I believe this is a common misconception. The author seems vaguely aware of it because just before this he says that the forests were cleared in antiquity, which is the usual response to point out this as being a wrong theory that doesn't add up.
They cleared most of the forests for agriculture and kept and 'farmed' the ones they coppiced for fuel for a long time after clearing the rest. When they no longer felt they needed wood as fuel, they cut down more rather than managing them as they had for hundreds of years.
This is like saying people started eating beyond burgers because they ran out of cows. No, we'll stop having herds of cows because we have a replacement that makes them less necessary.
In other words, Britain discovered coal, to some extent, then started using it earnest and neglected the forest-as-fuel-source infrastructure that was needed to keep repopulating the forests.
So you're arguing that deforestation was a consequence of using more coal, not a driver of using more coal.
So the question still remains, why was coal only discovered then? What prevented people from using coal earlier?
Coal was known and used in antiquity. It has the same problem as oil: extraction was difficult and expensive except where it was on the surface or just below it.
People used more coal where good quality coal was easily accessible. They turned to more extensive mining and extraction as population growth and deforestation made wood more expensive - prior to that it was cheaper and easier to cut down trees that would regrow themselves if managed even half-heartedly. Once a steady supply of cheap coal was established it accelerated deforestation in a feedback loop.
* The sophistication of forest management varied a lot across civilizations and time within the same civilization, but very few took a "clear-cut everything" attitude. Clear-cutting was usually done to make farmland to grow more food, not for the lumber itself per-se.
It was known and used, just that there wasn't enough incentive for massive extraction so it wasn't searched. It's population growth and in conjonction with it urbanisation, electrification and railroads that lead to the search of more efficient energy source.
Nothing really prevented people from using coal earlier and they did but keep in mind that town where smaller and people scattered about in lots of smal villages. It was easier to collect wood.
Remember that by the end of 18h century, only a handful of cities barely reach a million inhabitant.
1712: Newcomen's steam engine.
1765: Watt's first engine.
1800: First battery.
1804: First steam locomotive.
1832: First DC generator.
The book (https://archive.org/details/ahistorycoalmin00gallgoog/page/n...) referenced by wikipedia claims that the change from wood to coal for domestic use occurred during the reign of the first Elizabeth.
(The Cornish steam engines also come up a lot due to them doing a lot of improvements that Watt held back with patent shenanigans, and a collaborative approach to their improvements)
Before electricity was a thing the steam engines were also used to pump water which then ran machinery hydraulicly, like cranes. Which piggybacked on improvements in civic water supplies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Armstrong,_1st_Baron...
(Same guy had the first house lit by hydroelectric power later)
My point is that this sort of transition isn't immediate and universal. Some people had the motivation and opportunity to use coal, there were lots of advantages and it spread... slowly... at the same time the infrastructure to extract and distribute it developed.
Wikipedia has an interesting history that includes Roman usage. Note the final cite, which has the traditional "we ran out of wood" story is cited to a 19th century source.
> After the Romans left Britain, in AD 410, there are few records of coal being used in the country until the end of the 12th century. One that does occur is in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 852 when a rent including 12 loads of coal is mentioned.[8] In 1183 a smith was given land for his work, and was required to "raise his own coal"[9]: 171–2 Shortly after the granting of the Magna Carta, in 1215, coal began to be traded in areas of Scotland and the north-east England, where the carboniferous strata were exposed on the sea shore, and thus became known as "sea coal". This commodity, however, was not suitable for use in the type of domestic hearths then in use, and was mainly used by artisans for lime burning, metal working and smelting. As early as 1228, sea coal from the north-east was being taken to London.[10]: 5 During the 13th century, the trading of coal increased across Britain and by the end of the century most of the coalfields in England, Scotland and Wales were being worked on a small scale.[10]: 8 As the use of coal amongst the artisans became more widespread, it became clear that coal smoke was detrimental to health and the increasing pollution in London led to much unrest and agitation. As a result of this, a Royal proclamation was issued in 1306 prohibiting artificers of London from using sea coal in their furnaces and commanding them to return to the traditional fuels of wood and charcoal.[10]: 10 During the first half of the 14th century coal began to be used for domestic heating in coal producing areas of Britain, as improvements were made in the design of domestic hearths.[10]: 13 Edward III was the first king to take an interest in the coal trade of the north east, issuing a number of writs to regulate the trade and allowing the export of coal to Calais.[10]: 15 The demand for coal steadily increased in Britain during the 15th century, but it was still mainly being used in the mining districts, in coastal towns or being exported to continental Europe.[10]: 19 However, by the middle of the 16th century supplies of wood were beginning to fail in Britain and the use of coal as a domestic fuel rapidly expanded.[10]: 22
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining
Seems relevant that the coal mining areas worked out the way to use coal more cleanly in home furnaces a couple of centuries before the 'running out of wood' shift was supposed to have happened.
