Ballast

In the now conventional story of the Industrial Revolution, tailored to fit a World-Systems model in which the colonies were un- or underdeveloped agricultural peripheries that provided raw materials to the mechanized metropole, international energy markets and their role in enabling European industrialization—indeed, the development of the steam engine itself—have been largely overlooked. Similarly ignored is the mechanization of colonial agriculture and urban centers (e.g., the industrialization of Egyptian cotton agriculture, or the development of Egypt's railway, which preceded the railways in most of Europe, and of Cairo's tramway, which preceded the London tramway) and the relation of this process to new influxes of fossil energy.Footnote ¹⁰

The World-Systems perspective tends to stress the difference between raw materials and processed goods, between agriculture and industry. The industrialization of England made it ever more dependent on imported raw materials such as Black Sea grain from southern Russia and the Ukraine, or Egyptian cotton—enter cereals and fabrics, exit finished goods and textiles. These neat divisions are disrupted, however, by a key commodity exported from England—coal. While coal may appear as an exception to the rule, it was in fact the exception that made the rule possible. As most imports, particularly those from the Black Sea and Mediterranean regions, were low cost and bulky, and most exports were expensive and far less bulky (whether articles of great value but small bulk and weight, such as drugs or dyes, or articles that were more heavy than bulky, including expensive iron products such as anchors, chains, and later, machinery, much of which was coal burning), outgoing ships would have to leave the British Isles half empty or in ballast.Footnote ¹¹

Coal export solved this problem, at least for ships traveling to the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean regions.Footnote ¹² Given that bulk was among the main variables through which the difference between raw and processed manifested, coal equalized this differential by enabling a return trade. In a British trading system focused on carrying homebound cargos, coal was a readily available item that at the very least paid a ship owner's expenses and could increasingly find customers around the world. As the 19th-century economist William Stanly Jevons put it, “coal is to us that one great raw material which balances the whole mass of the other raw materials we import.”Footnote ¹³ By the 1860s, British coal was consumed in almost every considerable port in the world. Beyond the excellent quality of Newcastle and Welsh steam-coals, an important explanatory factor, according to Jevons, was the fact that “coal is carried as ballast or makeweight and is subject to the low rates of back carriage.”Footnote ¹⁴

For a British-led global commerce to be able to exist, then, a world had to be made to consume British coal, one encompassing not only Western Europe but no less importantly its peripheries. The Ottoman Empire was a ready partner for such world-making. In the last decades of the 18th century, the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean in general saw a severe crisis in their existing energy regimes, which largely depended on animal power. Between 1780 and 1810 a series of epizootics and weather changes, compounded by wars and struggles for power (such as the nearly three-decades-long “Austrian-Russian-Ottoman Danube Waltz,” the 1798 French invasion of Egypt, and internal revolts),Footnote ¹⁵ devastated the domesticated animal population of the Mediterranean, Ottoman Egypt, and the rest of the Ottoman Empire.Footnote ¹⁶ The crisis prepared the ground for coal not simply by creating a void, but by laying the foundations for the centralized state, which offered support systems for, and in turn drew sustenance from, large-scale energy transformations, especially ones requiring interaction with foreign entities.

Floating Experiments

The Ottomans first encountered steam power while facing the barrel of a gun. The first steamer ever built and used for naval combat was tailored to battle an Ottoman fleet in the Mediterranean under Greek flags during the Greek War of Independence. The ship (and its coal) was brought from England, but in 1826 it was a novelty even there. When a conservative British admiralty finally introduced fighting steamers to the Royal Navy during the 1840s, a decade and a half had already passed since British engineers and soldiers of fortune, and colonizing corporations such as the East India Company (EIC), began experimenting with this technology away from the metropole.

The construction of this pioneering ship, the Karteria, and that of the squadron of several other steamers meant to join it, reveals some of the conditions for scientific progress in this semiprivatized, interimperial environment. The Greeks entrusted the project to the engineer Alexander Galloway, whose son was employed as an engineer by Mehmet Ali, the Ottoman governor of Egypt. Mehmet Ali's own son, Ibrahim Pasha, commanded one of the fleets fighting the Greek secessionists for the Ottoman sultan. With the Galloways providing engineering services to both sides of the conflict, Galloway senior deliberately delayed as long as possible the completion of the ships.Footnote ¹⁷ The Karteria's eventual completion and deployment in the Mediterranean was a major reason for the collapse of the Greek-Ottoman ceasefire and for the Battle of Navarino in 1827. The ship was slow and inefficient; however, with the ability to revolve using pedals, it could fire accurately and quickly from all sides. The ship's furnaces, maneuverability, and stability also allowed the use of heated shells from sea. Until that point, it had been coastal batteries that usually fired hot shots at wooden ships rather than the other way around. During her first year at sea, Karteria fired 18,000 hot shots, mainly at shore fortifications.Footnote ¹⁸ If the Karteria fired the opening shot in overturning received definitions of land and sea, we shall see that this complication was a feature of steamers generally. In 1828 the Ottoman navy purchased its first steamer, the British-designed Swift. One of its first tasks was to tow back to harbor the crippled Ottoman ships that participated in Navarino.Footnote ¹⁹

