Floud R., Johnson P. The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Volume 1: Industrialisation, 1700-1860
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The extractive industries 431
Table 15.6 Index of coal and metal prices, 1700–1830
(Av. 1770–9 = 100 Flinn’s base for his coal index)
Coal 1700 = 95 1830 = 128 (Flinn, pp. 303–4)
Lead, pig 1709 = 70 1830 = 100 (Burt, pp. 303–5)
Tin, white 1700 = 107 1830 = 124 (Schmitz, pp. 293–5)
Copper, bar 1771 = 100 1830 = 117 (Schmitz, pp. 26, 269)
Iron, pig 1710 = 80 1830 = 85 (Hyde, pp. 44, 163)
Schumpter–Gilboy Consumer Goods Index (Mitchell and Dean 1962) 1700 = 100, 1823 = 128
Source: Hyde 1977; Schmitz 1979; Burt 1984; Flinn 1984.
early eighteenth century do not appear to support the contention of a de-
veloping fuel crisis during that period. New technologies that facilitated
thesubstitution of coal for charcoal in the reduction of metallic ores
might have been expected, other things being equal, to have produced a
surge in coal prices and a corresponding reduction in metal prices. No
such movements are observable (Schmitz 1979; Flinn 1984). Throughout
the period, all sectors of the industry appear to have seen near perfect
competition between producers, with only coal seeing periodic attempts
at price rigging. Mine owners generally acted as price-takers rather than
price-fixers. In 1798, for example, there were seventy-six active copper
mines in Cornwall alone, with no single producer accounting for more
than 12 per cent of total production and the majority less than 3 or 4 per
cent. The ‘ticketing’ system of ore sales, which remained the common
form for copper and much lead throughout the period, placed market
influence firmly in the hands of the smelters rather than the mine own-
ers. Similar conditions were encountered in the tin market, and, wherever
they could, ore purchasers conspired to minimise, rather than maximise,
ore prices in order to increase their own profits and maximise the size
of the market (Barton 1967; Burt 1984). It is possible that combinations
of smelters may have affected the metal markets for short periods dur-
ing the eighteenth century, but the increasing importance of imported
metals in the early nineteenth century would have undermined such
activities. Overall, it seems likely that prices were directly determined
by marginal costs at the level of production necessary to meet market
demand.
The sustained level of prices should not be taken to infer that there
were few technological improvements in the extractive sector. As will be
seen, there were several highly strategic innovations that affected all parts
of the sector during the period. The effects of those changes, however,
were absorbed by the increasing difficulties of extracting deeper, more
complex and lower-quality minerals. Coal and metal mining in Britain
had already been conducted for more than a millennium by the early
eighteenth century and the most easily accessible deposits had long since
been worked out. A high proportion of output was already coming from
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432 Roger Burt
mines deep enough to cause difficult technical problems, and even with
improved methods the obstacles to the major expansion of production
would be acute (Flinn 1984). In particular, deeper mining meant rising
drainage, ventilation and drawing costs that would constantly challenge
thebest technology of the day.
INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Like the manufacturing sector, the extractive industries saw major
changes in organisation and technology during this period – changes
that also helped to stabilise costs in the pursuit of ever more complex
and difficult mineral deposits. At the beginning of the eighteenth cen-
tury, large swathes of the extractive sector were still in an essentially
‘proto-industrial’ stage of development, dependent on the enterprise of
small groups of self-employed workers, operating mine and quarry leases
with little more than simple implements and hand powered machinery,
alongside parallel activities in agriculture. Certainly there were some
large-scale operations in all sectors of the industry but these were still
usually undertaken primarily by the mineral owners, acting either alone
or in concert with a few local merchants and tradesmen. During the next
hundred years, however, most of that industry was transformed into a
modern corporate structure, drawing capital from regional and national
markets to facilitate heavy fixed investment, employing a full-time labour
force, and dependent on specialised systems of professional management
(Burt 1998a).
