This lowtechmagazine website seems to have a lot of interesting articles. Also long articles, it's not a site for casual dipping. The linked article is about the use of fossil fuels in medieval Europe -- mostly peat in the Low Countries. We think of Olden Tymes as renewable, wind and water and muscle, but that's kinetic energy. Thermal energy, for heating cooking and industrial processes, is a bigger component, and people have long been using coal or peat for those. But sometimes at bigger scales than others.
Article argues that Flemish then Dutch 17th century prosperity was fueled by massive use of peat, with 10% of the farmland ending up cut, burned, and replaced by water. Peat fueled industry and heated homes, meaning that imported wood could be reserved for construction. Prosperity was also helped by all that wind power, and also by the easy transportation of a coastal flat windy country with a high water table. Many canals were cut for transporting peat, then used for transporting agriculture. And the act of cutting the peat often created the canal.
Then the cheap peat ran out, while the English had figured out how to use coal in industrial processes despite the contaminating sulfur, the Dutch imported English coal at unfavorable rates, industry shrank, and urbanization reversed.
At one level it's really interesting. At another it's depressing: we've been dependent on fossil fuels for longer than realized, and now I can't think about falling back to 19th century levels, whether due to peak oil or due to some post-apocalyptic scenario, without wondering about how much coal was being used for those levels.
(Modernity: steam engines and turbines -- and why do we keep using steam boilers, and not turbines turned by coal combustion gases? -- convert from thermal to kinetic energy, while electricity can convert kinetic energy into heat and light. So can friction, but surprisingly badly.)
See the
Comments
Hyperbole does not help your case here.
That's part of the point you say you're disagreeing with! Maybe we've misconstrued each other. I don't think I or the original article were saying Dutch wealth sprang out of nothing in the 17th century due solely to resources, just that the wind power and local water transport and local peat were resources whose importance had been overlooked. If the Dutch were wealthy going in, having resources to exploit made them even wealthier.
As for the Dutch getting coal, look back above:
"Then the cheap peat ran out, while the English had figured out how to use coal in industrial processes despite the contaminating sulfur, the Dutch imported English coal at unfavorable rates, industry shrank, and urbanization reversed."
They did get coal, but it was more expensive -- probably both more expensive than the peat and more expensive to the Dutch than to the English. And earlier, it was less useful, just raw heat full of contaminants; the Dutch had an advantage with peat. Later the peat ran out and coal became more useful, and the advantage shifted to the English -- also a wealthy maritime trading and industrializing country.
I know coal had been mined a long time; one of my old posts was about a 13th century poem complaining about industrial pollution, both noise and smoke IIRC.
mood: enthralled
Yeah, it's a fun site.