The Industrial Revolution in Iron

The Impact of British Coal Technology in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Chris Evans, Göran Rydén

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351887717
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The essays in this volume, each written by an acknowledged expert in the field, trace the fortunes of British coal technology as it spread across the European continent, from Sweden and Russia to the Alps and Spain, and supply an authoritative picture of industrial transformation in one of the key industries of the 19th century. In this period iron making in continental Europe was transformed by the take-up of technologies such as coke smelting and iron puddling that had already revolutionised the British iron industry. The transfer of British technologies was fundamental to European industrialisation, but that transfer was not straightforward. The techniques that had proved so successful in Britain had to be adapted to local circumstances elsewhere, for charcoal-fired techniques proved surprisingly durable. More often than not, as these studies show, coal-fired methods were incorporated into traditional production systems, making for the proliferation of technological hybrids. Overall, it is diversity that stands out. Some European regions (southern Belgium) came near to the British model; others (Spain) persisted with charcoal technology into the late 19th century. Some countries (Sweden) adopted British organisational principles but not the reliance on coal; others (Russia) maintained different iron making sectors - one coal-based, the other loyal to charcoal - in parallel.

Chapter 1

The Industrial Revolution in Iron: An Introduction

Chris Evans and Göran Rydén

In preindustrial Europe between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries iron was made by a variety of techniques and in the most diverse of social settings. At the risk of over-simplifying, direct reduction techniques (in which malleable iron was produced as the immediate outcome of smelting ore) were dominant in southern Europe. In northern Europe indirect reduction prevailed: iron production was a two-step operation involving the smelting of ore in a blast furnace, then the refining of brittle pig iron into malleable bars at a forge. The social organisation of production was more varied; so varied as to defy easy classification. In eighteenth-century Britain iron making was already a thoroughly capitalist enterprise, reliant upon wage labour, but in most other regions of Europe the production of iron remained tied to feudal estates. The mining and smelting of ore was carried out at the behest of a variety of different social groups (nobles, merchants, state officials), using the labour of a similarly variegated workforce, ranging from the serfs of the great Urals ironworks to the free peasant-miners of central Sweden or the Basque region.

However varied the iron making regions of Europe, they were united in one thing, their dependence upon charcoal as a source of energy. Bloomeries, blast furnaces, finery hearths, stückofen, Catalan forges – the whole panoply of preindustrial iron making plant – operated within forest economies. Access to wood was a fundamental precondition for successful iron making. Nothing else would do. Or so it appeared. The experience of the British iron industry in the eighteenth century showed otherwise. Mineral coal in the form of coke began to be used in blast furnaces from 1709 onwards, after Abraham Darby’s famous experiments at Coalbrookdale. Workable coal-fired forge techniques were available from the 1750s, and the most successful of these – Henry Cort’s puddling and rolling method – began to sweep through the British forge trade from the 1790s. By 1800 it was clear that the British had developed an entire coal technology package: coke smelting in blast furnaces, often driven by steam engines; the refining of pig iron in puddling furnaces; and the shaping of iron into bars in rolling mills, once more driven by steam rather than water power. Usually these different functions were combined together on a single site to make a centralised, integrated production unit. With some later additions, such as the application of the hot blast in smelting around 1830, the British had developed an entirely new technological paradigm, one that was fundamental to British industrialisation.

Coal technology made iron available in abundance. Pig iron output soared towards the end of the eighteenth century, from 61,000 tons in 1785 to 120,000 tons in 1795, then to 250,000 tons in 1805. By 1850 pig iron production in the United Kingdom stood at 2.25 million tons. The growth of bar iron output was every bit as spectacular. A mere 32,000 tons of bar iron was forged in Britain in 1788; 2 million tons was made in 1854 (Davies and Pollard, 1988, pp. 80-82 and 87). This, it need hardly be said, was an epochal change.

Seemingly limitless mineral energy and a profusion of cheap iron allowed Britain to play its pioneering role in the industrialisation of the globe. Without this combination of coal and iron there could have been no steam power and none of the durable machinery that transformed the production of textiles and revolutionised other industrial sectors. If other European regions were to industrialise it seemed clear that they would have to come to terms with British coal technology. The chapters that follow explore precisely how they did so. Geographically, the investigation extends from the Urals to Andalusia and from Sweden to Calabria. Chronologically, the story stretches from the first attempts at coke smelting outside the British Isles in the 1780s to the rise of bulk steel production in the second half of the nineteenth century.