These early experiences with foreign and domestic naval steam power were the main context for the emergence of coal mining, import, and proliferation in the Ottoman Empire. The first and most significant coalfield in the empire was in Zonguldak, on the shores of the Black Sea. As Donald Quataert has suggested, the story that it was discovered in 1829 by a local returning to Zonguldak from military service in the Istanbul naval yards is probably apocryphal, for it is unlikely that the local population did not know about the exposed seams beforehand.Footnote ²⁰ However, the spuriousness of this founding myth throws into relief the belligerent context in which the Ottoman state began to show interest in fossil fuels.Footnote ²¹

Subsequent phases of the introduction of steamers into the Ottoman navy likewise coincided with the development of coalmining. It took until the late 1830s for the first steamers to be built in the Ottoman shipyards.Footnote ²² One of these ships sailed in 1840 to explore another coalfield near the Black Sea port of Pendaraclia, and it even served as a floating laboratory to gauge the coal's quality, using some of the collected mineral specimens to generate steam.Footnote ²³ Only in 1847 did the Ottoman fleet formally convert to steam when a new steamer squadron was built, prompting the initiation of active mining in Zonguldak one year later. In 1865 the mines were officially put under the supervision of the Ministry of Seafaring.

The Karteria and the Swift marked a significant development on the British side as well. Since the 1730s, patent and tax regimes as well as border controls had restricted the proliferation of English steam engines and technical drawings. In the 1830s, feeling that its steam engine industry had matured, Britain started changing its policy and selling the technology along with its energy source.Footnote ²⁴ The above steamers, for example, arrived with English captains and engineers who helped to train local officers. This promotion of the British energy sector through the proliferation of coal-burning technologies and personnel went hand in hand with the reform of tax structures and the abolition of fees on coal export. In 1831 Britain cut in half its coal export duty, yielding a 109% increase in tonnage exported abroad. A further increase of 320% followed the cancelation of duties one decade later.Footnote ²⁵

Newcomers found it difficult to compete with the mature British industry. While the Ottomans were attempting to master the skill of steamship building, as is apparent from the abovementioned experiments, it soon became obvious that a new Ottoman steamer would be obsolete by the time of its launching. (In 1836, the Indian Fleet reached similar conclusions.)Footnote ²⁶ This realization led to a policy of favoring acquisitions over production.Footnote ²⁷ As early as the mid-1840s, the Ottoman fleet was regularly buying its steamers, mainly from England.Footnote ²⁸ While these steamships were certainly not the first or only Western finished goods purchased by the Ottomans, they were unique given the “defensive developmentalism” employed by the empire's rulers, who begrudgingly accepted other dependencies in order to attain military and naval independence.

But as the activation of the Zonguldak coalfield suggests, the Ottomans did not slip toward what we would today call “coal dependence” without awareness or resistance. (“Dependence” is a loaded term. I do not use it here in the geopolitical sense—the British Empire was, as I argue, itself dependent on this ottoman dependence—but to point to coal's growing irreplaceability in various spheres of activity.) Since the empire's entry into the age of coal, the central government and provincial rulers understood that reliance on foreign minerals and expertise would be costly in multiple senses. An 1854 report submitted to the sultan's personal treasury (which at the time managed the Zonguldak mines) stated that “the annual coal production of the Ereğli mines is estimated at about 400,000 kantars [22,580 tons]. Since the annual need of the imperial docks, the armory, the mint, the gunpowder factory, the fez factory, other factories, and steamships totals 1,886,000 kantars, except the mentioned 400,000 kantars, 1,486,000 kantars of coal should be purchased from England.”Footnote ²⁹

Thus, soon after the activation of Ottoman coal mining, and alongside constant attempts at improving it, the central government and several provincial governors began exploring and developing imperial coal sources that would promote energy independence. This was part of a wider overhaul of energy resource management, including the introduction of scientific forestry in 1840.Footnote ³⁰

As in other fields—especially the art of war making on land and sea, but also agriculture, education, law, and medicine—the sultan took his cue from the governor of Egypt, Mehmet Ali (r. 1805–49), who was the first to begin geological surveys and coal searches, albeit with limited results.Footnote ³¹ Egypt's hunger for coal exceeded that of any other province in the empire. It was the most technically advanced, was subjected to the most European intervention, and lacked any known energy sources of its own. Consequently, and due to the dwindling availability of Ottoman wood over the course of the 19th century, Egyptian khedives sought opportunities for coal production even beyond the territories under their direct control.Footnote ³² During Mehmet Ali's Syrian campaign, the Egyptian army explored coal in Mount Lebanon.Footnote ³³ Mehmet Ali's heirs ʿAbbas and Ismaʿil also dispatched geological expeditions and made discoveries of coal in Upper Egypt, but no mines were subsequently developed.

