📗 REVIEW: Coal by Barbara Freese

The black rock that bootstrapped modern civilization, from Roman jewelry to corrupt psuedo-govenments stamping out angry miners' 'terrorist' cells.

I picked up Coal: A Human History by Barbara Freese because I was arguing about the Fermi paradox (again…) and someone raised a point I’d never considered: what if the reason we don’t see alien civilizations is that industrial bootstrapping requires fossil fuels, and you only get one crack at it? Coal seemed like the place to start understanding that claim. The reviews were good, and one of my coworkers mentioned being interested too. Freese — an environmental attorney from Minnesota — was a nice enough guide through the history of industrialization... as long as I skipped the end where she went off into inside-baseball political essays that seem pretty outdated now.

The book covers coal from prehistory through the Romans to the modern climate debate, organized roughly by geography: Britain first, then America, then global. She’s not neutral — she clearly wants the reader to be worried about the environmental implications of coal power — but she’s honest about the good that came with the bad (during the parts of the book I actually found interesting, i.e. everything before 1990). As she puts it: “Failing to recognize both sides of coal — the vast power and the exorbitant cost — misses the essential, heartbreaking drama of the story.”

The Deep Past

Coal beds were formed during the Carboniferous period, when dense plant matter fell into oxygen-poor water and failed to decay normally. The forests of that era were dominated by lepidodendron trees — giant scale trees with soft, pithy interiors. As long as water was plentiful, their internal cells stayed expanded and kept the tree erect. Without water, these proud giants would have weakened, sagged, and finally collapsed under their own weight. It’s a funny mental image: prehistoric forests that could just... deflate.

Instead, when the seas rose and fell during glacial cycles, these forests were repeatedly buried in water and sediment. Because oxygen couldn’t reach the buried plants, the plants only partly decayed, leaving behind black carbon. Over geological time, the peat compressed into coal, locking away millions of years of solar energy underground. To give you a sense of her style, Freese puts it more eloquently than I usually bother to:

It wasn’t just the forest’s carbon that ended up trapped in the coal, but the energy it had accumulated from the sun over millions of years. Instead of dissipating with the plants’ decay, that energy was tucked away into the dark recesses of the earth, at least until the amphibians crawling across the forest floor evolved into creatures capable of digging it up.

She hammers this point about how we’re using up millions of years worth of energy very quickly pretty often.

Rome: Coal as Jewelry

When the Romans invaded Britain, they found outcrops of a “velvety deep black mineral” that they carved into jewelry and exported back to Rome. The Romans also burned coal at Minerva’s shrine in Bath, so they knew it was flammable.

They called it gagate, which became “jet” — as in “jet black.” I had no idea that was the origin of the phrase, or that “jet” is a special, dense form of coal. Apparently many Romans couldn’t tell the difference and were probably wearing plain coal around their necks.

My father once put coal in my stocking at Christmas, and I think I still have it in a baggie somewhere. The idea of trying to turn it into jewelry is a little strange, but I guess a lot of ancient status symbols were pretty weird. Modern ones are too.

Medieval English Coal

By the 700s, the English were burning coal not for heat but because they believed its smoke could drive off serpents. Coal’s early history in England is surprisingly mystical — people thought it was a form of living vegetation and suggested manuring coal seams to help them grow.

The medieval coal story mostly struck me as a story about institutional control. The majority of the coal along the River Tyne was held by the Catholic Church — specifically the bishop of Durham and the prior of Tynemouth — and worked by their serfs. The first recorded act of violence in the coal trade was between merchants and monks. Town merchants, many of them former serfs who’d bought their freedom, tried to muscle in as middlemen between the Church’s mines and the tradespeople who actually burned the stuff: blacksmiths, lime burners, brewers, and salt makers.

Eventually, the merchants won:

The town merchants pled in their defense that if the monks traded coal without going through the merchants, not only would they lose their cut, but the king’s tax on coal could not be collected. The merchants won, and the prior was forced to tear down his wharf.