I

The coming of coal technology has long been of central importance to debates about the British Industrial Revolution. To stand inside Abraham Darby’s long-abandoned blast furnace, David Landes has asserted, ‘among the pitted bricks where the fire burned and the ore melted’, is to enter ‘the womb of the Industrial Revolution’. Indeed, Landes has repeatedly identified the Industrial Revolution as a combination of machines and coal, with the steam engine as the crucial link, powering machinery with coal energy. The Industrial Revolution was thus very much about ‘the muscle: the machines and the engines’ (Landes, 1969, p. 1; Landes, 1986, p. 606; Landes, 1998, p. 189). Landes is not alone in advocating this coal-and-machines interpretation of the British Industrial Revolution. Far from it. He stands in a long tradition dating back (at least) to Arnold Toynbee who, in the 1880s, introduced the very notion of an ‘Industrial Revolution’ into historical discourse, defining it as a violent rupture brought about by ‘the mighty blows of the steam engine and the power loom’. Coal, it seems, was an essential ingredient of the industrial experience. Nowhere was this more obviously the case than with the iron industry. T.S. Ashton, in his classic Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution, published in 1924, starts with Abraham Darby, dismissing the charcoal iron industry in a brisk preliminary chapter. The first use of coke smelting in Coalbrookdale launched a new era: ‘a furnace had been lighted in Shropshire, fire from which was carried to a hundred new and larger furnaces, springing up not in silent woodland, but in busy haunts which the coalfields had already brought into being’ (Ashton, 1924, p. 23). The rest of the work was devoted to exploring the consequences of that epic transformation. More recent work, however, has revised Ashton’s account. The most eye-catching of Charles K. Hyde’s findings, announced in his Technological Change and the British Iron Industry, 1700-1870, was that coke smelting enjoyed no immediate cost advantages over charcoal smelting (Hyde 1977). It was this that accounted for the slow diffusion of coke smelting from its Shropshire heartland, and not the various explanations with which Ashton had toyed (the reticence of the Quaker Darbys in advertising their success, the indispensable qualities of fuel from the east Shropshire coalfield, or a succession of incremental improvements to the process in the 1730s and 1740s). Hyde’s book, taken together with work by Flinn and Hammersley that stressed the vitality of charcoal iron making in the early eighteenth century, seemed to open the way for a new discussion of the energy basis of British industrialization (Flinn, 1958; Hammersley, 1973). Yet that did not happen. Hyde became the new orthodoxy about technological change in the iron industry, but did so at a time when the international debate over proto-industrialization theory steered scholarly interest away from questions of technology. Unlike David Landes, the proponents of proto-industrialization did not see machines as critical. They were concerned with changing patterns of industrial organization, with the extension of international markets, or with household structure and family formation in industrialising communities. Coal technology had little role to play in the textile villages of Flanders or the West Riding (Ogilvie and Cerman, 1996; see also Coleman, 1983, for a countervailing stress on the importance of coal as a locational factor).

Nevertheless, as the controversy over proto-industrialization has subsided or taken new directions, the question of mineral energy has re-emerged. The most significant contribution has come from E.A. Wrigley who has restated the centrality of coal to British industrialisation in his Continuity, Chance and Change: the Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (1988). Wrigley opens his discussion with a paradox: why were so many economic commentators of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sceptical about the prospects for human betterment at the very time when the technological breakthroughs associated with Britain’s Industrial Revolution heralded a new age of material plenty? Why, in short, were the classical economists so pessimistic? Because, Wrigley answers, they appreciated that the area of cultivable land was finite. Since virtually everything necessary for the sustenance of human life – foodstuffs, raw materials and fuel – came from the land, the productivity of agriculture set limits to economic growth. Growth could occur, as Adam Smith suggested, through a more elaborate division of labour, through the suppression of barriers to trade, and other efficiency gains in the spheres of production and exchange. Ultimately, however, the increased demand for food, for raw materials and energy would press too hard on the land. More industrial raw materials (like flax, leather hides or wool), more construction materials (principally wood), more energy (wood once more), and more food could not all be had from the same, fixed acreage of land. As a result, growth would peter out, leading to the ‘stationary state’ that the classical economists so feared. This was the built-in failing of what Wrigley terms the ‘organic economy’. Indeed, the work of Brinley Thomas on the ‘energy crisis’ that afflicted seventeenth-century Britain indicated that this was an observable historical phenomenon (Thomas, 1993, especially 100-19.)

