Coal and Iron Ore: The Natural Resources Behind the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution was, in essence, an energy revolution. The dramatic expansion of British industry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was made possible by the exploitation of two natural resources, coal and iron ore, that together provided the cheap power and the raw materials for the new industrial economy. Although institutions, capital, and ideas all mattered, no serious account of the origins of industrialization can ignore the geography of coal and iron.

Coal as the Fuel of Industry

Coal was the lifeblood of the early Industrial Revolution. Before the widespread use of coal, the energy available to society was limited to the muscle power of humans and animals, supplemented by wood, water, and wind. Coal changed this by providing a dense, portable, and seemingly inexhaustible source of energy that could be used to power machines, smelt metals, and drive the new factories.

Britain was uniquely well endowed with coal. The coal seams of Northumberland, Durham, South Wales, Yorkshire, the Midlands, and Scotland were extensive, easily accessible, and located near ports and rivers, which made transport relatively cheap. By 1800, Britain was producing about 80 percent of the world’s coal, and this dominance in coal production gave it a decisive advantage over potential industrial rivals.

From the late seventeenth century onward, coal was used for domestic heating in British cities, fueling both household wealth and the early awareness of urban air pollution. In industry, coal was used to fire the early steam engines, which were originally designed to pump water out of coal mines. The development of a practical steam engine by Thomas Newcomen in 1712 and the great improvements made by James Watt in the 1760s and 1770s were directly tied to the problem of pumping water from coal mines, and the engines they produced were first used in coal mining and the industries that supplied it.

As the technology improved, steam engines powered by coal began to drive machinery in textile mills, ironworks, and other factories, freeing production from the limitations of water power. By the 1820s, coal was also being used to power the new steam locomotives, which together with the new railways created a self-reinforcing cycle: more coal to power more trains, more trains to carry more coal.

Iron Ore and the Iron Industry

Iron was the second critical resource. Industrialization required iron in huge quantities, for machines, tools, bridges, ships, rails, and buildings. In the early eighteenth century, however, British iron production was small and expensive, limited by the fact that the only fuel capable of smelting iron was charcoal, which was in increasingly short supply as Britain’s forests were cut down.

The breakthrough came in 1709, when Abraham Darby, a Quaker ironmaster at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, succeeded in smelting iron using coke made from coal. Darby’s discovery gradually spread through the British iron industry, and by the late eighteenth century, coke-smelted iron was the norm. The new technique produced iron more cheaply and in larger quantities than had been possible before, and the geography of the industry shifted toward coalfields, especially those of South Wales, the West Midlands, and the Scottish Lowlands.

The combination of coal and iron ore in these regions created powerful industrial clusters. In South Wales, for example, coal from the valleys was used to smelt iron ore brought in by sea from Cornwall and later from abroad, and the resulting iron was used to build bridges, ships, and railways. In the West Midlands, particularly Birmingham and the Black Country, a dense network of small ironworks produced a huge variety of iron goods, from nails and chains to steam engines and machine tools. The Scottish iron industry, centered on Carron and later Coatbridge, similarly combined local coal with imported iron ore to produce ordnance, ships, and locomotives.

Geography and Industrial Location

The geography of coal and iron ore helps to explain the location of British industry. Lancashire, with its moist climate, became the center of cotton spinning not because of local coal, but because it had easy access to the coal of South Lancashire and the Wirral. The woolen industry of the West Riding of Yorkshire was located near the coalfields of the region. The pottery industry of Staffordshire was powered by local coal. The iron industry of the Black Country developed near the South Staffordshire coalfield.

Coal and iron also shaped the geography of transportation. Canals were built in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to carry coal and iron ore from the mines and quarries to the cities and ports. The Bridgewater Canal, opened in 1761, was originally designed to carry coal from the Duke of Bridgewater’s mines at Worsley into Manchester, and it became a model for the canal-building mania that followed. The first railways were also primarily designed to carry coal, and it was in the transport of coal that steam locomotives first proved their value.

Limits of Resource Explanations

It would be a mistake, however, to attribute the Industrial Revolution entirely to the availability of coal and iron. Other countries had coal. China had vast coal deposits, as did Germany and the United States. The decisive British advantage lay not in having these resources but in being able to exploit them first, thanks to a combination of institutions, skills, capital, and demand. Coal and iron were necessary conditions for industrialization, but they were not sufficient.

Moreover, Britain’s coal resources, though abundant, were not unlimited. By the late nineteenth century, the easily accessible seams were beginning to be worked out, and British industry was facing competition from coal producers in Germany, the United States, and elsewhere. The long-term exhaustion of Britain’s coal reserves was one of the reasons why British industrial leadership gradually passed to the United States and Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Coal, Iron, and the Environment

The story of coal and iron in the Industrial Revolution is also a story of environmental change. Coal mining scarred the landscape, slag heaps from ironworks dotted the industrial regions, and the burning of coal produced the air pollution that gave industrial cities like Manchester, Sheffield, and Stoke-on-Trent their distinctive smoky atmosphere. Soot-blackened buildings, acid rain, and the characteristic coal-smoke fogs of the late nineteenth century were all direct consequences of dependence on coal.

The environmental consequences of coal use in the Industrial Revolution are particularly relevant today. The carbon dioxide released by burning coal since the late eighteenth century is the principal reason for the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the debate over climate change is in many ways a debate about how to manage the legacy of the energy choices made by the first generation of industrial capitalists.

The Continuing Question

The unresolved question about coal and iron in the British Industrial Revolution is the one raised in the “why Britain” debate. The traditional answer, going back to the 19th-century Whig historians and given its modern form in the work of T. S. Ashton and of Robert A. Church, is that British coal and iron ore reserves were exceptional in their combination: abundant coal, often close to iron ore, often close to water transport, often close to skilled labor. The revisionist answer, given its most influential modern form in Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence (2000), is that the resource story is not enough: the Yangzi delta in 1800 had comparable or better coal and iron resources, comparable or better agricultural productivity, comparable or better commercial infrastructure, and yet did not industrialize. The interesting current question, raised in Robert Allen’s “Why England?” essays and developed in the comparative work of Stephen Broadberry, is what combination of factors (wages, prices, energy costs, institutions, demand) gave the British a sustained advantage in adopting and improving the new technologies. The honest answer, given the comparative data, is probably: British wages were high relative to energy costs in the 1780s-1810s, creating a stronger incentive to substitute coal for labor; British patent and property-rights institutions were unusually good at the time; and the British state was unusually effective at protecting shipping lanes and at opening export markets. The resource story is part of the explanation, but it is not the whole story, and the unresolved question is the relative weight of the three.

Selected Sources

Robert A. Church, The History of the British Coal Industry, vol. 3 (1986).
John Kanefsky and Jonathan Robey, Steam Engines in 18th Century Britain: A Quantitative Assessment (1980).
Michael W. Flinn, The History of the British Coal Industry, vol. 2 (1984).
T.S. Ashton and J. Sykes, The Coal Industry of the Eighteenth Century (1929).