Carrying Coal to Newcastle:Energy, Environment and the American

Revolution

Dr. Steve NewtonDelaware State University

American Institute for History Education©2008; all rights reserves

An exercise in going beyond traditional narratives….

If you have ever heard the phrase, “Carrying coal to Newcastle,” do you know what it means?

It is the 17-18th Century English equivalent of “Selling ice to Eskimos,” but why?

And what could that possibly have to do with causing the American Revolution?

First: an Enduring Understanding

Civilization depends on energy, and from the Classical period forward to the 1500s, if you speak of energy, you are speaking of:

– Human energy– Animal energy– Wind energy– Water energy– …and--especially--Wood

Wood as an energy source

Throughout the ancient and medieval world, wood was used to

– Smelt copper, bronze, and iron– Fire pottery– Heat houses/cook food– Build ships

And while wood is a renewable resource, it is only slowly renewable

– One lime kiln firing in ancient Greece required 1,000 mule-loads of wood

– Fifty such kilns eat 6,000 metric tons wood/brush annually– Much of the story of the rise and fall of ancient kingdoms

can be traced by deforestation

Enter William, who Conquers

The famous Domesday Book is a tax accounting, and lists the possessions of 13,418 English settlements, as well as 7,800 forest areas

Saxon kings had maintained game preserves, but left peasants free to cut wood for fire and furniture

William’s Forest Law created the New Forests, which set aside as much as 25% of England’s land mass for the King’s exclusive use

Not only peasants (on penalty of impalement, or worse) but also barons were restricted from cutting wood without the King’s explicit permission

Afforestation represented a major transfer of wealth and power from nobles to king

Meanwhile, charcoal technology arrives…

During the 1100s, oven-dried charcoal becomes important, because it is lighter than wood and releases more energy (heat), and becomes in great demand in the emerging London

In 1189, Richard I begins a process of disafforesting by selling off tracts of the New Forest to woodmongers and charcoal dealers

In 1215, King John assents to the Magna Charta, which is as much about wood as anything else:

– “All forests that have been created in our reign shall be disafforested…. All evil customes relating to forests and forresters, warreners, sheriffs and their servants … are at once to be investigated in every county … and within forty days of their enquiry the evil customs are to be abolished….”

Yet the Magna Charta didn’t end the English energy crisis….

It merely replaced a royal monopoly with a commercial and baronial oligarchy, which in turn attempted to manipulate the supply of wood and charcoal for profit, resulting in….

Great swings between ample supply (low prices) and calculated shortages (high prices) that had a stranglehold on the economy, and especially the growth of London….

– London’s brewers and bakers alone consume 30,000 tons of firewood each year

– The total demand for London (pop. 80,000) was 140,000 tons of firewood each year

– Counties immediately surrounding the city were being deforested at a rate exceeding 10% per year

– Cost of wood rises 70% between 1260-1300– By 1300, London alone is consuming 70,000 acres of

firewood per year

But by 1400 demand for firewood in London had dropped to 44,000 acres/year

Even though population, commercial enterprises, and industry in the city were rapidly expanding

The answer is that while peasants were being driven from wood to peat moss as a fuel by the high prices, London was rapidly converting to a coal-based economy

From an original reliance on sea-coal, during the 11-1200s coal mining had begun in northeast England, on land controlled by the Church

This was so profitable a monopoly that the Prince-Bishops of Durham actually convened shadow parliaments, raised armies, and levied taxes

But England has a long tradition of mercantile challenges to clerical authority

… and by 1303 the Prince-Bishop of Durham was forced to start leasing key mines to wealthy speculators, even as a more serious rival emerged around Newcastle on the Tyne River….

The Hostmen of Newcastle was a coal cartel controlled by about a dozen key families that virtually monopolized the coal industry (and therefore England’s energy supply) for the next 450 years.

The Hostmen literally created the later-named concepts of vertical and horizontal integration, as well as originating the artificial energy shortage

How to build a monopoly…

1300s: Crown writs eliminate Church monopoly 1404: Hostmen recognized as official company 1483: Royal restrictions require charcoaled woodlands to

remain fallow 7 years; squeezing out charmongers 1500s: Hostmen control the overwhelming majority of keel-

boats and pilots on all England’s navigable streams (delivery monopoly)

1536: Dissolution of ecclesiastical power under Henry VIII allows Hostmen to move from lease to ownership of primary ore regions

1560-1590: Rise of Royal Navy leads to wood being sequestered for that purpose

1578: Elizabeth I cuts herself in for major coal leases while simultaneously placing new restrictions on cutting in forests

1600: Elizabeth I rewards Hostmen with a Royal Charter and virtually complete monopoly of coal

No power seemed able to break the monopoly….

