Coal: Britain's Buried Advantage

Britain sat on large, accessible coal deposits, often close to rivers, coasts and growing towns. Wood was becoming scarce and expensive in parts of Britain by the 1600s, so households and industries such as brewing, glassmaking and salt-boiling had already switched to coal. That early coal industry created a problem and a solution: deeper mines flooded, which created demand for pumping engines, and those engines in turn burned cheap coal at the pithead. Economic historian E. A.

Wrigley described industrialization as an escape from the limits of an 'organic economy', where all energy came from plants and muscle, into a mineral-based energy economy. Coal provided vastly more energy than British woodlands ever could. Critics of coal-centered explanations note that other regions had coal too, so coal was necessary but not sufficient on its own.