You might be able to trace whether the trees disappeared first in the areas where they had coal mines.
edit: interesting take on this here:
https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/wood-scarcity/
> In 1611, the agricultural writer Arthur Standish warned, ‘No wood, no kingdom.’ Deforestation, he claimed, threatened to undermine English agriculture, impoverish the poor, and provoke rebellions. In contrast, his contemporary Dudley Digges – a politician and investor in commercial and colonial ventures – took the opposite position. He argued that fears of wood scarcity were unfounded; a ploy by ‘beggars’ dwelling in forests and the greedy, feckless landlords who profited from these desperate tenants, both of whom wished to protect forests from conversion to more profitable uses. A third perspective was offered by the London merchant and deputy treasurer of the Virginia Company, Robert Johnson. Wood scarcity was real and incurable, and the only solution was to exploit abundant woods in the new English colony of Virginia.
Mines get deeper and start flooding more, pumping is more difficult and you have an "energy crisis" as coal mines struggle to keep up production and land has already been deforested.
Choose a place that has slowly ramping up energy consumption so that they start supplanting it with coal until there's a threshold of it being profitable to mine coal in deeper wells.
What I still don't understand is why it took so long. Is it the critical mass of population and urban vs. rural population? Could it have happend in Asia, the Middle East or other parts of Europe? How long would we have had to wait if it hadn't happened in Great Britain?
Then there's the next step Bret discusses: the Newcomen engine apparently worked well enough for mining purposes that the next big improvement took 50 years and then it was James Watt that got involved.
"It is particularly remarkable here how much of these conditions are unique to Britain: it has to be coal, coal has to have massive economic demand (to create the demand for pumping water out of coal mines) and then there needs to be massive demand for spinning (so you need a huge textile export industry fueled both by domestic wool production and the cotton spoils of empire) and a device to manage the conversion of rotational energy into spun thread. I’ve left this bit out for space, but you also need a major incentive for the design of pressure-cylinders (which, in the event, was the demand for better siege cannon) because of how that dovetails with developing better cylinders for steam engines."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining#:~:text...
Similar comments here about the lack of wood driving the use of coal.
https://industrialrevolution.org.uk/coal-mines-industrial-re...
And:
It's not a simple story. There were distinctly regional transitions and pressures from things like the expansion of urban centers that created demand for food which could not be mined unlike fuel that could be both mined and grown. Other factors like the spread of horses for ploughing (displacing oxen) and improvements in agricultural machinery were also important. The growth of distribution networks (canals) was also very important. Still copicing was practiced commercially right into the 20th century, and some copices were not cut back - they were just abandoned. You can see these weird old trees out in the English countryside today.
So it's accurate to say "wood as a heat fuel was scare for some people in some places". Conversely it is fair to say that coal displaced some other fuels including wood gradually, and that the use of land for crops other than wood became gradually more attractive.
https://www.bahs.org.uk/AGHR/ARTICLES/62_1_WardeWilliamson.p...
https://acoup.blog/2020/09/25/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
Tl;dr: 7:1 raw wood to charcoal conversion. And a lot of charcoal needed for each iron batch. Or "To put that in some perspective, a Roman legion (roughly 5,000 men) in the Late Republic might have carried into battle around 44,000kg (c. 48.5 tons) of iron – not counting pots, fittings, picks, shovels and other tools we know they used. That iron equipment in turn might represent the mining of around 541,200kg (c. 600 tons) of ore, smelted with 642,400kg (c. 710 tons) of charcoal, made from 4,620,000kg (c. 5,100 tons) of wood."
Unlike the Greeks, they did not leave the world a better place at the end of their power than they found it at the start.
Many see them as violent and bitter enemies of scientific truth, and there is some foundation for this view.
I think it never actually happened, but this sort of story reveals a Roman perspective on technological innovation in Roman society.
Roman law fuels most of the world's modern legal codes. Roman languages are among the most widely spoken today, and is closer to universal if you look at written language (even now, we're writing using the Roman alphabet). The largest world religion is Roman religion. Roman infrastructure forms the backbone of European infrastructure in much of the world.
