War, much more than any of the moral causes later attributed to it.

The so-called “Second Industrial Revolution” began as other countries joined in the Industrial Revolution, generally dated to about 1865-1900. It coincides closely with the “New Imperialism” that began after the Franco-Prussian War, dated to about 1871-1914. During this period, the corporation began to take center stage. Amalgamation of industries in Britain occured while the Fourteenth Ammendment was used in the United States to establish corporate “personhood.” At the same time, the breakdown of Britain’s economic hegemony led to the greatest consolidation of global land area under a minmum number of governing bodies the world has ever since: the “Great Game” in Central Asia, the “Scramble for Africa,” and other initiatives in which European powers conquered most of the globe.

One of the specific causes for the race for colonies had to do with the changing nature of military and trading vessels. Steamships were replacing wooden ships with sails during the course of the nineteenth century. These ships ran on coal which fueled the furnaces, which in turn boiled water needed for steam power. The problem was that ships could only store a certain amount of coal in their cargo holds. Thus, the need for coal refueling stations along trade routes became indispensable. In addition to pursuing colonies for raw materials, European nations began to selectively impose their will over nations that could provide convenient refueling stations or military bases. The use of Pacific Islands for these stations and bases is a good example.³

Jules Ferry, twice prime minister of France during this period (1880-1881, 1883-1885), gave a speech in which he addressed frankly why this great scramble for colonies took place:

At present, as you know, a warship, however perfect its design, cannot carry more than two weeks’ supply of coal; and a vessel without coal is a wreck on the high seas, abandoned to the first occupier. Hence the need to have places of supply, shelters, ports for defense and provisioning…. And that is why we needed Tunisia; that is why we needed Saigon and Indochina; that is why we need Madagascar… and why we shall never leave them! … Gentlemen, in Europe such as it is today, in this competition of the many rivals we see rising up around us, some by military or naval improvements, others by the prodigious development of a constantly growing population; in a Europe, or rather in a universe thus constituted, a policy of withdrawal or abstention is simply the high road to decadence! In our time nations are great only through the activity they deploy; it is not by spreading the peaceable light of their institutions … that they are great, in the present day.⁴

At the age pf 47 as an up-and-coming politician, Winston Churchill became the First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. Churchill appealed to the same logic as Ferry, and suggested shifting the Royal Navy from coal, to petroleum.

As a coal ship used up her coal, increasingly large numbers of men had to be taken, if necessary from the guns, to shovel the coal from remote and inconvenient bunkers to bunkers nearer the to the furnaces or to the furnaces themselves, thus weakening the fighting efficiency of the ship perhaps at the msot crucial moment in the battle. . . . The use of oil made it possible in every type of vessel to have more gun-power and more speed for less size or less cost.⁵

Churchill organized the purchase of a controlling government share in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, founded around William Knox D’Arcy’s discovery of oil in Iran, the first major oil find in the Middle East. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company eventually become British Petroleum, or “BP.” Of course, while Britain still had supplies of coal, it did not have significant supplies of petroleum, so Britain would have to maintain a flow of petroleum from other countries—like Iran.

Yet the changing situation for coal production in Europe was beginning to have an effect. The United States had surpassed Britain in coal production by a full million tons per annum by 1900, while Belgium’s coal seams were being exhausted by the end of the 19th century, forcing them to import coal from the Ruhr Valley. Most of Europe’s coal production would not peak until the second half of the twentieth century, but Churchill’s switch over to petroleum would precipitate a rearrangement of global powers away from the vast, territorial, coal-burning empires, to the more fluid petro-powers we know today.

The great land grab of the “New Imperialism” left Europe enmeshed in a fragile web of alliances, a particularly precarious kind of international complexity prone to severe collapse. That is precisely what happened with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Yet other, more basic material concerns, certainly hung in the background. Despite the distinctly eastern European origin of the conflict, the main combatants were Britain and Germany. At the time, Germany was constructing the Berlin-Baghdad Railway with the Ottoman Empire, connecting the famous Orient Express with the Constantinople-Baghdad line, and allow Germany access to the Persian Gulf—and the Persian oil that now fueled the British Navy. Many historians, have argued that the rising tensions between Germany and Britain over the railway had much more to do with the outbreak of World War I than the excuse both sides found for open conflict in backing their respective eastern European allies. As soon as the Ottoman Empire entered the war in November 1914, an Anglo-Indian force siezed Basra in a pre-emptive strike to secure Britain’s oil supply.

