by Alfred Marshall 1842-1924

Fuel of Freedom

Victorian economist Alfred Marshall argued that it was no accident that free societies and coal-powered industries are found together.

1878

Queen Victoria 1837-1901

Introduction

In 1878, Alfred Marshall, one of the most influential British economists of his day, looked back over a hundred years of social progress. For some, the French Revolution (1789) was the key, for some the Communist Manifesto (1848). But Marshall believed that what had liberated the people and raised their standard of living to new heights was not political idealism, but coal and steam.

by Alfred Marshall 1842-1924

TO us, more than to any other nation on the globe, dearth of coal means material ruin. The enormous changes effected both here and elsewhere during the last hundred years by the aid of British coal have been described again and again.

We are perfectly familiar with such facts as that the population of this country has increased five-fold during that time: that the exports and imports have increased considerably over ten-fold: that in the interval portions of the globe amounting in area to something over a hundred times the area of the British Isles have been largely colonised and settled by British subjects, and are now the seats of ordered industry and intelligence comparable with those of the mother country herself: and so with endless other facts, all tending to show that a development of power and an increase of wealth have been witnessed in the past century, with which nothing whatever in the previous history of the world can be compared.

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Précis

In 1878, economist Alfred Marshall rehearsed the extraordinary benefits that had come to the British Isles from a century of coal mining. He mentioned three in particular: a fivefold increase in population, a more than tenfold increase in overseas trade, and the raising of peoples all over the world to a state of equal prosperity and education.

Clay Lane The Copybook