As in other branches of modern capitalism, the foundations of these
new structures were established by institutional changes. Of these, the
most important were those relating to property rights. Mining, and to a
lesser extent quarrying, normally require high long-term fixed investment
to open and develop workings, and security and transferability of own-
ership define the parameters under which the industry operates. Studies
of the origins and evolution of mining law in the frontier areas of the
United States and Australia during the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury have clearly demonstrated its pivotal role in the development of the
industry (Libecap 1986), but in Britain the subject has received compar-
atively little attention. This is possibly because mining law here evolved
gradually from the early medieval period and there were no major de-
partures or innovations during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
to attract attention. Certainly mining saw nothing to compare with the
contemporary struggles over surface rights instigated in the agricultural
sector by the process of parliamentary enclosure.
In Britain, unlike continental Europe, common law had long held that
minerals were the private property of the owners of the surface. As has
been seen, they occasionally worked them on their own account or, with
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The extractive industries 433
rising costs and increasing risks, leased them to separate companies of
miners. The mineral owners sometimes took a share in these companies
but always derived an income from rents and royalties on their lessee’s
output. The level of the latter as a percentage of output generally de-
clined over the period but continued to generate high total revenues for
some throughout. In 1860, for example, the Duchy of Cornwall derived
an annual £24,885 from mining and quarrying, or slightly more than a
third ofthetotalestatereceipts. Twenty years earlier, with a smaller to-
tal income, mining and quarrying had contributed well over half of the
Duchy’s income (Burt 1987).
Over time, clear arrangements had evolved for the alienation and dis-
position of mineral property, by both the owners and the lessees. There
was, however, one important exception to these arrangements which, at
the end of the seventeenth century, threatened security of tenure in the
important non-ferrous sector of the industry. This was the crown’s claim
to all mines yielding the precious metals gold and silver. Throughout the
seventeenth century, these claims had been vested in the Company of
Mines Royal which periodically tried to exercise them. While gold was
rarely encountered in Britain, silver was commonly found in association
with lead and, to a lesser extent, copper. Any private company producing
those minerals stood in constant fear of being dispossessed. The limita-
tion, if not removal, of that threat, as much as any positive change in
thelaw,was an important precondition for establishing the necessary
confidence for large-scale private sector investment in the industry. It fi-
nally came in the 1690s, not through legislation, but by judicial decision,
and the ‘Terror of the Mines Royal’ was removed (Lewis 1967). The issues
surrounding the claims of royal prerogative can be seen in the context
of the recent discussion of the institutional and political changes set in
train by the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. The close and careful defini-
tion of royal prerogative rights to minerals – which were now far more
restricted than in any other part of Europe – was one element of those in-
stitutional changes that ushered in the financial developments that laid
thefoundations for the wider industrial revolution (North and Weingast
1989; Ekelund and Tollison 1997; Wells and Wills 2000).
Secure property rights could lay the foundations for large-scale en-
terprise but new corporate arrangements were necessary to bring them
to fruition. The financing of heavy investment in often highly specu-
lative mining operations presented particular problems. Large numbers
of investors needed to be brought together and arrangements made for
them to spread or limit their risks. Joint-stock organisation would have
been particularly attractive but, with the exception of the London Lead
Company and a few other smaller operations with their own parliamen-
tary charters, it was generally unavailable after the Bubble Act of 1720
(see chapter 8 above). Special arrangements were made within common
law for mining ventures to have a large number of partners, but they
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434 Roger Burt
frequently proved inadequate. The most successful method of circum-
venting the restrictions was found within regional codes of mining law.
In the Stannaries of Devon and Cornwall, for example, ‘cost book com-
panies’ were evolved from the early eighteenth century, which brought
together hundreds of large and small investors, and even offered means
of limiting individual liability. Also used outside of the south-west, they
brought extended investment opportunities to mining more than a hun-
dred years before such facilities were commonly available in other parts
of British industry. The difficulty of financing expensive and risky mining
operations led mining companies to be in the vanguard of the adoption
of joint-stock limited liability forms of company organisation from the
1850s (Burt 1998b).
