Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain

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About three quarters of the way through Extractive Capitalism she does explain that “two of the major gains that drove the transition to fossil energy are its capacities for saving time and speeding transport across space” (144) — very general “capacities” that seem related only to business. The major sign of the book’s ambition is her claim that “novels that might not seem to be about extraction, such as The Mill on the Floss and News from Nowhere, emerge as extractive literature when placed in the context of environmental history and considered from the standpoint of genre” (22). We're always happy to answer any questions or queries you might have, please get in touch using one of the methods below. One particularly skewed part of aspect of Extraction Technologies appears in its continual, in fact relentless, emphasis on “extractive capitalism. In former mining areas, the young sometimes had little to do: in one Welsh village, the authors say, they could be found smoking dope and drinking cider while sitting on the ‘dole wall’ behind the bus station.

And then we come to the most dreadful woman in Britain's political history and her brutal vindictive and duplicitous behaviour is starkly brought into the light. Coal meant that ships became faster and better protected than they had been previously (the coal itself sometimes stopped projectiles), though one drawback was that they needed to put in at coaling stations, which meant that their movements were more predictable to enemy ships and also that their crews spent more time ashore. Here are two very different kinds of books about the extraction of coal — that is, mining — but both agree, as Paxman says, that “the history of its extraction is the story of Britain. As is quoted here, Heseltine opined that all he had done was shut down a dirty, dangerous industry and there is some truth to that I think.In my youth I didn't understand politics or sociology and was an immensely privileged, obnoxious right winger who was firmly on the side of the government in that struggle. Ridley – a drawling, aristocratic right-winger – was a pantomime villain for the Left, but he was never a particularly important figure in government. It wasn't an exhaustive history and some aspects were dwelt on for longer than others - naval developments had much more coverage than railways and I was surprised that the traditional birthplace of the industrial revolution in Shropshire didn't get much of a mention. Its history is one of humans and humanity, of a primeval struggle that encompasses enterprise, politics, religion, ingenuity, excitement and toil.

Similarly, she convincingly argues that “in the widespread debate about coal exhaustion in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, speculative fiction came to depict energy transition as a source of social transformation” (150). If you already know British history then some of the information won't be new to you, but it gains new context here, demonstrating how coal, this dirty rock which caused so much human misery and polluted the environment, was a vitally important factor in the development of the country. The history spans the opening of the first coal mines and finishes with the decline of the industry. Jeremy Paxman is equally good on the horrors of the work (the death toll was horrific, not just the disasters that killed hundreds in a single explosion, but the tens of thousands who died in smaller incidents), the immense wealth that came to those fortunate landowners who happened to find that they were sitting on mineral riches beyond their wildest dreams with barely any effort on their part, the technological innovation that coal powered steam stimulated, and the long-term mismanagement of the industry both before and after nationalisation in 1947.

Jeremy Paxman tells the story of coal mining in England, Scotland and Wales from Roman times, through the birth of steam power to war, nationalisation, pea-souper smogs, industrial strife and the picket lines of the Miner’s Strike. He is critical of Arthur Scargill while acknowledging that his claim that the government planned to close a great many pits - derided and disbelieved at the time including by Paxman- turned out to be completely true. I don’t find that the absent or non-existent treasure in the “empty” pit in Treasure Island is “exhausted” or that it “explodes the fantasy of open-handed nature” (110), nor do I find convincing that Nostromo, a novel in which a supposedly exhausted mine turns out to be rich in silver, fits her scheme, in large part because of the book’s emphasis upon its protagonist and Decoud. The book ends with a long section explaining the complex rise and fall of miners’s unions, and the relationships among mine owners, miners, and the British government. Although all her readings of individual novels are both interesting and point to aspects of the books in question that others may not have noticed, they do not always convince and too often appear to depend upon peripheral or minor points.

Perhaps it is, as readers of Paxman’s book might conclude, because it was so closely tied to Britain’s status as a great power and because so many British people still feel a half-guilty regret about the loss of that status. There are quite a few mining accidents mentioned in the book, especially those that led to new laws and reform. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. Mining in general, and coal mining in particular is one of those subjects that somehow fascinates me for reasons I don't clearly understand.It came to loom large in the collective imagination of the Left, and I suspect that the number of historians working on this single event is now greater than the number working on all other aspects of the history of British mining. Boris Johnson’s sardonic reference to Margaret Thatcher’s “big early start” towards renewable energy has come at the perfect time for Jeremy Paxman’s Black Gold, a history of how Britain industrialised, modernised and thrived. He has also written many books including the best-selling The English, On Royalty and Friends in High Places.