One issue with coal exploitation in this era was that the Church leased mines on such brief terms that nobody had an incentive to invest in expansion. Freese argues that if the mines had stayed in church hands, the industry might never have scaled to meet demand. We’ll never know, because Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon required splitting from the Catholic Church (not least of which because the Pope was under pressure from Catherine’s family). As part of the Protestant Reformation, Henry dissolved the monasteries and transferred their coal holdings to private owners who were incentivized to think bigger.

This is one of those pivot points in history that makes you dizzy if you think about it too long. This is why I don’t write alternate history, as much as I enjoy the occasional book in the genre (1812: The Rivers of War by Eric Flint is my favorite). In a real “for want of a nail“ sort of way, a roll of the genetic dice reshuffled property rights in a way that made the Industrial Revolution possible. Freese doesn’t belabor the point, but I really want to read that book now.

The coal trade grew around Newcastle, where thick seams were exposed above the water line was a crucial advantage. What the English called “sea coal” (oddly enough for such a terrestrial product, but the term stuck until the 1600s) could be mined without dealing with flooding. Other regions had coal, but Newcastle’s geography made it commercially viable.

Freese doesn’t go deep into whether the Industrial Revolution could have happened elsewhere, but Bret Devereaux’s “Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?” makes a strong case that the specific chain of coal availability → steam engines → textile production was unique to Britain. See also this discussion of why the steam engine wasn’t invented earlier.

Coal’s Health Costs

Freese is at her most passionate when describing coal’s health consequences. One story involves Queen Eleanor of Provence, who visited Nottingham in 1257. She (probably) promptly fled because she couldn’t stand the heavy smoke of sea coal. At the time, coal was used only by blacksmiths and lime burners — nobody would burn it at home. But as forests shrank and wood became scarce, and eventually, domestic coal burning became unavoidable. London’s famous fogs were coal fogs. Visitors regularly developed respiratory symptoms that cleared up as soon as they left the city.

The fireplaces and chimneys had to be made much narrower for coal fires than they had been for wood fires to provide the proper draw of air (an architectural change that would promote the employment of very young children as chimney sweeps).

That parenthetical hit me. I knew the child labor market got pretty dark during the Industrial Revolution (it’s a major part of the high school US History curriculum), but I didn’t realize that the chimney sweeps being children was due to chimney sizes changing. I kept thinking of the chimney sweep song scene from Mary Poppins, which is one of my favorite movies to watch with the kids when everybody is sick.

Coal smoke also destroyed tapestries within a few years, making them ugly and smelly, so wainscoting replaced them. The aesthetics of the English home were, in a meaningful sense, designed around coal… and not everybody was happy about it:

Even in modest English homes, chimneys had become common by the mid-1500s. Some lamented this development, because they credited the wood smoke that had filled homes in earlier years with both hardening the timbers and protecting the health of the inhabitants.

It’s not like they had a great grasp on the health implications of all this, back then, although doctors did tell people to go get some fresh mountain air to get well. Now a book like Heidi (which holds up pretty well even as an adult!) sounds insane, but back then “get out of Frankfurt and up into the Swiss Alps where you can drink some fresh goat milk and breathe fresh air, and you will get healthy and well” probably was true.

Manchester under the industrial haze was pretty grim. Tocqueville described the sun as “a disc without rays.” Babies raised in industrial darkness developed rickets in epidemic proportions — it became known internationally as “the English disease.” In some neighborhoods, every child a doctor examined showed signs of it. As late as 1918, a government report found that half the population in Britain’s industrial areas suffered from rickets.

The national security implications for the Army were as big a deal as scurvy was for the Navy. During the Crimean War, 42 percent of urban recruits were rejected for physical weakness, compared to 17 percent of rural recruits. And these were young men who had already been screened by local recruiters — the truly unfit never made it that far.