Newmethods of company formation brought together the finance nec-
essary to establish large, highly capitalised operations, but it needed the
evolution of new management systems to operate them. With labour of-
ten accounting for up to two-thirds of total operating costs, the control
and motivation of the workforce presented a particular challenge. Like
theearly manufacturers, mining and quarrying enterprises in the early
eighteenth century had to grapple with the problem of disciplining a
still essentially proto-industrial labour force for the first time ( Jenkin
1927) – and they had the additional problem of ensuring regular and
diligent labour in the dark and labyrinthine conditions of underground
workings. Most sectors of the industry – certainly coal, iron, non-ferrous
metals and slate mining – tackled these problems through variations of
asystemofpartnership working, where groups of miners took respon-
sibility for working particular ‘pitches’ and pay was related to output.
Regular opportunities were given to partnerships to change pitches to
accommodate variations in their productivity and working conditions
(Samuel 1977; Benson 1980; Colls 1987). In some systems, the miners
became effectively sub-contractors, supplying all of their own materials
and taking a share in the risks of the enterprise. If the conditions and
productivity of their working areas improved, they received higher than
expected earnings; if these deteriorated, they carried part of the extra
cost of working them for the duration of their contract. The Cornish
‘tribute’ system was the most sophisticated of these arrangements. It tied
earnings either to the quality of the ore produced, or to the volume of
ground extracted. Under the patronage of John Taylor and Sons, an in-
fluential national and international consulting partnership, it became
theindustry standard for non-ferrous mining. Through the Taylors’ con-
nections with the metropolitan intellectual community, this system also
came to the attention of contemporary commentators such as Charles
Babbage, who advertised it widely as a model for labour arrangements
everywhere (Price 1891; Burt 1977).
Complex systems of performance-related pay make it extremely diffi-
cult to calculate general earnings levels. Pay varied between the different
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The extractive industries 435
kinds of underground work and the partnerships undertaking them, be-
tween mines and regions, and over time. Earnings were subject to nu-
merous deductions and payments in kind and were influenced by wide-
ranging levels of trade union activity, from increasing strength in some
coalfields to near invisibility in the metalliferous mining districts. In the
most general and tentative of terms, however, it would appear that the
average earnings level for miners of all types was around 12d. (1 shilling)
per day at the beginning of the eighteenth century and then increased
gradually over the century. The strongest growth was probably seen in
themost rapidly expanding coal districts and the slowest in the declin-
ing metal mining fields, such as the Somerset Mendips. By 1790 earnings
stood around 16d. a day for metal miners and 20d. to 30d. for coal min-
ers. During the ensuing inflationary war years they moved forward more
sharply, to around 24d. a day for metal miners and up to 50d. a day for
coal miners by 1816. They fell back slightly during the post-war deflation,
but by the late 1820s had recovered a roughly similar position. By the
1850s most metal miners were earning around 30d. a day and coal min-
ers probably had fallen back to about 40d. Overall, miners in all sections
of the industry appear to have done reasonably well during the industrial
revolution, with many seeing a significant real increase in their standard
of living. They all achieved considerably higher earnings than agricul-
tural workers everywhere and did at least as well as semi-skilled labour
in neighbouring manufacturing. Those who increasingly chose to capi-
talise on their skills in overseas mining districts did significantly better
again (see Burt 1984, Flinn 1984, Church 1986, Burt and Kippen 2000).
It was not only the labour force that required innovative management.
Careful account was also needed for the tens of thousands of pounds
spent each year on fuel, candles, timber, iron and steel, rope, leather, oil,
hemp, picks, shovels, drills, gunpowder, stationery and a host of other bits
and pieces. Here the professionalisation of management went hand-in-
hand with the evolution of accountancy and improved book keeping tech-
niques (Boyns and Richards 1995). Unlike manufacturing industry, where
management was commonly undertaken by owners and partners dur-
ing this period, mining companies evolved a dependency on specialised
professional managers from early in the eighteenth century. There were
several reasons for this. First, mining companies pioneered large-scale in-
dustrial organisation and were among the first to confront the problems
of managing a large, full-time, mixed-gender labour force and controlling
alarge financial turnover. Second, as has been seen, mining operations
were obliged to develop extended partnerships and independent compa-
nies from an early date, and even developed mechanisms for effectively
limiting investor liability. There was rarely the sense of private ownership
and commitment that was encountered in manufacturing and there was
agreater preparedness to accept employee management. Third, workplace
management was a particularly unpleasant task and one that needed to
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436 Roger Burt
be undertaken by people familiar with the job. Fourth, and again unlike
manufacturing industry, there was an available supply of good-quality
talent. Britain had no formal mining schools before the 1850s but it had
developed a highly efficient informal system of on-the-job ‘apprenticeship’
management training from an early date. Under-managers, drawn mainly
from the ranks of working miners, could progress by stages to overall ‘cap-
tain’ status, and captains themselves often established clear career struc-
tures as they moved from smaller to larger workings. At every stage the
criterion for progression was proven technical and commercial success.