Economic growth could only be sustained by escaping the bounds of the ‘organic economy’. Specifically, it required the tapping of new sources of energy. This was the secret of the British Industrial Revolution. British success lay in substituting mineral energy for the energy formerly extracted from vegetable matter. It was the adoption of coal and coal-based technologies that averted a crisis in the ‘organic economy’, paving the way for a ‘mineral-based energy economy’, the foundation of long-term growth. For Wrigley, then, there were two processes at work in eighteenth-century Britain. One was the evolution of the ‘organic economy’, a process characterised by bouyant Smithian growth, but growth that was subject to diminishing returns. The other was the rise of the ‘mineral-based energy economy’. In Wrigley’s eyes these developments were quite separate and should not be conflated into a single process. He questions ‘the appropriateness of the view that the industrial revolution was a cumulative, progressive, unitary phenomenon’ (Wrigley, 1988, p. 3). The ‘organic economy’ and the ‘mineral-based energy economy’ were not complementary aspects of a single process, they were quite distinct processes with no necessary historical relationship. The growth that was so visible in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries should be understood as ‘the product of two different sets of forces having only an accidental relationship to one another in the early stages of their overlap in time’ (Wrigley, 1988, p. 4). The classical economists had not been illogical in their prognostications about the coming of a stationary state. Their understanding of the organic economy was logically impeccable. It was simply that the organic economy was quite suddenly and unexpectedly superseded by a mineral-based energy economy.

This interpretation does not command universal assent. Joel Mokyr, for example, makes little mention of Britain’s rich deposits of coal when discussing the Industrial Revolution. He prioritises ‘technological creativity’, by which he means not just the capacity to make innovations, but also ‘the willingness and ability to recognize and then adopt inventions made elsewhere’ (Mokyr, 1993, especially 16ff.). According to Mokyr, the advance of the British economy in the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century stemmed from high levels of technological creativity, not from the abundance of mineral energy. Stress is laid less upon the resource endowment available to different human societies and more upon human agency in transforming the resource base. Mokyr distinguishes between macroinventions, those which embody a ‘radical new idea, without clear precedent’, and microinventions, those ‘small incremental steps that improve, adapt, and streamline existing techniques already in use, reducing costs, improving form and function, increasing durability, and reducing energy and raw material requirements’ (Mokyr, 1990, p. 13). Macroinventions such as the steam engine afforded a sudden, unforeseeable addition to human power, but the numerous microinventions that developed in tandem with steam technology (improved gearing systems, transmission belts, etc.) reflected the willingness of unsung artisans and tinkerers to change the environment in which they laboured.

Maxine Berg has a similarly capacious view of technological development. Britain’s Industrial Revolution involved ‘not only machinery, but also tools, skills and dexterity, and the knacks and work practices of manufacture. And a broader definition of innovations must include product innovation, market creativity and organization change’ (Berg, 1991, p. 56). From this vantage point, it was a suitably skilled and resourceful workforce that was indispensable. It might even be said that Britain’s advantage as an industrial pioneer lay not so much in the volume of coal at the disposal of its industrialists as in the expertise that British workers had acquired in the use of coal between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, John Harris has written extensively about the finesse with which British workers used coal in a variety of early modern industrial processes – glass-making, non-ferrous smelting, brewing, and ceramics, as well as iron-working. It was this slowly acquired knowledge of the qualities of different mineral coals or of the optimum design for kilns, ovens and reverberatory furnaces that distinguished British workers from their continental counterparts. And it was this, Harris suggests, that made the transfer of coal technology to continental Europe such a drawn-out affair. Coal technology was quite literally embodied in its practitioners. It could not be introduced to the coal basins of Europe without transplanting workers adept in that technology (Harris, 1976).