His unquestioning faith in society’s ability to use technology and coal to meet its needs independently of nature was widely shared by the new industrial powers. That faith allowed the captains of industry to cut much of the industrial population off from the sunlight of its own day because they were unable to believe that humanity has a biological need for sunlight that runs bone-deep.

That line about sunlight running “bone-deep” is literal — rickets is a bone disease caused by vitamin D deficiency, and vitamin D comes from sunlight. The coal fog was so thick people in industrial Britain — already pale-skinned due to the difficulty of getting enough sunlight in the northern latitudes — not only couldn’t breathe, their bones were shot.

Down in the Mines

In the seventeenth century, English coal miners and their families were “commonly referred to as a separate race of humans” and “increasingly ostracized by society.” Medieval peasants and artisans, whatever their disabilities and trials may have been, were not segregated from their neighbors to anything like the degree to which the coal miners of the seventeenth century were considered other. Over time, the isolated miners developed distinct habits and speech.

But if English miners had it bad, Scottish miners had it worse. In Scotland, whole families were bonded for life to a coal mine in a form of industrial serfdom. Men hewed the coal; women and children hauled it to the surface. Families were regarded as property and sold with the mine if it changed hands. If they ran away, they could be “tortured in the irons provided only for coal miners and witches and notorious malefactors.”

The dangers of coal mining appear throughout the book, but Freese gives particular attention to the invisible killers: the gases.

Miners dealt with three types of “damp” (from the German dampf, meaning fog or vapor). Choke damp is mostly carbon dioxide, which forms when carbon in coal oxidizes. In high concentrations, it snuffs out life the same way it snuffs out a candle. White damp is carbon monoxide, a product of incomplete combustion that appeared mainly after fires or explosions. Though carbon monoxide is odorless, historical texts frequently describe white damp as having a floral scent.

But the worst was fire damp — methane gas that appeared more frequently as mines got deeper. If there was only a small accumulation, the bearer of a flame might merely be knocked flat and singed. Larger accumulations exploded.

Some mines employed “firemen” whose job was to burn off the fire damp before it reached explosive concentrations. The fireman would cover himself in soaked rags, creep on his belly along the mine floor, and raise a long stick with a lighted candle on the end to where fire damp was suspected of collecting. The gas would flame along the ceiling while the fireman pressed his face to the floor until it passed over. Ken Follett describes this much more vividly in A Place Called Freedom. It’s my favorite of his many books, although I suppose A Night Over Water was really good too. Pillars of the Earth ranks a distant third, for all that it’s his most famous work.

Follett’s novel follows Mack McAsh, a Scottish coal miner, fireman and son of a fireman who died in the mines. He’s a strong, smart, conscientious guy, and so he tries to get better treatment. He of course falls in love with a beautiful but tragically vulnerable heiress (who also ends up in Virginia, married to an incompetent jerk who is put in charge of a plantation he badly mismanages). It being a book, he has girl problems and cop problems and just all kinds of problems. He’s eventually sent to colonial Virginia as an indentured servant for his crimes (involvement in a riot, but I forget the details).

Spoilers: they run away together, but the first chunk of the book is a really stark and educational look at the horrid conditions of Scottish coal miners. Though it’s been years since I read it nothing Freese talked about here was too much of a surprise — A Place Called Freedom came flooding back to me and to be honest I remember the details from that book better than what I learned about in Coal even though I read Coal much more recently. Like I’ve said before, I find fiction really valuable for learning.

Anyway, eventually miners like Mack started using animals to detect dangerous gas levels. Canaries came to replace mice because a poisoned canary would topple dramatically off its perch — much easier to detect in a dark mine than the “pinkness in the snout” and “crouching” displayed by a poisoned mouse.

In some pits, miners even experimented with bringing phosphorescent fish down to light their way. Apparently this didn’t fully meet their needs, though it’s one of the few details I wasn’t already familiar with.

