Chapter 5 discusses how intensifying transpacific traffic along the Kuroshio affected Japan’s geopolitical situation in the mid nineteenth century. It argues that the so-called “opening” of Japan was a process that began at sea and crept ashore in peripheral locations such as the Yaeyama Islands of Ryukyu, where a mutiny on a “coolie” ship involved local authorities in a violent, international conflict. For decades, Japanese governments had been coping with naval incursions and weighed different strategies for defense reforms, though domestic controversies delayed these efforts. By 1853, the American quest for steam-powered access attracted new interest to land-borne coaling infrastructure across the Japanese archipelago, a pursuit that materialized with Commodore Perry’s expedition to Japan, Ryukyu, and the Bonin Islands. The chapter shows how the shogunate and Japanese domains competed to reverse engineer steam engines and sailing technologies, and eventually to deploy their own steam-powered facilities to reclaim the strategically located Bonin Islands.

In the 1830s and 1840s, railways were available to relatively few communities, with many encountering them on paper and in public discourse long before they had the opportunity to see them in person. This chapter examines what preceded the slow integration of railway infrastructure into narrative infrastructure: fantastical visions of technomodernity that did not fit well into established plots. Documenting efforts by railway companies, journalists, and cartographers to articulate steam-powered transit exposes how widely authors struggled to find a fitting form for railways on the page. Examples include Charles Dickens’s false starts in weaving railway imagery and mobility into prose, via The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44). By changing track to explore the notion of ‘fellow passengers’ in A Christmas Carol (1843), and taking time and space away from writing on the move to develop a more deliberately engineered structure for his 1848 novel, Dombey and Son, Dickens adapts his approach to plotting long-form fiction in the steam age. These readings reveal the importance of carefully laying groundwork – or infrastructure – for large-scale shifts in novel form.

Called “the rock that burns” by Aristotle, coal was the first major industrial fuel, created about 300 million years ago as heat and pressure compressed pools of decaying plant matter. Burned to generate heat to boil water and make steam to move a piston in a Watt “fire engine” or a giant turbine in a modern power station, the industrialization of manufacturing, transportation, and electric power is examined from beginnings in the United Kingdom to today’s increased use of coal combustion in developing countries despite the limited thermal efficiency and harmful combustion by-products.

A transition simplifies or improves the efficiency of old ways, turning intellect into industry with increased capital – when both transpire, change becomes unstoppable. The transition to a more efficient combustion fuel changed the global economy when coal replaced wood (twice as efficient) and oil replaced coal (roughly twice as efficient again). The history of the Industrial Revolution is explained through the energy content of different fuels (wood, peat, coal) from the 1800s, early steam engines that produced power for manufacturing and propulsion, and the political, economic, and social consequences of industrialization (wealth, health, and globalization), culminating in Thomas Edison’s 1882, coal-fired, electricity-generating, power station in Lower Manhattan.

There is much to do to create a modern energy paradigm, one that is clean, sustainable, and economically viable, but the changes are coming as overall efficiencies improve and manufacturing costs decrease for today’s renewable technologies. In 2000, 0.6% of total global energy production was generated either by wind or solar, a 50% increase in a decade; by 2010, the amount had doubled.1 By 2013, Spain had achieved a global first as wind-generated power became its main source of energy (21% of total demand, enough to run 7 million homes2), while both Portugal and Denmark now regularly produce days powered 100% by wind.

Historically cloudy England scored a first, as solar became the largest source of grid energy during an especially sunny 2018 spring bank-holiday weekend,3 while in the midst of high winds from Storm Bella on Boxing Day in 2020, the UK was more than half powered by wind, a new record.

After one year, Henry Clay Frick quit the university he was attending and, with two cousins and a friend, founded the Frick Coke Company. The plan was simple. Using a beehive oven, they would turn coal into coke fuel. Coke is an important ingredient in making steel.

Henry’s father had been a farmer and an unsuccessful businessman in Pennsylvania, and Henry vowed that his life would be different. Soon after establishing the Frick Coke Company, however, disaster struck – and it seemed that Henry would follow in his father’s footsteps. A financial crisis in 1873 had reduced the price of coke to 90 cents per ton and Henry’s business partners wanted out. But Henry chose to stay on, wrote a letter to an old family friend, Andrew Mellon, and received a loan of $10,000. For him, depressions were times of expansion; with his new loan he bought out his partners and acquired several coal mines from timid competitors at very low prices.

This chapter is concerned with two fundamental driving forces of the process of modern economic growth: capital accumulation and technical change. The importance of these factors as drivers of productivity growth underwent a major acceleration with the First Industrial Revolution. This chapter surveys the available evidence on capital accumulation since 1700 in different countries, highlighting the expansion of fixed capital. The chapter then outlines the main contours of technical advances of the First Industrial Revolution, noting the critical role played by two technological trajectories: 1) mechanization, and 2) the development of steam power technology. Finally, the chapter discusses the main sources of technical progress in this historical period, flagging some directions for further research.

Steam power, railways and steamships; communications with India via Suez; the opium trade and Canton; the First Opium War.