If Harris is concerned with the difficulty of carrying coal technology across the English Channel, Mokyr and Berg prefer to dwell upon the alternatives to mineral energy. Mokyr’s scepticism about coal’s fundamental role has already been noted. Technological creativity would not necessarily wither without mineral energy to sustain it. ‘In the absence of coal’, Mokyr writes, ‘the ingenuity applied to using it would have been directed toward replacing it. Coal-poor regions, such as Switzerland, Northern Ireland, and Catalonia were able to generate substitutes or develop low-energy product lines’ (Mokyr, 1990, p. 160). Berg concurs. ‘Wrigley’s emphasis on inorganic materials and power’, she writes, ‘would hold little sway in a comparative context: American and Swedish industrialization relied to a predominant extent on wood-using technologies and water power’ (Berg 1991, p. 56). British industrialisation might have been a matter of coal technology, but it was not the only blueprint for success. This is a line of argument that echoes that made by H.J. Habakkuk more than forty years ago. For Habakkuk, the choice of technology during industrialisation was determined by the supply of labour, not the availability of mineral coal. The technological path taken in the United States reflected the relative shortage labour in that country: labour-saving devices proliferated. In Britain, where labour was relatively abundant, employers could afford to be prodigal in its use. This principle held true for the iron industry as for others. The selection of ‘methods of manufacturing wrought iron depended largely on labour’, not on energy. (Habakkuk, 1962, p. 104).

Recent trends in the historiography of British industrialisation have been towards the study of consumption rather than production, focusing on consumerism and cultural identity, marketing and aesthetics, rather than the brute realities of coal extraction. Despite the appearance of a multi-volume history of the British coal industry, coal and the use of mineral energy has not been a crowded field of research (Hatcher, 1993; Flinn, 1994; Church, 1986). Yet fresh conceptual impetus has come from an unexpected quarter – China. Kenneth Pomeranz’s widely acclaimed The Great Divergence has asked large questions about the roots of western domination of the modern world (Pomeranz, 2000). In doing so, Pomeranz drew comparisons between the most advanced sector of the European economy in the eighteenth century, namely Britain, and China’s most prosperous region, the Yangzi delta. The results were arresting for non-specialists in Chinese history. Orthodox explanations of European primacy in the world economy stress deep-seated cultural and structural distinctions between East and West, distinctions that date back a millenium or more. In this view, western Europe’s advantage lay in an intellectual matrix that privileged individualism and restless acquisitiveness, as opposed to the Confucian preference for stability and social harmony. In western Europe the legal framework allowed for land and other factors of production to be freely alienated and disposed of on an open market; in China, so it is said, law and custom impeded the development of an agrarian capitalism. In China, the imperial state exercised an unchallenged authority, which brought the threat, often realized, that disturbing novelties, be they technological innovations or initiatives in transoceanic exploration, could be interdicted. In Europe, it is often claimed, the fragmentation of political authority prevented the arbitrary prohibition of potentially progressive developments by a fearful ruling elite.

Such is the alleged chasm that separates western Europe from China. Yet Pomeranz, by a careful comparison of agricultural productivity and related measures of social well-being in Britain and the Yangzi delta, concludes that there was little to choose between the regions in the mid-eighteenth century. Both were populous, both were sustained by commercial agriculture, and both had flourishing manufacturing sectors. Moreover, Pomeranz maintains that technological creativity was as prominent in the Yangzi delta as it was in Britain, albeit in a different form. Whereas the British excelled in energy-using innovations such as the steam engine, the Chinese specialised in energy-saving devices such as heat-retaining stoves. Given the overall parity between the two regions as recently as 1750, the conventional explanations of western superiority seem wanting in explanatory power. So why did Britain and China diverge so dramatically after 1800? Pomeranz’s answer – to compress a rich and complex discussion – is twofold. Firstly, the European appropriation of the New World generated a uniquely positive dynamic within the Atlantic basin. The plantation economies in America were able to provide Europe (and Britain in particular) with foodstuffs and raw materials, whilst at the same time providing a captive market for European manufactures. In this way, growth in Europe could continue without fatally overexploiting Europe’s own resources. Secondly, Pomeranz recites the arguments of E.A. Wrigley about the axial role of mineral energy in British industrialisation. It was coal, coal in profusion, that distinguished the British experience. The British Isles were not just liberally endowed with coal measures, but those coal measures were accessible, allowing their output to be carried by sea or river transports to centres of urban or industrial demand. Coal was to be found in the Chinese empire too, but in remote, landlocked locations, far distant from the most developed centres of agriculture and industry. Thus, lacking the energy reserves that were so freely made use of in Britain, China sank into the Malthusian mire. Population growth was accompanied by diminishing returns on the land, extensive deforestation, ecological regression, and widespread immiseration in the nineteenth century.

