Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain

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In this brilliant social history, Jeremy Paxman tells the story of coal mining in England, Scotland and Wales from Roman times, through the birth of steam power to war, nationalisation, pea-souper smogs, industrial strife and the picket lines of the Miner’s Strike. Such combinations of omitting important facts with a lack of rhetorical strategies that might cover for them weaken an intriguing and often convincing argument. In addition to discussions of canonical works like Nostromo, Heart of Darkness, Sons and Lovers, The Mill on the Floss, and Hard Times, the book introduces us to Fanny Mayne’s Jane Rutherford: or, the Miners’s Strike, H.

As she explains, “ Extraction Technologies sets out to show that industrialization of underground resource extraction shaped literary form and genre in the first century of the industrial era, from the 1830s to the 1930s, just as literary form and genre contributed to new ways of imagining an extractive earth. To access your ebook(s) after purchasing, you can download the free Glose app or read instantly on your browser by logging into Glose. The seismic influence of coal forces Paxman to spread his ink across politics, economics, art, industry and culture: the grubby rock gets everywhere. and that “at the front lines of extractive imperialism, anthroturbation becomes cultural practice” (136).The book is so very interesting, but the vanishing of the reader's voice at every subordinate clause is unbearable. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you.

Paxman organizes Black Coal by first explaining how coal and steam power developed, after which he devotes a great deal of space to the terrible working conditions of the miners and mine disasters that killed hundreds of people. The book is remarkably sympathetic to the miners and their families, so many of whom suffered terribly during the industry’s emergence. Paxman also has a Taylor-esque propensity to skate over awkward complexities that might slow the pace of the narrative.Equally important, Britain’s main interest in Africa lay much farther north because it needed to protect Egypt and the Suez Canal, the lifeline to its richest colony, India. But was also in a sense unnecessary since decades of declining productivity had already doomed the coal industry. Almost all traces of coal-mining have vanished from Britain but with this brilliant history, Black Gold demonstrates just how much we owe to the black stuff.

The footnotes alone are worth reading and tell us, for example, that London’s remaining 1,300 gas lamps are tended by four lighters who travel on motorbikes. A 1914 calculation showed that a miner was severely injured every two hours, and one killed every six hours.When I was a child it was how we heated our home, but, hidden from view it also powered the British economy. This book is a highly readable account of the coal industry and the uses to which coal could be put. His regular appearances on the BBC2's Newsnight programme have been criticised as aggressive, intimidating, condescending and irreverent, and applauded as tough and incisive. The terms in which they talk put one in mind of military veterans, though – intriguingly, in view of the bitter conflicts on picket lines – one ex-miner compared his working life to that of a policeman. It was a world of "allotment associations, pigeon and poultry clubs, brass bands, choirs, youth organisations, whippet racing and eagerly contested giant-vegetable competitions" .