In the 1860s coal explorations were conducted elsewhere in the empire as well, including on the Island of Semandirek, in the villages of Marmara and Güzelşehir, around Draç in the Tiran Mountains, and in Resmo in Crete. In official correspondence, the benefits of internal coal production were contrasted with the disadvantages of import. Consider an imperial decree addressed to the governorships of Saida, Salonica, Yanya, and İşkodra, which also captures Egypt's catalyzing role:

But resource scarcity limited the possibilities of such empire-wide cooperation, instead animating tension. Cairo's growing political and economic independence from Istanbul over the 19th century manifested in its decreasing dependence on Anatolian wood and, given the dearth of alternatives, its increasing reliance on British coal. In 1831 Egypt's governor set out on a military campaign to wrest control of Syria from the Ottoman government. He was driven largely by the desire to acquire wood for naval building and industrial consumption in the mint, foundries, and armory, and to fortify his hold on Egypt.Footnote ³⁵ The adventure ended in 1840–41 with the British (steamer-aided) bombardment of Acre. The last scramble of the age of wood was settled by a decisive demonstration of steamer power.Footnote ³⁶ During the rest of the long 19th century, locally mined nonfossil energy sources and coal supplied only a small portion of the growing demand for energy, making British coal imports more, rather than less, indispensable. While increased production in existing local mines, geological surveys in search of new ones, and energy-saving and scientific management had significant results, demand expanded much more rapidly than supply. The Ottomans responded by allocating their limited local resources to specific spheres, prioritizing, for example, military energy independence by supplying a strategically selected network of coal depots with Ottoman coal.Footnote ³⁷

The bombardment of Acre was a powerful display of steam power. Another spectacular example was offered in 1840 by the EIC iron steam- and sail-powered ship the Nemesis, which was the first steamer to sail around the Cape of Good Hope and played a central role in the First Opium War by crushing enemy ships and coastal defenses. The Nemesis' success came as a surprise even to her operators, who saw in the conflict “an extremely favorable opportunity for testing the advantages or otherwise of iron steam-vessels.”Footnote ³⁸

While Britain ruled the waves long before the age of steam, its advantage on the high seas was limited by the supremacy of small enemy ships in their native shallow waters. The Nemesis helped to change this situation: her hybrid construction allowed her to cross oceans with sail, while her shallow draught and steam engine allowed her to travel and maneuver rivers in order to engage other vessels and onshore targets. This hybridity was informed not only by the precedent of the Karteria and the secession of Greece, but also by the conquest of another Ottoman territory: Aden. In 1839, the year of the Nemesis' construction, an EIC fleet of sailships sent to capture this key coal depot was severely delayed by dead calm and almost missed the battle. The incident was used to promote the introduction of auxiliary steam engines in sail ships, and the builders of the Nemesis were among the first to take this into account when they constructed the ship.Footnote ³⁹

Kenneth Pomeranz has famously stressed the importance of British coal and of coal's proximity to waterways to the emergence of a “great divergence” between England and China circa 1800. But as Pomeranz also acknowledges, England and China were not independent units that could simply be compared to one another. These two empires were connected via various intermediaries, such as the Ottoman Empire, through which the coal economy could be extended eastward while other influences could travel westward. If the Nemesis was inspired by lessons from Aden, Chinese Muslims, in the wake of the Opium Wars during the 1840s, began to re-establish connections with Egyptian and other Ottoman centers.Footnote ⁴⁰

The Nemesis illustrates how new kinds of military power were integrated into a coal-based economic system. “It is here worthwhile to remark,” the ship's captain pointed out, “that coal is found in great abundance in China.”Footnote ⁴¹ The abundance of coal and other minerals, including “all that is most requisite for a commercial and manufacturing people,” was exactly what interfered with sustaining a return trade, as the Chinese desired nothing the British could offer, save their silver. Opium was forcefully promoted to solve the resulting payment imbalance. Like the addictive substance it helped promote, the Nemesis' performance stimulated steam power and a habit for coal by providing a sample that would create a new dependence. And as they did in the Ottoman case, British military and commercial intervention eventually triggered the development of coalmining in China beginning in the 1880s (notably, after coal lost its ballasting function, a point I explain below).Footnote ⁴² In sum, while the different geographies of coalfields were no doubt an important factor in understanding the timing and shape of industrialization in the English, Ottoman, and Chinese cases, when viewed comparatively another connective step is required. As we will see, British coalonialism advanced via waterways located near English coalmines to seas, to oceans, and finally to land. Whether coalonialism spread by sea or over land, its key bridgehead eastward was the Ottoman Empire.

Considering the Karteria, the Swift, and the Nemesis together paints a complex picture of the origins, conduct, and outcomes of British steam-based naval power and of its relations to existing and new markets. Britain's gradual shift to combat steamers beginning in the 1840s was animated by experiments conducted in various frontiers by private and semiprivate actors, and even non-British actors. The outsourced origins of the modern rule of the waves mixed various schemes of creating addiction, soft and spectacular power, and the types of fuel that best suited the weight and bulk differential of a particular international trade. The dynamism of experiment and hybridity was not confined to the sea alone, as the stimulation of Ottoman coal mining and developments in Ottoman geology demonstrate. We now turn to the extension of this “coalonialism” inland.

Deposits

As the Nemesis and the Karteria demonstrated, steamers transformed the relation between sea and land, allowing the projection of naval power onshore in new ways. The coal deposits that enabled the operation of steamers offered similar possibilities. If early steamships could be regarded as floating laboratories, experimentation also informed the creation and then expansion of a system of evenly spaced coastal coal stores in newly acquired territories, many of which were acquired specifically to offer footholds for coalonialism.

