As if to imprint on us the gravity of England's organic fuel shortage,
P reminds us, at one point, that the "British economy was already
using over 8,000,000 Kcal of coal-based energy per person in 1815,
before most of the boom in steam engines" (222). But isn't this a
clear indication that England was actually finding and using
inanimate sources of energy?
Having dealt already to some degree with this issue here and
elsewhere (the one obvious weak link in P's book which Vries and
others have pointed out) I just want to add that Britons were well
aware of the land-fuel constraints they were facing and, for complex
historical reasons, were able to find a technological solution to
those difficulties. If we look at the iron industry we will find that
already in the 17th century there serious efforts underway to use
coal as a fuel for smelting iron, and that in 1709 Abraham Darby
managed to use coke rather than charcoal. Here sinologists will
point out that, as early as the 11th century, the Chinese were
capable of smelting iron with coal. But, to me, this gives us
permission to ask the very question sinologists like Sivin feel we
should not ask but which Eric Jones says are legitimate: why "a
society that had achieved so much then passed so many centuries
without achieving it again?" (Jones, 1990). And, conversely, why
were discoveries like Darby's followed up in a sustained way during
the eighteenth century in England? Why did Henry Cort develop, in
1784, the "puddling" process for converting cast iron to wrought
iron using coal? - innovations which in the course of the 18th
century allowed iron production to grow by more than 10 times!
