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***Magda Hassan*** · 27-10-2014, 03:04 PM

Epochal Event 3.5 The Rise of Europe

Chapter summary:

The Roman Empire suffered from the devastation that it inflicted on Europe and the Mediterranean's periphery, as its EROI steadily declined, and Emperor Constantine tried some gambits. One was moving the capital from Rome, and the Greek city Byzantium became Constantinople and remained the imperial capital for more than a millennium and fell to pastoral invaders, the Turks, in 1453. Another ploy was uniting the fragmenting empire under one religion, and Christianity became the Roman Empire's state religion. Christianity by 300 would have probably been largely unrecognizable to Jesus, and especially after it became a state religion a generation later. By 476, Rome had officially fallen, and Italy's first king, Odoacer deposed Emperor Romulus Augustulus. Germanic tribes conquered Europe's Roman lands, and in the Near East, Islam began its rise in the late 600s. In 711, Moors invaded the Iberian Peninsula, overthrew Visigothic rule, and Islamic Iberia became Europe's most civilized location for centuries. While the Roman Catholic Church specialized in burning libraries and "pagan" literature, Islamic culture preserved it. The Church completely eradicated Classic Greek writings in Western Europe, and although there is vociferous debate on the issue, in many ways medieval Europe was in a dark age for centuries. The Dark Ages were related to Rome's devastation inflicted on its subject peoples and environments. After centuries of recovery, around 800 Europe's Medieval Warm Period began (although some put the date in the 900s), and Frankish king Charlemagne tried to revive the Western Roman Empire. The Medieval Warm Period was a time of unprecedented prosperity and progress in northern Europe, and led to widespread Viking invasions among other usually violent migrations, but the climate that made northern Europe amenable to civilization-building caused epic droughts around the world and helped lead to the fall of the Classic Mayans and Anasazi, the decline of Angkor Wat, and may have been responsible for initiating the devastating Mongol invasions.[701]
The Medieval Warm Period led to the High Middle Ages, which began around 1000. It was a time of great city-building in northern Europe and about 75% of northern and central Europe's forests were razed and put under the plow. The success of northern Europe partly was partly attributable its heavy ice age soils, which did not erode as rapidly as the thinner southern soils of the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean regions. Not until adopting the horse-pulled heavy plow did northern Europe's soils became sufficiently arable to feed Europe's High Middle Age peoples.[702] The teams pulling heavy plows were more than a single farmer could afford, so communal financing of horse teams for heavy plows has been considered a proto-capitalistic development. Even so, rivers filled with the mud of erosion, and the same deforestation and soil-loss process happened in northern Europe, but arguably slower than in those earlier civilizations.
Although the Church obliterated "pagan" teachings, they did not defend Europe from pagan technology. The Chinese horse collar arrived in Europe by 1000 and it quickly became the standard. As the Roman Empire became depopulated, the Greek watermill helped compensate for labor shortages. Watermills were active across Italy in the Roman Empire's early days, for running hammers, and were heavily used in Rome's mines. Constantine's predecessor Diocletian made a price edict regarding watermills. The advantages of motive power not produced by muscles were obvious.[703] The thick forests of northern Europe had steady Atlantic precipitation to thank (as well as the warm Gulf Stream), and Central and Western Europe was blessed with streams and rivers in abundance. The spread of the watermill is the first time that humanity harnessed widespread non-animal energy (other than sailboats, but they were far less widespread), and it helped propel Europe's rise. Humanity learned how to exploit the hydrological cycle's energy in an unprecedented way, but not everybody embraced it as Europe did. In eighth-century China, using water for irrigation and transportation had higher priority than mills, and they were regularly dismantled.[704]
But in medieval Europe, the watermill reached its peak use in the preindustrial world, beginning with Germanic lords as Rome was falling. Not only did the watermill spread throughout Europe, but new mills such as the ship mill and tide mill appeared. Today's France is where most medieval mill innovations appeared, but watermills became universal on the streams and rivers of Europe. In 800, only a few watermills existed in Western Europe, but by 1000 there were hundreds. The Domesday Survey of 1086 recorded nearly six thousand watermills in England alone, and the true number was some thousands more. The Kingdom of France had 10 thousand watermills at that time, and their number doubled in the next two centuries, as did England's.[705] Each mill produced at least two-to-three horsepower, which was the equivalent labor of about 50 men. In 11[SUP]th[/SUP]-century France, its mills produced the labor of a quarter of its population. Medieval European watermills produced the work of millions of people and reduced the need for slaves. It was a prelude to the Industrial Revolution. When Columbus sailed in 1492, watermills performed the work of at least 10 million people in Europe, which had a population of about 75 million.[706] When watermill sites became filled, Europeans began using windmills, which first appeared in France in 1080, although the first undisputed European windmill appeared in Yorkshire in 1185.[707] The social organization of medieval Europe was feudal; peasants labored for landowners in return for a portion of the harvest. The watermill became the center of a struggle between feudal and Church authorities and the peasantry; the windmill was established partly to circumvent lordly claims on waters that passed over their lands, as nobody yet owned the air.[708]
A seminal event in Europe's rise was the reintroduction of Classic Greek writings. It happened during the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by Christian armies in what is today called the Reconquest. Islamic libraries housed Greek writings, and when the library at Toledo was captured in 1085, Christian scholars from across Europe traveled to that library, where those works were translated, and Europe was never the same. The rise of science and reason in medieval Europe thus began.