Yet beyond the proximate causes, even contemporaries noted the importance of coal. William Notz wrote in The Journal of Political Economy in June 1918:

The coal industry is the basic industry most closely connected with the present war. To both the Allies and the Central Powers their respective available coal resources constitute a sine qua non for carrying on the war, while in the period of reconstruction after the war coal will unquestionably become one of the most vital factors in determining industrial expansion and the growth of international trade.

World War I ended less for military reasons, than for the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 that decimated all sides. Amongst other general burdens placed on Germany, the Versailles Treaty took a decided interest in how coal supplies were divided. Redrawn boundaries deprived Germany of 27% of its coal supplies, and demanded coal exports from Germany so great that it would not allow Germany to meet its own energy needs. It also put a final end to the Berlin-Baghdad Railway, but the British used some of it to construct a railway from Baghdad to their refurbished port at Basra.

More than a conflict unto itself, World War II addressed the casus belli left unfinished by the abrupt, epidemiological end of the “War to End All Wars.” In Germany, the Fischer-Tropsch used substantial amounts of coal to produce liquid fuel. In Japan, oil was the most crucial limited resource. Over 80% of Japan’s oil came from the United States, which the United States began to embargo. Japanese planners began looking to the Dutch East Indies as a supply of oil—though it was sure to bring the United States into the war. It was decided that a quick strike on Pearl Harbor could eliminate the Pacific Fleet in one stroke, push America far enough that they would stay out of the war, and open the way up to the Dutch East Indies. It was a long shot, but with Japan’s oil supply dwindling, the alternative was the collapse of the empire. On 7 December 1941, they made their attack, and the United States entered the war.

Oil had emerged as a key strategic consideration in post-World War I British policy on Iraq as the British navy shifted from coal to oil power. The British rushed troops to Mosul in 1918 to gain control of the northern oil fields. Britain and France clashed over Iraq’s oil during the Versailles Conference and after, with Britain eventually taking the lion’s share by turning its military occupation into colonial rule. ⁶

When World War II was over, most of the European colonies had declared their independence, of would over the next ten years. Britain’s shifting dependence from its own coal mines to the oil fields of other countries put them in a position where they could no longer maintain dominion over their colonies. In actual fact, even the “New Imperialism” was largely a sign of Britain’s weakness, and the force it needed to compete with other industrializing powers. During World War II, Britain was forced to compromise with Indian factions fighting for independence, leading to a cascade of freed colonies. The borders of the newly-independent countries were often drawn with the long-term interests of European powers in mind. For instance, the borders of Iraq were drawn deliberately to avoid any true nationalism from emerging, and to keep a small, Sunni elite surrounded by hostile neighbors to the north and south (but who would still not identify with each other—in this case, Kurds to the north and Shi’ites to the south). Thus, the key to Iraq’s continued existence would be a strongman in Baghdad, who would need British support, and would thus ensure the continued export of oil to the west. Removing the strongman would be like puliing the pin from a grenade. (See “The Nature of Empire“)

Catton saw the transition to petroleum in the same terms of “exuberance” that set the pattern for all of post-Columbian Western history, writing in chapter 3 of Overshoot:

After World War II, for one more generation, people in many parts of the world would act from the illusion that the world’s less fortunate could reap the benefits of an age of neo-exuberance by creating new nations in areas formerly held as colonies by one European power or another. But terminating colonialism could not renew limitlessness. Both imperialism and the subsequent graduation of the earliest and richest colonial components of empires into the status of new nations had been results, not causes, of the age of surplus carrying capacity.

Of course, much of the need for a far-reaching empire had also passed. Coal had been superseded by petroleum, and the needs of politcal power had shifted with them. The British Empire fell apart, and instead, the United States—where the first major oil finds had been discovered—rose to prominence. The U.S., too, had relied on coal during the “Second Industrial Revolution,” but by World War II, the shift to petroleum was complete, and with that shift came American domination. Some of the first oil wells were discovered in Pennsylvania, and the first major oil region was Texas. Later, we would discover even larger reserves in the Middle East, but by then, the “petrodollar” had already become the currency of oil exchange, and United States oil companies dominated the industry. They had the technology to exploit those wells, and so Middle Eastern supplies still primarily meant American affluence and power. When the world switched from coal to oil, it likewise switched from Britain to the United States.

United States’ energy use by fuel type, 1650-2000

Of course, there was another country to emerge from World War II with significant oil reserves of its own, one we have so far neglected conspicuously: the Soviet Union. In the next article in this series, we’ll go in-depth into the economic history of the USSR, and chart its rise and fall in terms of oil.