Clearly, in practice, their competence and honesty were variable, but the
best were equal to the occasional few trained in the mining academies of
continental Europe. By the mid-nineteenth century they already filled
most managerial positions in mining districts throughout North and
South America, and they maintained their domination of the interna-
tional industry until they were finally displaced by the graduates of a
rising number of schools of mining after 1890 (Harvey and Press 1989).
TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE
Institutional development paved the way for technical changes in the
means and methods of mining – and was in its turn influenced by those
changes. The first of the great new technical innovations was the com-
paratively simple process of applying gunpowder to the breaking of rock.
In place of the laborious process of chipping and wedging the work face,
short holes were drilled, powder and fuse inserted, the hole blocked up
and the charge fired, ‘shooting out’ shattered rock or mineral. The pro-
cess was first developed in central Europe around the mid-seventeenth
century and it was gradually introduced into England in the decades
around the beginning of the eighteenth century. It was not until the sec-
ond quarter of that century, however, that it became common. When it
did, it revolutionised miner productivity on a scale never previously seen.
The new technique benefited all parts of the extractive sector, but its use
wasfar more constrained in coal mining, where the possibility of igniting
natural explosive gas gave it potentially disastrous consequences. Some
sections of the construction and earthy minerals industries, where pro-
ducers required large and carefully cut products, also made only limited
use of the technique.
The improvement in productivity brought about by the introduction
of gunpowder was considerable, but it was not sustained after the first
half of the eighteenth century. In all sectors of the industry, output per
underground worker remained little changed between the 1740s and the
introduction of the coal cutter, machine drilling and dynamite explosives
in the late nineteenth century. The mechanisation of surface dressing
operation had some marginal effect in facilitating the extraction of more
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The extractive industries 437
Table 15.7 Employment structure of Manchester cotton firms, 1841, and Cornish metal mines, 1837
Manchester cotton firms, 1841 Cornish metal mines, 1837
Number of Number of Number of Number of
Size of firm firms employees Share of total % mines employees Share of total %
Small 1–150 54 3,989 12.5 115 5,626 20.8
Medium 151–500 62 17,806 55.8 35 9,677 35.8
Large 501–1,000 8 5,408 17.0 5 3,317 12.3
Very Large 1001 & over 4 4,700 14.7 5 8,408 31.1
Total 12831,903 100 160 27,028 100
Source: Lemon 1838; Lloyd-Jones and Le Roux 1980.
mixed material but this was generally confined to the non-ferrous sector.
Everywhere major increases in output were produced mainly by a di-
rect multiplication of the numbers employed. There were two ways of
achieving this but both could incur expensive penalties. Either ‘adven-
turers’ (mining investors) could seek the lateral extension of working into
new, previously undeveloped areas, or they could follow the deposits to
greater depths. The former might be possible using existing extractive
practices but commonly involved much higher transport costs as mining
diverged from the established centres of consumption. The latter opened
new and often rich deposits but required high and continuing expendi-
tures on complex pumping, drawing and ventilation processes. Also, as
underground workings radiated out from deep shafts, an increasing per
centage of the work time and energy of miners was ‘lost’ in getting to
and from their workplaces.