Steam navigation put in motion new flows of humans (sailors, pilgrims, prostitutes, slaves, colonial officials) and other life forms (from microbes to camels), goods (legitimate and contraband), and ideas. These flows passed through ports that now necessarily included coal depots. Depots were the hubs of submarine telegraph cables, customs stations, and coastguard, quarantine, and border control. The provision and regulation of coal in these sites thus coincided with other forms of regulation—press censorship, espionage, quarantine, political surveillance, counter-smuggling policing, and religious guidance, all of which often reinforced (and, less frequently, interfered with) one another. For example, the Ottoman Tobacco Company collaborated with the coastguard in the prevention of smuggling; Islamic reformers and quarantine officials shared anxiety about the “twin infections” of popular Islam and contagious disease.Footnote ⁴³ For all of these reasons, depots were loci of intense interaction and conflict. To an extent, they were deliberately created this way. As sites where violent flare-ups justified localized military interventions, depots offered ample opportunity for extraterritorial control. Paradoxically, stabilizing a constantly expanding infrastructure of coaling involved triggering and then violently suppressing structural and political vulnerabilities and fissures in the environments where it had taken root.

The establishment of coaling stations witnessed stops and starts. Locations originally perceived as favorable were sometimes later abandoned due to ill-fitting topography, harbor-depth, weather conditions, changing political and economic circumstances, changing naval technologies, and disease. The British and other European nations often had to negotiate with local forces in order to establish and maintain such stations, whether through the permit, lease, or purchase of the designated land.Footnote ⁴⁴ Thus, while locations such as Aden were eventually taken by force,Footnote ⁴⁵ establishing other stations was often a complicated affair.Footnote ⁴⁶

The first British coal depot in Ottoman lands was constructed in Mocha, a port city that Mehmet Ali had secured for the Ottoman sultan. Following a contrived casus belli and the British bombardment of the city from the sea in 1820, EIC agents were granted land and exemption from anchorage fees, which proved significant for traders and sailing ships stocking this store with coal or moving it from there to Aden, and for the steamers that used this coal.Footnote ⁴⁷

It soon became apparent that Mocha offered scaffolding for a rapidly expanding system that eventually would make the city's station redundant.Footnote ⁴⁸ Over the course of the 1820s, the EIC, which over the previous two decades had gained control of the entire Indian subcontinent, created coal stores in a reversed domino effect in Aden, Jeddah, al-Qusayr, and Suez. The depots, which were associated with this Indian universe and sometimes formally belonged to it (Aden itself was annexed to the Bombay Presidency in 1839), emerged much in the fashion of the company's costal footholds in the subcontinent—“factories” and trading posts that were not formed with the objective of colonial conquest or direct rule but opened the door to both. Coal stores offered physical enclaves which matched the economic and legal enclaves that allowed joint stock corporations such as the EIC to operate overseas. Sailing boats and camel caravans stocked the new depots with coal overland.Footnote ⁴⁹ Much of this coal came from England, but whenever possible local sources were tapped too. Reports and rumors of the existence of coal near African and Middle Eastern coastlines generated European commercial interests, motivating several British and French expeditions.Footnote ⁵⁰ As much as they formed the nodes of a maritime network, depots also required an interfacing grid of new overland connections and routes, and they extended the economic, political, and military influence of their users deeper and deeper inland through railways, tramways, telegraphs, and water pumps.

Because these technologies facilitated the movement and operation of policemen, judges, inoculation officials, and irrigation inspectors, we may regard the expansion of coal import as a measure for the expansion of the power of the state vis-à-vis its population, and the integration of the coal importing regions as a subsidiary counterpart in the global economy. Consider Egypt (which should be regarded not as representative of Ottoman provinces during the period, but as a trailblazer): beginning in the 1830s, new depots on the shores of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, initially servicing only steamers on both sea ends of the newly opened “Overland Route to India,” started supplying British coal to inland Egypt, fuelling its Nile steamers, its cotton industry, and later its railways in an exponential upsurge (see Figure 1).Footnote ⁵¹

FIGURE 1.

British coal imported to Egypt through Alexandria (in metric tons). Source: Richard Cowling Taylor, Statistics of Coal: The Geographical and Geological Distribution of Fossil Fuel (Philadelphia, Pa.: J. W. Moore, 1848), 623.

The experimental spirit that animated the development of steamers also characterized the formation of the depot system. Consider the takeover of Aden, one of the largest and most significant British coal depots. The Hugh Lindsey, built to experiment the practicability of Red Sea steam navigation, left Bombay in 1830 so heavy and low in the water that it was nicknamed “the Water Lily.” The ship carried coal piled on deck, in the saloon, and even in the cabins to ensure sufficient supply. After eleven days it arrived in Aden with only six hours of supply remaining. The experiment marked this port as optimal for a depot station (and as one of the only suitable harbors). Technological advances over the following decade allowed the Bombay-to-Suez route to function with the provision of a single coal depot, at Aden.

The political problem arising from the fact that Aden was formally part of the Ottoman Empire was cracked in 1839 based on the pattern established in Mocha of provoking conflict and then resolving it via naval bombardment.Footnote ⁵² The takeover indicated to the Ottomans that the establishment of foreign coal depots might result in more substantial forms of foreign control (see Figure 2). Aden was evoked later in the century as a cautionary tale promoting Ottoman energy independence.Footnote ⁵³ A few decades later, explanations invoking the contingency of the takeover gave way to a conspiracy theory that the company had intended on seizing the port from the beginning.Footnote ⁵⁴

FIGURE 2.

