Coal and the European Industrial Revolution

Kevin O'Rourke and Alan Fernihough

No _124, Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

Abstract: We examine the importance of geographical proximity to coal as a factor underpinning comparative European economic development during the Industrial Revolution. Our analysis exploits geographical variation in city and coalfield locations, alongside temporal variation in the availability of coal-powered technologies, to quantify the effect of coal availability on historic city population sizes. Since we suspect that our coal measure could be endogenous, we usea geologically derived measure as an instrumental variable: proximity to rock strata from the Carboniferous era. Consistent with traditional historical accounts of the Industrial Revolution, we find that coal exhibits a strong influence on city population size from 1800 onward. Counterfactual estimates of city population sizes indicate that our estimated coal effect explains at least 60% of the growth in European city populations from 1750 to 1900. This result is robust to a number of alternative modelling assumptions regarding missing historical population data, spatially lagged effects, and the exclusion of the United Kingdom from the estimation sample.

Keywords: Coal; Historical Population; Geography (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-01-15
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (65)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Coal and the European Industrial Revolution (2021)
Working Paper: Coal and the European Industrial Revolution (2014)
Working Paper: Coal and the European Industrial Revolution (2014)
Working Paper: Coal and the European Industrial Revolution (2014)
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