Boulton and Watt knew that their steam engines, and those that preceded them, were vital for coal extraction, but history has forgotten just how important. Everyone agrees – then and now – that coal was essential in the early stages of what came to be called the Industrial Revolution. By the mid eighteenth century, even foreign observers sensed the growing importance of coal in Britain. In the 1750s French ministers charged with the task of overseeing industry and commerce devoted time and personal energy to assessing the state of manufacturing in both England and France. After seeing for themselves what was happening in England, they reported nervously on the great usage of coal in dyeing, cooking, and heating. Owners of mines can exploit the mines freely; indeed, the French ministers claimed that both owners and workers enjoy a greater freedom in Britain.

How did the British come to tap into the locked-up energy of coal? To answer the question we need look no further than the coal fields of Northumberland. When reading the records of early eighteenth-century mines there, it is routine to find computations made by viewers, as coal engineers were known, explaining how much coal cannot be accessed: “Both these seams in an acre, (to take half and leave half) will yield … 87000 tons at 12 s ten pence rent [and] will amount to £52,000. Little can be expected from a second working, because of fire & the water that lies above which will be let down by working the walls.” Again, the mine of Bowers and Rogers in Northumberland “has in it low and bad top coal, main coal must be won by a pumping Engine & ¾ of coal not worth working … main coal being cast down 7 or 8 fathoms & therefore cannot be wrought without drawing water.” In the same vicinity the viewer reported that “the seam at Monkcaton is 5 quarters & the coal exceeding good and clear, but not winnable, without a fire engine.” In 1749 an eighty-five-year-old miner recalled how it was not possible to get down to the coal in a mine “on account of the water which there was then no other way of drawing but by horses and coals not being so valuable then as now.” Another old-timer recalled “there being no way then for drawing it but by horses which would have been too great a charge.”

From at least 1600 three countries led in the overall prosperity of Europe: the Netherlands, Britain, and Belgium. Sometimes first in wealth, other times third, by common consent Belgium became the first nation state in Continental Europe to experience sustained industrial development, that is, to systematically apply power technology to mining and manufacturing. An equally known commonplace, and a perpetually puzzling one, is the Dutch failure to industrialize until decades after the British and the Belgians. Yet unlike Belgium, throughout much of the eighteenth century the Dutch Republic enjoyed a remarkably free press; a habit of religious toleration born of necessity, openness to immigrants and their skills; and not least, abundant capital. Like Belgium, the Dutch Republic was also highly urbanized, but it possessed a gross domestic product per head of the population better than both Britain and Belgium. By 1725 wages in both Britain and Belgium were comparable; they were even higher in the Dutch Republic. In addition, assuming that adult height bears relation to nutritional levels and economic development, in 1800 the male population of the Dutch Republic was significantly taller than their French counterparts, an advantage that disappeared in the 1830s and returned only in the 1860s.

We asked in previous chapters – however unfashionably – about the causes of French retardation; so, too, the different patterns of industrial development evident in the Low Countries after 1750 require attention. In France, scientific education occurred in fits and starts: renewed and strengthened in the 1790s by French revolutionaries, only then to experience significant stagnation from the second decade of the nineteenth century until well into the 1830s. It seems entirely reasonable to ask whether comparable trends in scientific culture relating to education can be seen in the Low Countries, both north and south.

“Retardation” is a mean word. Recently it has become impolite to apply it to people with disabilities or learning disorders, whatever their source. Perhaps national economies should also be exempt from such seemingly harsh judgment. Surely retardation in productivity can be understood only in relation to someone else’s advance, and, of course, what we label as “retarded” may have seemed quite normal to contemporaries. How dare we arrogantly tumble into the past and pronounce a historical judgment?

We dare to do so in relation to France in the period from 1750 to 1850 precisely because the French at the time made similar observations, even if they politely shied away from using “retarded” when describing their anxieties about “our rival,” England. It had become a mirror, and in it contemporaries saw a reflection of French deficiencies. French observers sent by the government to Britain routinely remarked on how the English had vastly improved the use of coal in the manufacture of iron, thus achieving “a marked superiority … over all other European countries.” A French engineer hoped “that France will not remain always foreign to this new source of prosperity.” Aided by the hospitality of their engineering hosts, the engineers scurried about British coal fields making exact descriptions of the types and quantities of coal to be found. Competition did not preclude the fraternizing of men of science; lest we forget, there was still competition.

We think of mechanization in the early nineteenth century and we think cotton; we also need to think textiles. When considering the application of mechanics, pneumatics, and hydrostatics, we turn to steam engines in cotton factories, or engineering plans for canals or the dredging of harbors, or the raising of water from North Country coal mines or London’s Thames. We also associate all those applications of power technology with the scientific culture and experimental habits that took root in eighteenth-century Britain. We can also witness scientifically informed, factory-based experimentation being taken up in the woolen and linen industries.

The lives of textile industrialists, rather like M’Connel and Kennedy in cotton, allow us to document the debt early manufacturers in linen and woolen cloth owed to mechanical science and chemistry. Where new machines and new applications of existing machines became the goal, science and technology were closely intermingled, not hierarchically but dynamically, never one and the same thing, but never far apart. We may even describe the textile entrepreneurs as “hybrid savant-technologists.” By 1800 they and their Yorkshire factories provide yet another example of a distinctive form of scientific culture, sometimes called “techno-science,” present far earlier than the twentieth-century associations of the term would suggest. In the critical first generation of mechanization that began in the 1780s, linen and wool manufacturers in Leeds – like their counterparts in Manchester cotton – deployed scientific knowledge of a mechanical sort, and chemistry, to assist in the invention of new industrial processes and forms of industrial life.

Late in the reign of Napoleon, around 1812, a reformer within the Ministry that oversaw religion penned an angry treatise on the state of religion and the French clergy. Everything – from celibacy to their education – warranted reform, and the author noted in passing that high among clerical failings stood the complete refusal to undertake study in “les sciences mathématiques et physiques.” By comparison to the “rapid march of all the sciences, the general perfection of their methods, theology has remained stationary.” Even allowing for bias, there is little evidence to contradict this anonymous assessment of clerical education at the opening of the nineteenth century.

In 1812, the Catholic Church was directed by the university to consolidate its ecclesiastical secondary schools, and then to put them in towns where their students could take courses at a lycée or college. Cardinal Joseph Fesch, Archbishop of Lyon, took umbrage at the government’s commands. At the height of his power, Fesch had persuaded the Pope to come to Paris and crown Napoleon emperor. Despite receiving many honors, by 1812 Fesch had felt the cold chill that descended from Napoleon’s growing disputes with the papacy. Thus Fesch had little to lose when he wrote to the Grand Master of the University and the Ministry of Cults to inform them that philosophy undertaken by students possibly destined for the priesthood had to be under the careful oversight of a bishop.