The British Coal Industry between the Wars

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries coal played a vital role in Britain’s performance as an industrial nation. Until the advent of cheap oil and natural gas after the Second World War, it was an unrivalled fuel for domestic heating, industrial machinery, sea and land transport, and the production of gas and electricity. And the availability of huge, seemingly limitless and easily accessible, coal reserves, meant that coal-mining became a critical element in Britain’s nineteenth-century supremacy, both as a manufacturer and (through the export of coal to feed the world’s new shipping and railway systems) as the dominating nation in the international economy.