Britain produces 25% of the world's coal
At its 1908 peak, Britain mined roughly 270 million tons of coal — about a quarter of total world output — and employed over a million coal miners. British coal underwrote the Royal Navy, the world's merchant marine, the global steamship network, and a third of world iron and steel production. The country was a coal-exporting superpower at a scale that, in inflation-adjusted terms, no later petrostate has matched. But the same year saw the discovery of major Persian oil reserves and the start of the Royal Navy's evaluation of oil-fired battleships. Britain's coal peak and oil's strategic emergence happened in the same twelve months. The succession had begun before the incumbent realized it was the incumbent.
Britain's coal output declined slowly through the 20th century — to 230 million tons in 1929, 200 million in 1953, then sharply down through the 1980s to under 20 million tons today. The 1984-85 miners' strike under Margaret Thatcher was the political endpoint of an industry that had been dying for sixty years; coal stopped being central to British power around 1914.
02 · King Coal
Once Watt's steam engine made coal-to-motion practical at scale, every breakthrough in industrial production rode on top of it: railways, steamships, mechanized factories, telegraph wires, electrical grids. Britain sat on the largest accessible coal reserves in Europe, and that geological accident turned a small Atlantic kingdom into the world's first industrial empire. By 1850, Britain produced more iron than the rest of the world combined. By 1908, it produced 25 percent of the world's coal. Wealth concentrated in factory owners, railway financiers, and shipping magnates — a new merchant aristocracy whose money came from burning rocks.
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