When that australopithecine Tesla made the first stone tool, his/her invention was transmitted via culture, probably by demonstration. When Homo erecti made Acheulean hand axes, they were engaging in a craft that lasted more than a million years; it was obviously a standardized training, as all axes looked similar. When that founder group left Africa, they had full command of language, a sophisticated toolset, and ideas were readily communicated, although it can be interesting to wonder what their beliefs were, if they had many. Those indoctrinating priests concocted complex thought forms to seduce and control the masses. Monumental structures in early civilizations were often architectural and engineering marvels, and the ancient Greeks began thinking in ways that could be called scientific. When that approach took root in Europe, which already used Greek technology to great benefit, it led to the Scientific Revolution, which accompanied and mutually stimulated the Industrial Revolution. In short, along with greater energy usage, mental feats also increased and were usually required for the next Epochal Event to manifest. The Teslas and Einsteins of their day initiated the breakthroughs and the masses took the ride in the subsequent epoch and raised their level of mental prowess. Calculus was only invented once (twice, really, as Leibniz and Newton did it independently), but it has been taught to students ever since as part of the mathematics curriculum. Each energy epoch was initiated by and accompanied by increased mental accomplishment, and each breakthrough helped form the foundation of the next one, which Newton stated most famously.
The medieval Catholic Church owned about a quarter of Europe's land and constantly vied for power with secular rulers. They became infamously corrupt, called Crusades that helped thin out the ranks of its ecstatic members, and even called Crusades onto its subjects when they strayed from the flock. In the 1200s, among others, Thomas Aquinas attempted to reconcile Church dogma with rediscovered Greek teachings. High Middle Age Europe also saw the troubadour phenomenon, with its themes of chivalry and courtly love.
Islamic culture enjoyed humanity's highest standard of living in about 1200, and although Europe was rising in that period, it was also seen as backward compared to the refined cultures of the Eastern Roman Empire (which never lost the ancient Greek teachings) and Islamic lands. But late Medieval Warm Period droughts may have unleashed a scourge that would be unsurpassed in ferocious destruction until the Nazis in the 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century: the Mongol invasions initiated by Genghis Khan. Islam never fully recovered from the Mongol invasions. Persia's population declined by about 90%, and Baghdad was Islam's leading city before its virtually complete destruction and wholesale slaughter of its residents. Places such as China, Russia, and Hungary lost up to half of their populations. A recent study suggested that the tens of millions of deaths at the Mongols' hands may have initiated reforestation that absorbed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to such an extent that it helped end the Medieval Warm Period.[709] The impact was only about 1 PPM, and the coming Little Ice Age has several proposed causes, including the Western Hemisphere's depopulation and reforestation due to the Spanish invasions of the 1500s.
By 1300, Earth was cooling down, High Middle Ages Europe was largely deforested and nearly all arable land was under the plow. Europe had reached the Malthusian limit of its means of preindustrial production. The 1300s were a century of unending calamity for Europe, beginning with famines in 1304, 1305, and 1310, and a major famine began in 1315 that lasted three years. Famines visited Europe at least once a generation in the 1300s. In 1337, England and France began a series of wars that lasted more than a century. Those events were only a hint at what lied ahead. Plagues and famines tend to be conjoined: weakened bodies are susceptible to disease. The Black Death pandemic probably originated in war-torn and famine-plagued China as early as 1338. In 1346 it reached Europe. By 1350, around half of Europe had died, and the plague kept reappearing. War, famine, and epidemics were so prevalent in the 1300s that the Danse Macabre became an art form in the 1400s and 1500s, after the troubadour profession died out with the Black Death. Europe became a hell on Earth. But the work that watermills performed was not subject to famine and disease, and the work of millions of "energy slaves" surely helped hold Europe together. Labor was in such shortage after the catastrophes that worker wages rose dramatically.[710]
In the late 1300s, in northern Italy's city-states, the ferment initiated by the rediscovery of ancient Greek teachings flowered in the Renaissance as humanism began its rise in Europe. Constantinople, which helped preserve ancient Greek teachings instead of destroying them, never fully recovered from the sacking that its "allies" gave it during the Fourth Crusade, and this led to Venice's lucrative dominance of Europe's spice trade. In 1453, Constantinople fell to Ottoman Turks, ending the Roman Empire's last vestige (other than the Roman Catholic Church), and humanist scholars fled to Europe, which further reinforced Renaissance humanism.
