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Book Review
| Coal: A Human History. By Barbara Freese. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing, 2003. 320 pp. Bibliography, index. Cloth $25.00.
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| You might expect a book so ambitiously titled Coal: A Human History, to be a huge, sprawling tome. The list of subtopics that could be included under the heading "coal history" is a lengthy one. Barbara Freese gets away with a shorter, much tidier book (it is 320 pages but physically small) by not being comprehensive. Instead, she selectively emphasizes the dual themes of coal as a foundation for industrialization and, by inference, a factor in nearly all that process entailed, as well as coal as a pollutant of air. Freese further divides her book into sections on Britain to about the mid-nineteenth century, the United States to the late twentieth century, and China during the second half of the twentieth century. |
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Written in a breezy style appropriate for any audience, general or academic, Coal is grounded in mostly secondary source materials. Freese's discussion of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century smoke control efforts, for example, relies heavily on the work of David Stradling and Angela Guggliota. She seems to be somewhat more original when cobbling together bits from various, multiple sources for a history of mining in China. But, as her overall approach would suggest, there are really no major, innovative arguments or newly told tales here. The value of the book is in the historical overview it provides, spanning many centuries and covering three continents. |
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Depending on the historian, some will take issue with what Freese leaves out or slights in her rendering of the past. She details early concern with the health consequences of burning coal in thirteenth-century England, for instance, but makes only a cursory pass at how coal use shaped activism and legislation in the post-World War II United States. Likewise, she gives attention to the working conditions of miners over time and across regions, yet the shortness of the book dictates a very abbreviated labor history. Most significantly, Freese makes only brief explicit reference to mechanization (including strip mining). This subject should be much more integral to her larger narrative considering how dramatically the technological transformation of the industry has affected miners and their families and regional and national economies, as well as the environment. |
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In telling the story of coal, Freese sometimes claims too much for the mineral as a historical agent, and parts of her own work sometimes make this evident. China's failure to independently develop steam-engine technology and railroads despite an earlier start than Britain in mining coal, for instance, suggests that there were other equally if not more important factors driving industrialization in the latter. But Freese does usually qualify any sweeping attributions or grand suggestions of causality. Ultimately, she successfully treads the difficult path of demonstrating coal's historical importance, providing most of the contours and many of the details of that narrative, and still ending up with a book that someone actually would sit down and read straight through. |
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Chad Montrie is assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He recently published To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). |
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