1623: Parliament ended all monopolies … exempting only the Hostmen

1630s: As much as 10-15% of English coal production now going to France, Germany, Flanders

1637: Hostmen stave off cancellation of their charter by allowing King Charles an exclusive middleman contract to buy and resell their coal

1644: English Civil War finds Hostmen monopoly a major target of Cromwell, but in the aftermath all their leases and privileges are re-confirmed

1666: Coal taxed in wake of Great Fire of London, but Hostmen counter by drowning mines of emerging competitors and establishing way leaves

What ended the Hostmen monopoly?

Many historians point to the development of the steam engine

– Originally developed to pump water out of coal mines more efficiently

– Eventually leads to the development of railroads, which destroy the Hostmen monopoly on transport

But there is also a strong case to be made that the fatal wound to the monopoly derived not from technology, but from the North American colonies

Thinking about North America as an energy competitor is strange, but….

What North America offered was an apparently endless supply of wood, available in quantities so large as to make energy/fuel virtually free even to the poorest settlers

Abundance of wood energized– Ship-building industry– Thriving local crafts industry– Development of multiple economic centers

Although wood couldn’t be exported for fuel like coal (weight, bulk), the availability of low-cost energy

– Drew population and capital investment from England– Threatened the financial viability of the Hostmen monopoly

Now, think about the Navigation Acts

… and their re-emergence after the Seven Years War (1763-1775) as a heavy-handed attempt to maintain an energy-based monopoly for both the Crown and major investors

Regulations requiring goods to travel to and from England in English Hulls sought to devalue and marginalize colonial timber for shipping while further increasing wood shortages at home

Lists of enumerated goods were designed to protect the in-flow of capital to English merchants and craftsmen who had to purchase coal through the monopoly

Settlement restrictions (Proclamation of 1763) not only placed land off-limits to expansion, but further supplies of wood as well

Colonists tended to frame their responses to these measures in political terms….

But the environmental realities of British North America provide ample evidence of the underlying economic conflict….

Consider Francis Higginson, writing in New England in the late 1600s:

– Though it bee here somewhat cold in the winter, yet here we have plenty of Fire to warme us, and that a great deale cheaper then they sel Billets and Faggots in London; nay, all Europe is not able to afford so great Fires as New-England. A poor servant here that is to possesse but 50 Acres of land, may afford more wood for Timber and Fire as good as the world yeelds, then many Noble men in England can afford to do…. Here is good living for those that love good Fires.”

And, as references to colonial deforestation show….

The English settlers were more than willing to commit what amounted to strip-mining of trees.

Consider Roger Williams:– “This question they [Indians] oft put to me: Why come the

Englishmen hither? And measuring others by themselves; they say, It is because you want firing, for they, having burnt up the wood in one place (wanting draughs [animals] to bring wood to them) they are faine to follow the wood; and so to remove to a fresh new place for the woods sake.”

Deforestation led to increased run-off

Naturalist Timothy Dwight in the 1700s– The amazing difference in the state of a cultivated and

uncultivated surface of earth, iz demonstrated by the number of small streams of water, which are dried up b clearing away forests. The quantity of water, falling upon the surface, may be the same, but when land iz cuvered with trees and leaves, it retains the water; when it is cleered, the water runs off suddenly into the large streems. It iz for this reezon that freshes [floods] in rivers have beum largers, more frequent, sudden and destructive, than they were formerly…. [Thus] while the country is entirely forested, it is ordinarily healthy. While it is passing from tis state into that of general cultivation, it is usually less healthy.”

And increased run-off led to massive soil erosion….

Which was considered the Price of Progress

Historian William Cronon:– “It was no accident that the colonists cleared land so much

more extensively than the Indians had done, nor was it mere chance that the English had such destructive effects of New England forests. The colonists themselves understood what they were doing almost wholly in positive terms, not as “deforestation,” but as “the progress of cultivation”…. Reducing the forest was an essential first step toward reproducing that Old World mosaic in an American environment. For the New England landscape, and for the Indians, what followed was undoubtedly a new ecological order; for the colonists, on the other hand, it was an old and familiar way of life.”

Because Progress and Civilization equated in the minds of Englishmen….

With the “greate stench” of burning coal in London…

With the “fowl and muddied rivers” of the coal trade…

With great barren lots of “emptied forest” in the surrounding counties, marked by “dirty, black and useless soiles….”

Thinking about the tension across the Atlantic Ocean as an issue of energy….

Changes our paradigm--at least momentarily--to consider the underlying and continuing economic and cultural issues which separated the colonists from the people who stayed at home

All wealth did not exist in terms of acreage, crops, and slaves--wealth existed in terms of available energy resources

That sudden availability of energy resources, combined with an English ideal of Progress, led to dramatic changes in both the American landscape and to the political system which organized it….

Sources

Edwin Black, Internal Combustion (2006)

William Cronon, Changes in the Land, Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (1983)

Max Savelle, Empires to Nations: Expansion in America, 1713-1824 (1973)

Paul Colinvaux, The Fate of Nations (1981)