Coal depots of the overland and sea routes between England and India, 1820–1914, based on multiple sources.

Shipshape

If the advent of the steamer reconfigured Ottoman geography, the changed geography constantly reshaped the design and function of steamships. This can be demonstrated by the grandest task to which coal was put in the Ottoman Empire: digging the Suez Canal, a feat that required a concentration of mechanical energy which, according to the canal's promoter Ferdinand de Lesseps, “has had no precedent in the history of industry.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Besides shortening the route to the East, the canal evened and reduced the distance between coaling stations. This allowed a European steamer en route to India to take coal at Gibraltar, Malta, Port Said, and Aden, thereby reducing the size of its coal holds and increasing its cargo capacity.Footnote ⁵⁶

In the decades following the canal's inauguration in 1869, this shortcut and the rearrangement of coaling stations promoted not only the route to the East via Egypt but also the steamer (as opposed to sail ships, which still circled Africa). The expanding system of coal depots and canals supported the development of ships that carried their energy source onboard rather than harvesting it from the air. This energy source was a fuel whose ballasting properties made it more valuable than the free energy of the wind. But the transition away from wind created a problem. Because solving this problem was also the foundation of the eventual replacement of coal with oil, it is best illustrated with an example from the beginning of the 20th century. During the first years of the 1910s, just before the transition away from coal, a cargo steamer of average tonnage rose about 1.3 inches per day owing to coal consumption.Footnote ⁵⁷ Available cargo space thus changed along a ship's voyage. The more ports where cargo could be picked up, and more expedient coaling, meant a more profitable voyage. Moreover, fluctuation in the water was a main factor in the development of various water-ballasting systems: pumps connected to the ship's engine linked the burning of coal and the flow of sea water, compensating for a steamer's rise owing to its depleting coal.

If water ballasting was developed in response to the need to regulate a steamer's weight as it moved between multiplying coal and cargo stores (think of the pioneering Hugh Lindsey), other design and technical features were informed by particular characteristics of the east–west voyage. For example, since the inauguration of the Suez Canal, this narrow waterway played a key role in promoting certain kinds of ships, such as screw-propelled steamers, and demoting others, such as side-wheelers, whose propellers could hit the banks, or sail ships, which depended on costly towing services for the entire stretch between Suez and Port Said. The canal itself kept changing: during its first decades it was continuously widened and deepened, a process tailored to and informing the changing size of the screw-propelled steamers that passed between its banks.

Together with considerations emanating from the canal's topography, other less physical features informed the shape of ships. For one, there were significant price differences for coal east and west of the canal. During 1911 and 1912, for instance, the price per ton of Welsh coal nearly doubled when passing between Port Said and Suez. As long as the canal's depth forced heavy ships, when fully loaded, to replenish their supplies east of the canal, light steamers had an advantage in terms of both money and coaling time.Footnote ⁵⁸ The canal's gradual deepening thus propelled an increase in the size of steamships as much as the other way around.

The growth of the steamer also corresponded to changes in its function. Early schemes for “steam communication” in the Indian Ocean were designed primarily to expedite and regularize the transfer of letters rather than goods.Footnote ⁵⁹ Most of a ship's free space was devoted to carrying coal, and what it lacked in cargo-carrying capacity it made up for in its ability to break away from the itineraries of the monsoon. Before submarine telegraph cables connected the subcontinent to Europe in the 1860s and 1870s via what were also locations of key coal depots—Aden, Suez, and Malta—steamer lines were the only means for guaranteeing regular communication between the metropole and its key colony. This changed with submarine telegraphy, an innovation that was itself made possible by the steady and linear motion of steamships and their ability to deploy cables evenly and cost-effectively. The 1870s and 1880s, coming after the setting of two major intercontinental cables as well as the opening of the Suez Canal, were the heyday of the sailing ship.Footnote ⁶⁰ As the steamer was searching for new agendas and purposes, the large cable-deploying steamships (whose size enabled them to carry cables long enough to tie together continents) led the way toward increasing size. The combination of compound steam engines that from the 1850s increased fuel efficiency, the enlargement of steamers enabled by the widening and deepening of the canal, the constant proliferation of coal and cargo stores, and finally, the expediting of the coaling process, contributed to an expansion of cargo space and the eventual obsolescence of sailing ships.