When Turks conquered Constantinople, Venice lost its spice monopoly and perhaps the seminal event of Europe's rise happened: attempts to find another route to obtain spices. Spices are often made of defensive chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves from animals, and many have antibacterial properties. These properties were important for preserving food, particularly animal products (mainly meat), in warm climates before the advent of refrigeration, but the antibacterial properties of spices are important even today in warm-climate nations. Spices essentially preserved food energy so that humans could consume it rather than microbes.
The Iberian Peninsula had been the site of wars for several centuries by the Fall of Constantinople, and the Christian/Islamic animosity there was pronounced; enslaving captured opponents was standard practice. Portugal began the maritime innovations that would see them seize the spice trade from their Islamic rivals. Henry the Navigator is closely associated with the rise of Portuguese maritime knowledge and practice. How responsible Henry was for Portugal's maritime prowess has long been debated, but what is not debatable is that Portugal began developing the necessary knowledge and skills for accomplishing an unprecedented feat: sailing the world's oceans. Until that time, only the Indian Ocean was regularly traveled because of its relatively gentle and predictable nature.[711] Not until Europe's rise were the Pacific, Atlantic, Arctic, and Antarctic oceans regularly traveled. Genoese sailors sought India via the Atlantic since the 1200s, unsuccessfully, and even settled some Atlantic islands, but Portugal was humanity's first successful practitioner of transoceanic navigation. Many technical issues were resolved, and Portuguese sailors with Henry's patronage sailed down the Atlantic Coast of Africa and across the Atlantic. The Portuguese began colonizing the Madeira Islands in 1420, the Azores in 1433, and in 1434, Portugal became the first European power to sail south of Cape Bojador on the African coast.
Serfdom largely replaced slavery in Europe by about 1000, but was still a form of forced servitude. By 1434, the first captured Africans to use as slaves were delivered to Lisbon. The sitting pope officially approved of enslaving non-Christians in 1452, and one of humanity's greatest disasters began. Portugal dominated the transatlantic slave trade for more than three centuries. The other Portuguese commercial obsession, before they seized the spice trade, beginning in 1500, was gold. African gold began pouring into Lisbon when the slaves did, and the Portuguese began minting gold coins in 1452. The pursuit of slaves and gold characterized Portuguese and Spanish efforts in the Western Hemisphere during the 16[SUP]th[/SUP] century, which caused history's greatest demographic catastrophe: most of a hemisphere's population died off within a century. Life was also cheap in the imperial nations. The average mortality rate for the crew during the centuries that Portugal used its spice route was about 25% per voyage. Scurvy was the primary cause, and Europe ignored the cures for centuries.
When Pangaea formed and the Permian extinction wiped out nearly everything, long years of evolution on separate continents came to an end when one supercontinent formed and Lystrosaurus became Earth's dominant land animal for a brief time. The Great American Biotic Interchange was another example of merging continents spelling the extinction of the less adaptable species. Some have argued that the biological effect of Europe's conquest of the world was like continents merging, but it happened 250 million years before the new supercontinent will form.[712]
Europe's rise was made possible when it turned the global ocean into a low-energy transportation lane. Portugal was in the early lead, but Spain was close behind, and within a century they were both caught and surpassed by English, Dutch, and French efforts. Until that time, the oceanic sailing ship was by far the greatest energy-capturing technology in world history and remained that way until the steam engine appeared. Europe's watermills achieved an average of three horsepower per mill by the 17[SUP]th[/SUP] century's end.[713] When Columbus stumbled into the New World in 1492, the day's 100-ton sailing ships generated between 500 and 700 horsepower when traveling at 10 knots, which was more than 50 times the power that the muscles of the 80-man crew generated.[714] By the 1800s, the most efficient sailing ships generated more than 200 times the human power needed to operate them. Using bodies of water as low-energy transportation lanes was one of civilization's most important inventions, from Sumer to Rome to TenochtitlÃ¡n to Europe's global dominance.
