Matt Ridley calls for a materialist account of the Industrial Revolution. Coal — and thus geography — he thinks is the crucial factor. I agree with him against Deirdre McCloskey that we need a materialist account. But coal is the wrong material.
Coal has long exercised a powerful magnetism as the key to the Industrial Revolution: see the accounts of E.A. Wrigley and Kenneth Pomeranz, as well as that of Robert Allen. Coal output surged in this period. And one of the features of modern growth has been a dramatic decline in the relative cost of energy. The chart below shows the cost of energy relative to the wage from 1230 to 2000 in England.
But coal cannot explain the upturn in innovation rates that the Industrial Revolution represented for several reasons.
The first is that without a single ton of coal being dug from the ground in England 1760-1860 there would still have been an Industrial Revolution. As Deirdre herself demonstrated in the 1980s, the majority of economic growth came from textile innovations that in no way depended on coal. Steam power was in no way essential to such mills. There was plenty of water power available in the years before 1850.
Later in the nineteenth century coal became important in the extension of the Industrial Revolution. But the process was well underway before this.
You don’t need coal to develop the elaborate canal system that the English constructed in the late eighteenth century — horses do fine. You don’t need coal to remake 21,000 miles of inland roads with all-weather surfaces by 1830. You don’t need coal to introduce threshing and reaping machines in farming — horse power again. Improvements in sailing ships, not coal, were responsible for most of the decline in the costs of international transport before 1850.
A second reason coal cannot explain the advent of British ingenuity is that the coal of Northumberland and Durham, from which Matt Ridley’s ancestors prospered, was as close to Amsterdam and Antwerp as to London. Cheap coal was not a monopoly of the British. Once you got it on a ship, the Dutch also could partake of this bounty of nature. But they did not.
Coal thus shaped the later Industrial Revolution. But to claim coal created it would be the equivalent of claiming that the coffee that fueled this contribution is the source of modern thought. For my more detailed and somewhat technical analysis of the role of coal in the Industrial Revolution, see here.