Industrialization

In preindustrial England, tough economic times caused people to marry later, lowering birthrates. After awhile, coal became too useful to continue ignoring the soggy seams. The Industrial Revolution reversed the fertility trend: cheap factory jobs meant young people could marry earlier, and birth rates rose. Meanwhile, today, we’re seeing falling birth rates in wealthy countries. The mechanisms are different, but there’s something disquieting about watching the demographic lever get pulled by different flavors of technological change.

The big change for industrialization was getting water out of coal mines. Large mines might need fifty or sixty horses to keep water-raising engines moving night and day, and the cost of feeding the animals and paying workers to handle them was enormous even with the awful serfdom coal miners endured. This pumping challenge is what drew the Royal Society’s attention in the 1600s. They focused on atmospheric pressure and vacuum creation. Denis Papin (who had earlier invented the pressure cooker, which he called his “new Digester or Engine for softening Bones.” I definitely prefer “instant pot” as a name...) found that steam could create the vacuum needed to harness atmospheric pressure.

Thomas Newcomen built on this work to create the first practical steam engine for pumping water from mines. He’s often overlooked in historical accounts, but Freese quotes those who remember his work with reverence, calling it “the most wonderful invention which human ingenuity had yet produced.” Without Newcomen’s engine, the deeper coal seams would have remained flooded and inaccessible.

As coal flooded the markets and became more common, it revolutionized the British military in more ways than one. Coal powered the navy’s ships, yes, but coal ships were considered the “chief nursery” for English seamen. They were sturdier and had larger crews than fishing vessels, making them more useful when commandeered for military service (which happened more often than I’d have thought before I read about the HMS Wager, which inspired my October article about press gangs). The coal trade and the navy were symbiotic; in wartime, coal sailors were press-ganged into service so frequently that they demanded hazard pay just for being in the coal business.

Coal powered steam engines. Steam engines powered blast furnaces. Blast furnaces produced cheap iron. Cheap iron built more steam engines and more ships. Each made the others cheaper and more productive. By 1830, Britain produced four-fifths of the world’s coal. By 1848, it produced more iron than the rest of the world combined.

American Coal

Meanwhile, the Puritans had advertised America’s forests as a selling point for emigration. Francis Higginson wrote that “a poor servant here may afford to give more wood for timber and fire as good as the world yields, than many noblemen in England can afford to do.” For the English, who had been freezing and choking on coal smoke, unlimited firewood was a deeply appealing promise.

Ironically, America also held the world’s richest coal deposits — “a coal field half the size of Europe” beneath those eastern forests. Pittsburgh became an early industrial outpost, making iron tools for westward settlers. In a gold rush, sell shovels. In an AI hype cycle, sell clawdbot installation services.

Anyway, the logistical absurdity of early American geography was pretty memorable. For awhile, it was easier to sail coal across the Atlantic from Britain than to haul it over the mountains.

We figured it out, though it was dicey for awhile. When supplies ran out in Arcola, Illinois (due to the 1902 coal strike) three hundred citizens — including two bank presidents, two ministers, and a police officer — surrounded a broken-down coal train and started shoveling coal into their wagons. One of the bank presidents “kept a careful accounting of the amount taken by each person so that payment could later be made.” In the most Midwestern way possible, they were very polite thieves, heh.

Then there was the situation with the Molly Maguires, (allegedly) a secret organization of Irish Catholic coal-mining terrorists in Pennsylvania’s anthracite region. At first I was annoyed the book didn’t really talk about what the Molly Maguires were trying to accomplish, but even the Wikipedia article is pretty hard to parse. The sense I got is that the Molly Maguires had goals similar to the burgeoning coal miners’ unions, but they were parallel organizations without even as much overlap as the Civil Rights movement had between MLK’s followers and the more militant followers of Malcolm X.

The interesting part here was that Franklin Gowen, president of the Reading Railroad (which I had not... entirely realized was a real thing), hired a Pinkerton spy to infiltrate the group. Gowen’s private “Coal and Iron Police” then arrested the suspects. Gowen himself served as special prosecutor at their trial, using testimony from his own spy, gathered by his own detectives, presented to a court in his company’s territory.