Other traits that led to European dominance were their violence and greed. Europe's 16[SUP]th[/SUP] century in the New World was essentially a century-long gold rush. Europe's incessant wars and technological advances devoted to inventing ever-deadlier weaponry, as well as its group fighting tactics and insatiable greed, made it an irresistible force that swept over the world's peoples. Greed was transformed from a vice into a virtue by Europe's economic ideologists. This dynamic will be explored in the next chapter.
Rome was a huge parasite. Its citizens did not understand that their methods were unsustainable, not to mention evil, and would lead to their civilization's collapse. The Spaniards' obsession with gold, which was responsible for exterminating a hemisphere, suffered from a similar blindness. Although warned by Spanish scholars that importing mountains of gold and silver to Spain would do little economically for Spain other than create inflation, the Spanish sovereigns did not heed the advice. The first bankruptcy that marked the effective end of Spain's imperial aspirations was in 1557, which was a mere generation after the initial Incan plunder began arriving in Spain. Crown bankruptcies continued, and Spain in 1600 was arguably worse off than in 1500. Spain and Portugal became the first imperial also-rans during Europe's rise. Portugal's violent seizure of the spice trade acquired some real if ephemeral wealth during its century of dominance. Portugal also imperially overreached, but closer to home. When its ruling class was decimated by an ill-advised invasion of Northern Africa, Spain annexed Portugal. With their imperial fortunes thus conjoined, they declined at the same time.
The English and Dutch dominated the high seas during the 1600s. The Netherlands declined in the late 1600s and France replaced them as England's rival in the 1700s. The French lost their wars against the British, and got vengeance by helping Great Britain's most successful colonies become independent via the American Revolution. After the humiliation of the War of 1812, the Americans engaged in a friendlier rivalry with the British in the late 1800s, to take the imperial crown in the early 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century as it became history's richest and most powerful nation. When imperial latecomers arrived (primarily Germany and Japan), other imperial nations had already laid claim to nearly the entire planet. Earth's industrialized nations then had two devastating wars that determined global plunder rights, and the USA emerged with unprecedented dominance. The USA was really an empire by the early 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century, but its social managers always promoted the fiction that America was not playing Europe's imperial games, even though they were obvious to everybody on Earth except for perhaps the empire's equivalent of plebeians and naÃ¯ve patricians who actually believed the propaganda.
While European powers plundered the planet, something happened in one country that led to its dominance and eventually transformed the world with the Fourth Epochal Event: harnessing the energy of hydrocarbon fuels. It began by mining coal laid down in the Carboniferous Period, and after a couple of centuries of rising industrialization, oil deposits were mined. Oil has been the primary focus of geopolitical conflict ever since the British Navy adopted oil as its primary fuel in 1911, on Winston Churchill's initiative. The imperial powers have not allowed Middle East peoples their de facto independence ever since.
The rest of this chapter will survey the path that led to England's initiation of the Industrial Revolution, and the next few chapters will tend to focus on England and its succeeding states, called Great Britain (1707 to 1800) and the United Kingdom ("UK" - 1800 to present, after adding Northern Ireland to its polity), and its rebellious colonies in North America, today called the USA. They may well seem an unnecessary focus to many global readers, but I do it for a few reasons. One is that England was the first nation to industrialize and helped set the pattern for other industrialization events. England's industrialization, with its attendant capitalism, was the only pristine one. Another is that England became Earth's greatest imperial power since Rome. It had a truly global reach and altered the societal development of most of the world's peoples, sometimes profoundly. Another is that England's descendant, the colonies that became the original USA, is the world's leading power as of 2014. As bragged by a presidential advisor soon after its unprovoked 2003 invasion of Iraq, the USA is an empire and arguably was one long before it obliterated temperate North America's natives. The USA's first president set the blueprint for stealing a continent, and it wrested lands from everybody in the way. The theft of most of Mexico, in two steps (1, 2), added to the USA's plunder in the first half of the 19[SUP]th[/SUP] century, and its land grabs and imperial behavior only increased afterward, and a century after its early larcenous acts it emerged from history's greatest imperial war with unchallenged global hegemony. But the primary reason why I focus on those nations/empires is that they were history's greatest energy users, and the USA has used more energy than any other nation (it was passed by China in 2010, but uses four times as much per capita). Far more than any other dynamic, humanity's energy practices will determine its future. Although Americans are not my target audience and I doubt that the energy breakthroughs for initiating humanity's Fifth Epochal Event will originate from within the USA, America has been leading global energy trends for more than a century, and most attempts to initiate the Fifth Epochal Event have originated within the USA. Also, I am an American and know my nation better than any other, so it is the nation that I am best qualified to write about. One day, perhaps soon, the USA will no longer be the focus of so much global attention, and if humanity experiences its Fifth Epochal Event instead of meeting its demise in the Sixth Mass Extinction, I expect that nations will become obsolete political entities and take their place among other relics of the human journey.