While the problems of deep mining had been largely resolved for
metal mining by the mid-nineteenth century, and workings were going
down well over 1,000 feet, for coal the pursuit of seams at depth created
increasing dangers from gas and ground instability. This did not prohibit
deep development in coal mines – some pits in Yorkshire, for example,
matched the deepest Cornish mines with depths of well over 1,000 feet by
the1830s – but it was less common. Thus, in very general terms, the coal
and iron mining industries, which were able to exploit widely distributed
mineral reserves, tended to opt for lateral development, while the more
geographically restricted non-ferrous industry tried to expand production
by exploiting lodes at ever greater depths. In the early 1850s, for exam-
ple, there were over 2,000 collieries operating in England and Wales while
the number oftinandcopper mines amounted to no more than a few
hundred. Similarly, the production of some non-ferrous mining districts
tended to be dominated by the output of a small number of particularly
large producers, employing large numbers of men, women and children.
In 1853, for example, more than 50 per cent of Cornwall’s copper output
came from just 10 per cent of its active mines (Mineral Statistics 1853).
The data in Table 15.7 show that, as early as 1837, the proportion of
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438 Roger Burt
Cornish miners working in establishments with more than 500 workers
exceeded 43 per cent, whereas in the Manchester cotton mills at this
time only 32 per cent of workers were employed in enterprises of this
size (Lemon 1838; Lloyd-Jones and Le Roux 1980, 1982). At this date the
Consolidated and United Mines operation in Cornwall, employing 1,730
men, 869 women and 597 children, was possibly the largest single private
industrial employer in the country.
Care must be taken not to draw these lines too strongly however. From
thefirst years of the nineteenth century, several collieries working deep
seams in the north-east employed over 500 workers each, with at least
one exceeding 700, and in 1820 the average for each colliery in that area
was 342 workers (Flinn 1984). Similarly, not all non-ferrous mines worked
deep deposits. The lead mines of the Pennines and central Wales, for
example, commonly exploited shallow deposits with a fairly small labour
force. In the quarrying sector, the depth of workings was less relevant
but the need for heavy investment in a transport infrastructure could
also encourage large-scale working. Thus Richard Pennant employed 400
workmen in his slate quarry at Penrhyn in North Wales in the 1790s, and
by the mid-nineteenth century that number had risen to nearly 2,000
(Samuel 1977).
The introduction of gunpowder blasting in the early eighteenth cen-
tury not only eased the problems of ore extraction, but also greatly facili-
tated the sinking of shafts and the driving of underground tunnels. Here
it played a crucial role in helping to overcome the ‘drainage crisis’ that
wasbeginning to constrain the expansion of many mining districts from
theearly seventeenth century. As mines had sunk ever deeper to sustain
and increase output they had also progressed further below the water
table, and flooding or ‘unwatering’ problems had grown steadily. Bailing
and pumping equipment, of ancient and medieval design and still largely
hand powered, frequently proved inadequate to the task. One solution was
to drive long drainage levels (adits) under the deepest mine workings from
neighbouring low-lying land. Some such projects had been tried before
the advent of powder blasting, but progress had proved too slow and ex-
pensive. With powder, speed was greatly increased and drainage systems,
sometimes tens of miles in length, began to be pieced together in many
mining districts during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
turies. They made a major and lasting contribution to minimising mine
operating costs and can be regarded as a significant investment in the
capital infrastructure of many mining districts. However, they presented
only a partial solution to the drainage problem. It continued to take
years to bring the adits to completion and profitable mines might need
to be suspended for the whole of that time. Alternatively, where prim-
itive pumping systems could cope with the inflow of water, the mines
frequently had sunk below the adit level before it arrived, so greatly
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The extractive industries 439
reducing its final benefit. Clearly, there was a pressing need for better
and cheaper methods of pumping.
Pumping technology was revolutionised from the early eighteenth
century, not by any strategic improvements in the pumps themselves,
but in the machines that drove them. On the one hand, traditional
power sources, muscle and water, were greatly improved, and on the
other, an entirely new power source was rapidly introduced. It was the
mining industries that called forth and nurtured the steam revolution
that was later to sweep across the rest of the industrial system. From
Thomas Newcomen, the Devonian metal merchant, who was inspired
by thepumping problems of south Devon tin mines in the earliest years
of the eighteenth century, through James Watt and his attempts to im-
prove the efficiency and fuel consumption of atmospheric engines distant
from cheap fuel supplies, to the great Cornish steam engineers of the
early nineteenth century, it was the requirement of mines for a cheap
and reliable source of pumping power that drove one of the main lines
of development of steam technology (Barton 1969). Equally, steam power
had become the dominant source of motive power in mining districts
across the country long before it began to make any significant impact
in many manufacturing districts (Kanefsky 1979).