That's more impact than the Greeks had.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/what-did-the-romans-...
Our careers would not be possible if it was not for the mathematical and scientific contributions of the ancient Greeks. Not only did they greatly contribute to the foundations of math, but the way they formalized logical thinking enabled further discoveries.
This can be reduced to something like Newton didn't discover gravity, Newton formally described it in mathematics, and anyone dedicated enough to pursue the formal description could have done much the same. Much in the same way, the Eurocentric view is wrong to attribute things and with the way cultural interaction spheres tend to work it's even more difficult to attribute developments to a given culture or individual. E.g. not only are we "standing on the shoulders of giants" but the scientific domain is pruning viable explanatory paths with each passing moment, narrowing the scope of positive knowledge and increasing the sharpness of the borders of negative knowledge. For instance China had what was effectively fiat currency well before it became widespread in European nations; they also managed to invent moveable type which was ineffectual and thus discarded - but Gutenberg gets the attribution?
One reason is that Greece invented proto-empiricism. Other cultures invented math, but because of Plato only Greece elevated research and abstraction into a process of formal discovery rather than just a set of neat tricks for a limited set of problems.
China was a bureaucratic empire and didn't see the need. Rome was a fascist militarist slave owning culture which soon turned into a dictatorship. Both developed philosophies which were more oriented towards ethics and morality than empiricism.
So there was no formal culture of curiosity and invention. Inventions appeared and then they disappeared again. There was no momentum driving the process forward.
The West did develop an empirical culture. This was partly because it inherited the principle of formal abstraction from the Greeks, and partly because a tradition of physical exploration, with accompanying developments in ship technology and weapons.
China and Japan both turned back in on themselves. Rome was more interested in conquest than exploration.
The West explored - physically in search of gold and trade, but also philosophically and practically.
So IMO the real reason the industrial revolution happened is because the West had a culture that incubated technology and invention in a way that other cultures didn't. Not only were there associations for the advancement of knowledge like the Royal Society, and informal networks of researchers and mathematicians, there was also a practical tradition of engineering in wood, iron, stone, glass, fire, and water, on land and on the sea.
And also an economic reward system - abstracted from imperialism - which made practical engineering individually profitable.
A simpler explanation: That Chinese characters number in the 10,000s, while the characters in the Western alphabet number 26. This means that the latter is much easier than to former to turn into a profitable business, because the early movable types themselves are costly in time and capital to make, and easy to break or so I'd imagine. With 10,000 replicas of 26 characters you can print 24/7. However, with 26 replicas of 10,000 characters, your business will be halted every type the movable type of characters you need are inevitably broken and wait for an artisan to make new ones.
I think your postulations on the Greeks are interesting. I do have to wonder at the level of accessibility of the Greek thinkers into the Middle Ages and into the Enlightenment - from my understanding Archimedes, for example, a very late Greek thinker, was only rediscovered as a product of translations from the Arabic world - a product I suspect of the Church, which was itself an institution of incomparable power since before the fall of Rome. If this is correct that's a thousand-year period without the Classical thinkers, and yet Europe was still, in my opinion (and many others), highly functional.
I believe Toynbee came up with the Goldilocks hypothesis for civilization; not too challenging, but not too easy. If you'll allow me, I would posit this exists at the intersection and overlap of cultures as well. My history is fast and loose, you'll have to forgive me: but the Axial age coincides with lots of warring in just about every major old-world society - thus "we" derived challenge - readily modulated by various developments, resource limitations, and etc... It's my impression that "Europe" was particularly violent, thus a constancy of the "challenge" was thematic of the West. I see this as something that created a persistent arms race which escalated with the passage of time. I would suggest this has little to do with empiricism and more to do with the necessity of maintaining the balance of power - right up to MAD.
Finally, with the Age of Discovery, and the discovery of the New World with it, a vast and untapped land which was available with little contest thanks to contagious disease, virgin soil, and a people who may have even been susceptible beyond that... The tradition was allowed continuity, and all of the philosophy active in that era was allowed to persist uncontested a la your reward system, which may have actually been copped from the Arabic market traditions albeit in a seriously perverted fashion.
I think it's a very open question if the warring, violent nature of those Western cultures actually led to overall faster/better technological advancement than if they'd interacted with the other cultures they came across in a peaceful, trade-oriented way.
I expect you're speaking in terms of qualitative violence?