It would be hard to find another proceeding in American history where a single corporation, indeed a single man, had so blatantly taken over the powers of the sovereign.

I suppose it’s always nice to see that our modern political dramas aren’t unique.

Anyway, that trial resulted in twenty executions — and vigilante activity killed even more Molly Maguires. Whether the Molly Maguires were actually terrorists or simply labor organizers framed by railroad interests is still contested, but what’s clear is that Gowen wielded extraordinary power over both investigation and prosecution... because of coal.

For twenty years, Gowen was as famous as Carnegie or Rockefeller. Then the Reading Railroad went bankrupt — twice — under his leadership. J.P. Morgan’s syndicate seized control and shoved Gowen into a ceremonial counsel role. In December 1889, he was found dead of a gunshot wound in a Washington hotel room; whether it was suicide or murder is still debated. The anthracite industry he’d fought to monopolize declined through the twentieth century, and the Reading Railroad itself went bankrupt for the last time in 1971.

Contemporary Parallels

Not all the health side effects were unwaveringly grim, though. Some were also funny:

By the 1970s the acid had seeped into thousands of shallow wells in southern Sweden, corroding the copper pipes and contaminating the tap water with copper sulfate. The fair-haired Swedes who washed in the contaminated water found that it tinted their hair green, sometimes as “green as a birch in spring,” as a Swedish researcher described it in 1981.

The book was published in 2003, so the fervent climate politics gripes about the minutiae of Clinton-era legal battles at the end felt pretty irrelevant. Given that she’s an environmental lawyer I can’t begrudge her for including them, but candidly I skimmed most of it. And to her credit, she tries to be balanced:

There will be benefits, of course, as with most great changes. Some species will thrive, there will be fewer deadly cold snaps, heating costs will decline, and in many places the growing season will lengthen. Crop and wood production may well increase over the next few decades in the mid-latitudes if warming remains moderate. This is thanks in part to more CO2 in the air, which has a fertilizing effect that for many plants will help offset some of the other climate stresses.

Still, Freese’s description of Manchester’s factory workers “forming something new to the world: a large class of people whose lives were shaped, and in many ways reduced, by machines” was the most interesting part of the modern-day stuff from a 2026 perspective.

As LLMs take the tech world by storm, I tend to think we’re probably closer to a major technological upheaval impacting job type availability than we’ve been in awhile. In the time of the Luddites, coal power substituted for adult muscle and machinery substituted for adult skill. But widespread, permanent unemployment didn’t follow the loss of power for weaving guilds, and ultimately the Industrial Revolution led to a lot fewer famines and crises.

Freese occasionally makes gestures toward how things could have gone differently — “we might have found a more gradual and humane path out of it than the one we took” — without ever seriously engaging with what that alternative would look like. I haven’t found anyone who has, honestly. Lots of people can explain that the Industrial Revolution was brutal. I’ve never seen a plausible alternative history where it wasn’t. Have you? If so, please tell me, I want to read it (bonus points if the inflection point is Henry and Catherine having a boy!)

Yes, we probably burned through our civilizational starter fuel getting to our current position, but now is objectively the best humanity has ever had it. Whether we’ve done enough with it to secure the future of our species indefinitely — sustainable energy, space capability, whatever “enough” means when it comes to hedging against the fall of modern civilization — is one of those questions that matters enormously and that nobody can answer yet.

What makes Coal worth reading isn’t any single revelation but the cumulative effect of seeing how one resource reshaped everything it touched: architecture, childhood, class, empire, health... even the sky. If you’re interested in this kind of focused historical lens — how a single resource or commodity reshapes politics, trade, and daily life — you might also enjoy Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World (which I liked but haven’t gotten around to reviewing), or Salt: A World History (which I haven’t read yet). If you’ve already read Salt, let me know if it’s as good as people say 🙏