However, the general adoption of steam power within the extractive
sector did not follow an easy and regular path. In Cornish tin, copper
and lead mines the early up-take of Newcomen atmospheric engines was
constrained by their high fuel consumption and the elevated level of
local coal prices, which resulted not just from long-distance transporta-
tion costs, but also from a tax on coal brought by coastal shipping. The
suspension of those duties in 1739, together with efficiency improving
inventions in engine design and operation, provided the foundations for
amorerapidup-take, and by 1775 there may have been well over seventy
engines in the county. Fuel consumption on remote metal mining sites
everywhere continued to be a major issue, however, and the arrival of
thefar more efficient Watt engine was greeted with enthusiasm. Over
eighty Watt and similar ‘pirate’ engines were erected in Cornwall dur-
ing the last quarter of the eighteenth century, roughly matching all of
the atmospheric engines accumulated in the previous sixty years (Barton
1969). Many of the older atmospheric engines were displaced and found
new homes in the rapidly expanding coal industry, where plentiful sup-
plies of waste coal gave fuel costs a lower priority than reliability and
simplicity of operation. The continuing Cornish demand for ever greater
power and minimum fuel costs continued to force technology forward
and spawned a rapidly expanding local steam engineering industry in
theearly nineteenth century. That industry became a world leader in
thedesign and production of high-efficiency pumping engines. By the
middle of the nineteenth century its engines had spread beyond the
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440 Roger Burt
non-ferrous mining districts to the coal mines, where they replaced older
atmospheric and Watt engines as some mines sank below their pumping
capacity (Church 1986). Nevertheless many of those older engines contin-
ued to find use in parts of the coalfields until well into the twentieth
century.
Drainage was not the only use for steam power. In all areas, partic-
ularly the coal districts, winding engines and their associated headgear
became a characteristic feature of the landscape, as steam was applied to
themovement of both men and materials in rapidly deepening shafts.
Frequently, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the same
engines were arranged to work both pumps and winders, but by the mid-
nineteenth century an increasingly powerful range of expensive and spe-
cialised machinery was becoming the norm. From the early nineteenth
century, steam power was also applied to surface crushing and separat-
ing operations at metal mines, as well as to a widening range of fans and
other ventilation devices in coal mines (Hill 2000). Altogether, the use of
steam power in mining and quarrying was very extensive by the 1850s and
wasprobably equal to that in the rest of the industrial sector combined.
Unfortunately, there are no reliable counts of engines in use at this time,
or estimates of their total horsepower, but Kanefsky has conjectured the
position in 1870. He estimated that at that time there was 500,000 to
550,000 hp (horsepower) in coal mines, 50,000 hp in non-ferrous mines,
10,000 hp in iron mines and 10,000 hp in quarries (Kanefsky 1979). These
figures undoubtedly represented a considerable increase on the level at
themid-century but probably reflect reasonably accurately the balance of
distribution of steam usage between the different parts of the extractive
sector.
Although the increasing use of steam power usually takes centre stage
in histories of the extractive sector, the wider and more intensive use
of improved water power – itself an important natural resource – made
an equal, and sometimes much greater, contribution to the expansion of
output for most of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the
high and wet non-ferrous mining districts of the Pennines, Wales and the
south-west, for example, waterwheels and water pressure engines contin-
ued to provide a major source of power (Gill 2001). They not only proved
cheaper and easier to install, maintain and operate than steam engines
but also, with a power output sometimes in excess of 100 hp, were more
than equal to the pumping requirements of relatively shallow workings.
Almost everywhere they were used for powering crushing, washing and
separating machinery and started the substitution of mechanical for hu-
man power in all of the most arduous surface processes. Without those
changes, the potential to expand mined output would have been stran-
gled by the inability to process and concentrate run-of-mine material be-
fore despatch to customers and/or smelters. Even in the south-west, the
home of steam powered pumping machinery, waterwheels continued in
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