As part of these changes, the coaling process at each of the key coal stores was expedited enormously. In the virgin 1830 voyage of the Hugh Lindsey, it took four days to load one hundred tons of coal in Suez; in 1834 this quantity (providing fuel for ten days) took two and a half days to load.Footnote ⁶¹ By the turn of the century, the task on average took one hour.Footnote ⁶² Such acceleration required the concentration of heavers at coaling ports and new schemes for coordinating them. The fact that depots were hubs of information and connectivity facilitated this assignment. Telegraphs and telephones allowed regulating the flow of workers on the macro- and micromanagement levels, respectively, by, for example, facilitating the recruitment of seasonal workers and telephonically informing sleeping heavers of a ship's arrival.Footnote ⁶³

Coal-lapse

If during most of the 19th century the ballasting function of coal made it increasingly more attractive than wind, in the first decade of the 20th century it was water that made coal redundant by replacing it as ballast. In 1921, the journal Coal Age stated that “it should be understood from the outset that coal exports can never again mean to any country quite as much as they meant to England around the beginning of the 20th century. At that time there hardly was a portion of the globe where British coal could not be found. But since then important changes have occurred.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The first of these changes was a shift to the double bottom ship construction, which allowed the use of water ballast in a way that made using coal for this purpose redundant.Footnote ⁶⁵ Starting in 1844, the steam engine in the new screw propelled ships pumped seawater into a compartment directly underneath it to compensate for lost weight during the voyage. From here it was a small leap to begin filling these tanks, conveniently located under the boilers, with a liquid such as oil, which could serve as both fuel and ballast. But a small leap is still a leap, which requires motivation to be carried out. The incentive was provided by what came to be considered the weakest link in the coaling process: its dependence on a human element.

The evermore uniform and efficient infrastructures of the coal system depended on, and in turn produced, workforces that were themselves increasingly integrated, efficient, and well informed, including miners, heavers, stokers, and ground transportation workers. These members of the working classes were positioned in critical junctions where information and power flowed, and where their circulation could be disrupted. In the eyes of policymakers, the unprecedented agency of this interconnected and increasingly unionized human element made it the weakest and most dangerous link in the coaling system. As argued in 1909 by Herbert Stanly Jevons, nephew to the prophet of what today we would call “peak coal”—an economic theory reflecting the mid-19th-century belief in limited resources typical of agrarian society—the only limit to the coal regime was organized labor and strikes, which in the first decade of the 20th century continuously disrupted the stability of the global coal system.Footnote ⁶⁶ In this concluding section, I examine this element of the coal system in the moment that it gave way to oil. Focusing on the human element couches as “politics” different potentials and foreclosed possibilities in different parts of the coalonial grid.Footnote ⁶⁷

Similar to other features of the coal system, workers' strikes had interconnected and often synergic effects. It was not uncommon for strikes to erupt concurrently in faraway parts of the system. This was the case in 1893–94, when strikes erupted simultaneously in the coalmining sector of Colorado, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia in the United States and in the Tankersley colliery in England. These strikes also erupted in tandem with the famous strikes of the Port Said coal-heavers, themselves closely related to unrest among the Suez Canal workers, which in turn radiated “east of the Canal” to provoke unrest in Aden and Perim in the Red Sea region.Footnote ⁶⁸ The strikes, which the Ottoman government followed closely in the press and through informants at the coaling stations,Footnote ⁶⁹ also coincided with strikes by the Istanbul porters and the lighter boatmen guild against the French-owned Istanbul Quay Company during the tumultuous year of 1893 (the capital's quays were transformed over the course of the century from timber to mainly coal repositories).Footnote ⁷⁰

However, and again like the flows of coal, the effects of these intersecting waves of labor unrest were different in the metropole than they were in the peripheries. The global shape of the coal system was characterized by several imbalances and inequalities. First, in the Ottoman Empire coal was much more expensive, and it was also subject to more extreme price fluctuation compared to coal in Western Europe. By the early 1860s, when much of the colonial and semicolonial world had already become a captured market for English coal, Jevons estimated that “the best coal is put on board at Newcastle for 9s. per ton. Before it reaches France, it is about trebled; in the Mediterranean ports, Genoa, or Leghorn, it is quadrupled, while in many remote parts of the world coal cannot be purchased for less than 3l. or 31. 10s. per ton.”Footnote ⁷¹

Coal prices in the Ottoman Empire were informed not only by the increase in price as one moved further away from the source; starting in the 1840s they were determined by racketeering and contraband as well.Footnote ⁷² Alongside attempts to establish and regulate a quoted price, there were constant efforts to sell both English and local coal at a higher price by hoarding it and manipulating its regulation.Footnote ⁷³ Significantly lower coal tariffs for foreigners inside the Ottoman Empire made price differences into a bone of contention and frustration between locals and foreigners.Footnote ⁷⁴

The great British coal strikes in the years leading up to the 1911 decision to abandon coal concurred with a wave of labor unrest in the Ottoman Empire, which saw the fiercest struggles in the producing, transporting, and receiving ends (for instance, by Zonguldak miners, Istanbul coal-heavers, and Egyptian tramway and railway workers, respectively) of the coal industry. Global historians who have taken note of the concurrence of labor struggles have associated them with cycles in the world economy and have tended to ascribe their diverging aspirations, tactics, and outcomes to historical contingency rather than connectivity per se.Footnote ⁷⁵ Yet an important reason for the different articulations of this global wave of unrest was the fact that, as Timothy Mitchell has argued, British miners at the producing center of the coal system had greater power than workers positioned at its nodes.Footnote ⁷⁶ What follows unpacks Mitchell's perspective with regard to Ottoman miners and coal heavers, complicating it by adapting it to a system whose more dynamic segments were the semiperipheries and semicenters.