II

A comparative study of the technologies employed in Europe’s iron making regions has much to offer in the on-going debate between ‘advocates’ and ‘critics’ of coal technology. Iron has an obvious importance for the overall process of industrialisation – it is hard to imagine industrial society without large volumes of cheap iron. Moreover, iron exemplified the coal technology revolution in Britain. The new industrial landscape featured massive forges and rolling mills, ranks of blast furnaces, and towering engine houses, all of them darkened by coal grit rather than charcoal dust. To nineteenth-century Britons and to scores of foreign visitors coal seemed an essential element of industrial modernity. But was this really so? The ways in which British iron making technology was embraced varied enormously across Europe, as the studies gathered here reveal. The adoption, adaptation or rejection of coal-based techniques by continental ironmasters can illuminate the role played by mineral coal in the wider transformation of European society in the nineteenth century.

As a starting point in this comparative venture it is well to specify just what British coal technology involved. The chapter by Evans seeks to do so by examining the role of coal within the British economy in the two centuries preceding industrialisation. The British Isles were endowed with a great number of coalfields, many of them coastal or adjacent to navigable rivers, and coal output in Britain vastly exceeded that in the remainder of Europe in the early modern period. The use of coal in industrial processes was therefore well advanced by the end of the seventeenth century. Indeed, coal was being incorporated in certain portions of the iron production chain as early as the sixteenth century. Seen from this vantage point, the harnessing of mineral energy for iron making was a slow and uneven development, stretching from the 1580s to the 1780s. There was often a considerable time-lag between an innovation (such as Abraham Darby’s mastering of coke smelting in 1709) and its diffusion (the emergence of coke smelting as ‘industry standard’ in the 1750s). Questions arose as to whether the coal-based methods really were technically superior to the charcoal methods they were to supplant. Some coal-fuelled methods were very wasteful of materials and therefore technically retrograde, but they were economically superior by virtue of the extremely cheap fuel they consumed. These same questions confronted ironmasters in other parts of Europe in the nineteenth century, especially those in regions where coal was a relatively expensive input, and had a key bearing on whether ‘British’ methods were taken up.

Evans suggests that the coal technology package (coke smelting, puddling, rolling mills, etc.) was assembled rather late in the day. It was a creation of the 1790s, if not later. In earlier decades British ironmasters had employed hybrid production systems, using both mineral and vegetable energy sources. They might refine coke-smelted pig iron in charcoal-fired finery hearths, or they might use coal as a heat source in rolling mills that processed the finest grades of charcoal-made iron. The same hy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 The Industrial Revolution in Iron: An Introduction
• 2 The Industrial Revolution in Iron in the British Isles
• 3 Foreign Trade – Transfer – Adaptation: British Iron Making Technology on the Continent (Belgium and France)
• 4 The Diffusion of Coke Smelting and Puddling in Germany 1796-1860
• 5 The French Iron and Steel Industry during the Industrial Revolution
• 6 Good Ore but no Coal, or Coal but Bad Ore. Responses to the British Challenge in the Habsburg Monarchy
• 7 Responses to Coal Technology without Coal. Swedish Iron Making in the Nineteenth Century
• 8 Nineteenth-Century Russian and ‘Western’ Ferrous Metallurgy: Complementary or Competitive Technologies?
• 9 British Technology and Spanish Iron Making during the Nineteenth Century
• Bibliography
• Index