A great example is the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. According to your list only a single war took place for nearly 80 years in china, until the Song dynasty, which formed and unified (most of) china without a single war, attacks Vietnan, whereas in China it's known as a period of endemic warfare until the Song reunified china through conquest. Compare that to a Viking raid on Lisbon that does get its own place on the list.
Gutenberg gets the attribution because, not only does he appear to be the first person to use a press for printing, but also he developed a new way of producing metal type for printing and invented a new alloy for type. This is a rather dramatic leap forward in the history of printing in much the same way as HMS Dreadnought was for naval warships or especially Stephenson's Rocket was for locomotives.
Then why was there no Industrial Revolution when many other civilizations for thousands of years observed these same phenomena? I don't know the answer but it is curious. I do believe when you look back you can see connections - it might be trite at times but James Burke's series 'Connections' tries to tease out the road to a current day technology going back through the past and all the seemingly unrelated things that needed to happen to finally arrive at the solution. Solutions always seem obvious in the present but usually they aren't quite so obvious in the past.
Toynbee on the Genesis of Civilization via Wikipedia [0]:
He argues that for civilizations to be born, the challenge must be a golden mean; that excessive challenge will crush the civilization, and too little challenge will cause it to stagnate.
One of the big history book authors has an oft-repeated joke, one permutation of it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/bsnud/is_this_a_joke...
Why do all that work when you could just sit your ass on a beach or in a nice Mediterranean-esque corner of the world?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_of_History#Genesis_and...
It is (at best) oversimplified to put this as “Romans” in opposition to “Greeks”. What is fair to say is that the Greek language remained the common "language of science", just as Arabic was the common language of science throughout the Islamic world (even for e.g. Persians), Latin was the common language of science in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, or English is the common language of science today.
You wouldn’t say that “the English were opposed to science unlike the Latins Edmund Gunter, Thomas Harriot, Edmond Halley, Isaac Newton, et al.”.
First off, I'm not even sure that narrative is true.
Second off, even if it were, there's still the Middle East and Asia. I, unfortunately, don't know a lot about the Middle East during the European dark ages period but, from what I understand, they went through a type of renaissance themselves.
The question still is, why didn't people need or use coal at the levels they did until the 1600s?
Don't write off Mesoamerica and South America either. I know many people that strongly argue "The Mayan Empire never fell it was crushed." There especially was no direct equivalent to the European Dark Ages in the Mayan Empire. It remained a productive agricultural empire right up until post-Industrial Spanish Conquest (and right down until contemporary periods of not just the Roman Empire, but even as far back as various Mesopotamian empires as well).
That's just the Mayan Empire. We also have an impression that Aztec Empire and even the looser "Confederations" of North American Indian tribes at various times all had economies comparable to European agricultural sense of "Empire" at least, but all also lost a lot history/institutions during American conquests.
It seems reasonable to wonder if that deforestation of England truly was a strange precursor in the face of what we know of non-European empires at the time. (Which we don't know enough given how many of them Europe managed to burn to the ground in the American conquests.)
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Yes, but not because of his science. In fact, his science was the reason the Roman commander gave specific instructions that he was to be spared. He wasn't spared because of his inability to follow instructions from an invading soldier while he was trying to work out a problem.
There certainly were, I remember reading that most of what is now France (Gaul, back then) had already lost most of its forests in the present Île-de-France region, i.e. Paris and its surroundings.
The Romans could do all of this, but nobody had the idea. And it's the sort of idea that doesn't just spring into somebody's head out of the blue, Newcomen was applying principles and ideas other people came up with first (story of the entire industrial revolution.)
"If you had given the Romans the designs for a Newcomen steam engine, they [...] wouldn’t have had any profitable use to put it to."
> As we’ll see, this was a use-case that didn’t really exist in the ancient world and indeed existed almost nowhere but Britain even in the period where it worked.
I remember reading a blog post by TechnicsHistory [0] (which was on the front page of HN at one point) that makes the same argument.
The acoup.blog article goes on to give a reason why coal wasn't needed earlier as the need for heating fuel became scarce when wood became scarce:
> Consequently wood as a heat fuel was scarce and so beginning in the 16th century we see a marked shift over to coal as a heating fuel for things like cooking and home heating.
I'm still skeptical of why it took so long. Were there no other places in Europe, Asia or the Middle East that didn't have the same deforestation issues? Was it the combination of deforestation and population density?
[0] https://technicshistory.com/2021/07/13/the-triumvirate-coal-...