In 1906, after a House of Lords verdict in South Wales Miners' Federation vs. Gla-morgan Coal Co. limited collective bargaining, the British parliament passed the Trade Disputes Act, a key piece of legislation in establishing the right to strike. Outside of the United Kingdom, however, international coal companies could still get away with using practices that were falling out of favor at home. For example, in 1909 the same Glamorgan Co. used its time-tested union-busting strategies in the Ottoman Empire, bringing in blackleg coal heavers as replacements, with official sanction.Footnote ⁷⁷ The architecture of the system promoted such tactics: unlike miners, coal heavers, who were usually unskilled seasonal workers, were easily replaceable. As in previous heavers' strikes, such as in Port Said in 1882 and 1893, coal companies could resort to heavers from the neighboring stores (in those cases from Malta and Aden).Footnote ⁷⁸ Indeed, official Ottoman intermediaries sometimes proposed resorting to blackleg heavers for ending labor disputes, offering official reassurance that the security of companies using such strike breakers would be guaranteed.Footnote ⁷⁹

Whereas the reversal of the House of Lords decision in the House of Commons was a triumph for participatory representative politics, the Ottoman side of these global disruptions did not share the same fate. During the second half of 1908, and only several months before the 1909 Glamorgan-Ottoman dispute, 111 strikes erupted in the Ottoman Empire's coal sector and other industries—about double the number of strikes recorded throughout the empire during the previous half century.Footnote ⁸⁰ The transnational character of these strikes was clear to the actors involved in them. The governor of Ereĝli, for example, attributed strikes in his region to “foreign coal workers who were aware of the labor movements in European countries” (in that particular case, a subsequent investigation revealed this to be untrue), as did the Ereĝli Company during another occasion that year.Footnote ⁸¹ What came to be called the Young Turk Revolution reinstated the Ottoman parliament and constitution that had been suspended by the sultan in 1878. However, the Young Turks deflected popular unrest away from representative parliamentary politics and toward an understanding of government as controlled by an enlightened elite.Footnote ⁸² In August 1909, a strike law was passed that prevented workers who provided essential public services from striking without official sanction.Footnote ⁸³ Moreover, manifestations of labor politics were often similarly rearticulated by nationalist middle classes as anticolonial or anti-imperial politics in ways that absorbed their energies and deflected their agendas toward national (and hence bourgeois) goals.

Differences in the interface between labor and parliamentary politics informed the possibilities of addressing labor militancy. While strikes were forcefully suppressed everywhere in this period, it was easier to do so in Europe's periphery than in England. Fierce police action and the arrest of striking miners and heavers were common practices in the Ottoman Empire. This was the case in 1906, 1908, and 1913 with the striking Zonguldak miners, and in 1911 with the striking coal heavers of Istanbul.Footnote ⁸⁴ These strikes coincided with miners' strikes in Western Europe, and particularly in England and Wales. But there, when the young Home Secretary Winston Churchill merely garrisoned troops in preparation to break the Tonypandy Welsh miners' strike of 1910, the myth of sending the army against miners nearly cost him his political career. This was a constitutive experience. Combined with the aforementioned insights of Jevons junior, it pushed Churchill, one year later and in the new position of first lord of the admiralty, to support shifting the Royal Navy from coal to oil.Footnote ⁸⁵ The decision has long been described as visionary in so far as Britain had ample coal and no oil. But concern regarding the availability of resources was so 19th century, as it were, and so unimperial. Breaking, and breaking away from, the unruly miners and heavers of the coal system, Churchill promoted replacing them with foreign (and hence trouble-free) oil, pipes, and tanks.Footnote ⁸⁶

The coal strikes in England and Wales were a direct result of what Marx called “proletarianization”Footnote ⁸⁷: miners were farmers transformed into full-time workers, completely dependent on their wages and on the mine, lacking any other skills or means of subsistence, and subsequently fighting as a unified class for better pay, shorter working hours, and reasonable employment conditions. Their new power and limitations were a result of this process. By contrast, from the activation of the Ereĝli mines in the late 1840s to the strikes in the years around 1910, Zonguldak miners stubbornly retained their connections to their villages and to agricultural modes of subsistence, making them less dependent on wages (which at any rate were constantly “in arrears”).Footnote ⁸⁸ In this they were not very different from other Ottoman workers who practiced coal heaving off the agricultural season. As scholars from the Subaltern Studies School have shown, European-style proletarianization cannot be seen as one of the globalizing features of capitalism.Footnote ⁸⁹

Surprisingly, however, the 1910 strikes in England and Wales resulted in a push toward proletarianization in Ereĝli, just as decision makers in England were devising new ways to weaken local working classes, including by arranging for a shift away from coal. The fate of “fully” proletarianized Ereĝli workers was thus completely tied to this mineral just as it lost its political potency and could no longer serve as a driving force toward participatory politics.

