An Environmental History of Wildlife in England 1650-1950

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century – by the Civil War and Commonwealth. Although this struggle was
not, in any real sense, a triumph of the bourgeoisie over a feudal class, as
Marxist historians used to argue, it did create conditions under which a
market economy could flourish. In spite of the eventual Restoration of the
monarchy, the Civil War established a political system which guaranteed the
safety of property, under a parliament of the propertied, free from arbitrary
royal exactions and in a climate of internal peace. The accumulation of
capital could continue at the level of great landowners and merchants,
but also among the larger farmers and petty industrialists who made up
the ‘middling sort’ in early modern England. The seventeenth century saw
the consolidation of a ‘new class of bourgeoisie, intelligent but not always
educated, well-to-do but not always wealthy, articulate but not always
cultured, who owned property, manipulated money or followed one of the
growing professions’.^9 Such men were prepared to invest in new forms of
industrial development and also provided a ready market for sophisticated
consumer goods, encouraging for example the trades of clock- and
instrument-making, and gun-making, all of which utilized techniques –
such as precision boring and calibration – essential for the development
of industrial machinery, especially steam engines.^10 Also important was the
fact that the foreign policy of post-revolutionary governments was focused,
not simply on dynastic aggrandisement through European conflict, but on
securing advantages for English traders, and ultimately on the acquisition
of foreign colonies, particularly in the Americas – a major source of key
raw materials for industrialization, most notably cotton. Profits from
foreign trade were ploughed back into mining and manufacture to meet an
expanding home market.
While all these social, economic, cultural and ideological factors were
crucial in the development of the world’s first industrial economy, they
would have been insufficient in themselves without a key environmental
advantage: the availability of large quantities of coal, much of it lying at
no great depth. Whatever the importance of what Jacob has termed the
‘scientific culture’ of early modern England, industrialization was largely
the consequence of ‘crucial accidents of geography and juxtaposition’.^11
Moreover, the development of efficient steam engines in the middle and later
decades of the eighteenth century provided the motive power for the pumps
which allowed ever deeper deposits of coal to be reached.^12 It is true that
much early industry was not powered by coal at all: textile manufacture
was largely dependent on water power well into the nineteenth century, and
much contemporary effort was directed towards improving the design of
water wheels.^13 Famously, the earliest use of steam engines at Coalbrookdale
in Shropshire, a major centre of industrial innovation in the early and middle
decades of the eighteenth century, was to pump water to the top of a hill so
that it could be used to turn water wheels.^14 Nevertheless, coal had a key
role. It provided thermal power for a wide range of industrial processes, from
iron smelting to dyeing, which relied on high temperatures rather than on