The Welsh and English strike wave of 1910–12 violently reverberated in the Ottoman coal sector.Footnote ⁹⁰ “Because of the strikes of the European coal workers,” an alarmed March 1910 report to the Ottoman Ministry of Interior reads, “all merchant ships in the Black Sea and even in the Mediterranean need to purchase coal at Zonguldak port, and today 14–15 ships wait there for coal, including three big military transportation steamships, which would take 12,000 tons of coal for the Ottoman Navy.”Footnote ⁹¹ The report, wired during high agricultural season, complained that miners had left for their villages right at this hour of urgent need. “To ensure the production of necessary coal for the navy and in general,” it added, “it is necessary to guarantee a sufficient number of workers, who themselves cannot recognize the real interests [of the empire] and are currently engaged in useless work in their villages.”Footnote ⁹² If work stoppage in the Ereĝli mines came in various shapes and forms, from leaving to do agricultural work, to walking out due to a dispute about an injured drought animal,Footnote ⁹³ to a full-fledged strike, the situation in the global coal sector sensitized all parties involved to the circumstances of production in the coalfield.

As in 1908 and earlier, the possibility of systematic transnational influence was always on the table. Even when investigations proved that strikes were not precipitated by “foreign agitators,” more subtle transregional mechanisms were at work. Consider a November 1910 strike of about one thousand coal heavers in the Port of Istanbul, who explicitly took advantage of the leverage afforded them by the situation in Ereĝli and in England. While an official inquiry by the port officer found little evidence of foreign interference, the official explained that coal merchants incited the porters to strike so that the merchants may gain from the rise in coal prices. The strike had to be general; otherwise, merchants were obliged to pay indemnities to delayed steamer companies.Footnote ⁹⁴

The path to proletarianization in the Ereĝli coalfield passed through two competing force fields: agricultural work and military conscription. While workers often preferred to maintain a connection to their villages and lands, farmers and miners in the Zonguldak region circa 1910 were subject to forced conscription in the Ottoman army. However, by boosting the demand for local coal, the strikes in the British coal sector allowed the Ottoman Navy and the Ereĝli Coal Company to negotiate an exemption from military conscription to mine workers. Taking advantage of this new agreement, the company and the governors of Zonguldak and Bartın began encouraging locals to adopt mine work as a way to escape conscription (provoking rebuke about conduct unbecoming “the dignity of officialdom”).Footnote ⁹⁵ Finally, in 1911 the increased demand for Zonguldak coal and the creation of a proletarianized workforce eventually resulted in the shift of the coalfield to foreign management.Footnote ⁹⁶ The coalonial process had been complete. While the Ottoman coal sector continued to see strikes in the coming years, workers found it increasingly difficult to force the hand of a corporate employer backed by both the regional authorities and the central state.Footnote ⁹⁷

Thus, if we follow the political career of British coal, we see it fueling in England what Timothy Mitchell called “carbon democracy,” or the development of participatory forms of politics. But the same coal also reveals the limitations of this politics and its dependence on denying proto-democracy in Europe's peripheries. In fact, the very processes that ushered in democracy in Europe strengthened undemocratic powers in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world. Coal fueled the development of a modern interventionist state able to reach increasing segments of its population and territory ever more quickly and efficiently. As most of this coal came from elsewhere, even local producers such as the Ereĝli workers could not make use of its political potency. These miners were “properly” proletarianized just as working classes elsewhere lost much of their powers of disruption—that is, when technology became increasingly animated by oil, an energy source that needed far less human intervention than coal in its extraction and shipment.

Proletarianization and other reconfigurations of the human elements of the coalonial system cannot be understood apart from the system's technical aspects, and vice versa. The shift to liquid forms of ballast and then fuel helped to alleviate the systemic vulnerability resulting from labor unrest, be it by Welsh miners or Egyptian heavers. The new fossil fuel, in turn, helped win a war that created a severe crisis in the coal sector, a crisis felt with doubled intensity at the importing parts of the system.Footnote ⁹⁸ At the start of World War I, the Ottoman central government, as well as provincial governments (including that of Egypt, then formally a British protectorate), sought alternatives to coal and at the same time resumed exploration and intensification of internal resources. Regarding alternative fuels, these included cottonseed for machinery, wood for the railway, and olive pulp for the production of gas.Footnote ⁹⁹ As for intensification, this entailed the complete privatization of the Ottoman energy sector and Western corporations' achievement of hegemony. At the end of the war, as the Ottoman Empire was dissolved, the little control Middle Eastern states had over their resources was further diminished and franchised away. And thus, answers to the counterfactual question of why oil did not animate the rise of the Middle East must be sought also in the history and continued legacy of the carbonized fuel that oil replaced.

These dynamics allow us to reconsider democracy and other avenues of broad political participation as tied to a historical moment, a limited window of opportunity connected to a particular energy regime. Bringing British-led global coal export into the picture of English “carbon democracy” reveals how this process foreclosed similar participatory possibilities in other societies. The new avenues of political participation secured and expanded by European labor aristocracies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries obviously did not translate into “democracy” as we understand it today. A full account of how labor politics led to democracy requires much more than tracing fossil fuels, no matter how potent. Yet to the extent that mineral energy did play a role in shaping social relations and political trajectories in both the British and Ottoman empires, carefully considering how coal entangled these settings to one another reveals that in this interconnected system the uneven distribution of political power was informed by asymmetrical access to and flows of mechanical power. The linkage of the Ottoman adoption of coal to British coalonial expansion shaped Ottoman military and economic policies, including the development of the Ereĝli coalfields and the priorities for distributing their outputs, as well as the delayed proletarization of the region's miners. Paradoxically, this trajectory made the Ottoman Empire a latecomer to an age of coal that it helped to create on a global scale from very early on.