The developments that led to England's use of coal in industry arguably began when the first sailboats plied Mesopotamian rivers, as it was the first time that non-muscle power was significantly used. When Hellenic innovators developed the watermill, windmill, and the first steam engine, it became the path to the Industrial Revolution. The rise of waterpower and wind power in medieval Europe, first with windmills and then with oceangoing sailing ships, already had Europe riding an obvious energy wave, even if thermodynamics and other energy sciences were not yet invented.
The Domesday Survey, published in 1086, recorded that 85% of the English countryside was deforested, as well as 90% of England's arable land, and the remaining forest were largely reserved for royalty and nobility for hunting. But studies of lake and river sediments show that most of England's deforestation had been accomplished before Rome invaded two millennia ago.[715] By 900, the brown bear was nearly extinct on the British Isles and the wolf was not far behind. English coal had been mined by Romans, and China also mined some coal, but deforested England became the world's first nation to rely on coal. As the High Middle Ages were ending in the 1200s, deforested and cooling England began turning to coal. Most of Earth's coal came from a brief geological period before any organism learned to digest lignin, and geological processes made trees into today's coal deposits. The level of geological "processing" determines the grade of coal, and the typical progression is from peat to lignite to bituminous coal to anthracite, which is like a rock and the cleanest burning. Pennsylvania's anthracite deposits were long the most desirable coal in the USA, and Wales has anthracite deposits. But England generally burned bituminous coal, and pollution issues were obvious from the beginning. In 1257 Queen Eleanor visited Nottingham, and the coal smoke used in local industry drove her away, as she could not stand the smell and feared for her health.[716] In 1285, a commission was established in London, led by Eleanor's son Edward I, to address the coal smoke problem. In 1306, coal was banned in London, to little practical effect. Coal smoke was so noxious that it was not yet used in homes. Fuel-hungry operations, such as blacksmiths and brewers, are where England's early coal pollution originated.[717] As with the "green effect" of the Mongol hordes, the Black Death gave England's forests a brief reprieve when half of England died. England's population did not begin to grow again until the 1500s, when it was in the Little Ice Age's grip, which lasted until the 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century.
The Catholic Church owned England's coal mines until Henry VIII kicked out the Catholic Church, partly because it would not give him an annulment, and he appropriated its English assets, including its mines. During Elizabeth I's reign, England began its ascent to industrialization and England's woods were once again decimated. Elizabeth established commissions to investigate the dire state of England's woods, and the results were unanimous: they were largely gone.[718] Until Elizabeth I's reign, England was relatively backward, and the Netherlands was far ahead in economic development. The geographic isolation of the British Isles made them culturally quaint compared to their continental neighbors, which can still be seen today with the British reverence for its royalty.[719] Japan is the other isolated island industrialized nation, on the opposite side of the Eurasian landmass, with a similar religious fervor toward its royalty. The Netherlands was Europe's most urbanized place although it was resource-poor and began intensive agricultural efforts to reduce its dependence on imported food, and grain in particular. The land-poor Dutch even began to claim land from the North Sea, in history's greatest effort of oceanic land reclamation. During Henry VIII's reign, England had a primitive economy that provided raw materials to the Low Countries, where they dyed English cloth and sent it back to them, and southern England exported wood to deforested France.[720]
England imported its munitions from the Low Countries, and when the Continental wars began that would culminate in the devastating Thirty Years' War, Henry noted England's vulnerability and began developing its arms industry. England's iron industry began in 1543.[721] When Rome invaded, it established iron operations in what became Sussex, which deforested the area within a century. In the same place, more than a millennium later, Henry revived England's iron industry. Sussex was quickly deforested, and hearings were held only five years later, in 1548, regarding the deforestation and ruination of the commoners by the new iron industry, as the price of wood skyrocketed. Although the commission was concerned, the Crown did nothing about the situation, as an important industry could not be thwarted. Sussex's residents took matters into their own hands and attacked a local forge, which coincided with rebellions in other counties; they were brutally suppressed by the lords and Crown.[722]
While Spain and Portugal were busy plundering humanity, England was still getting its domestic house in order and began emulating Dutch practices. During the last half of the 1500s, England's "contribution" to the world's rape was largely limited to harrying the Spanish. England's richest private citizen was the pirate Francis Drake, whose claim to fame was stealing Spanish silver by surprise raids of its Pacific ports and circumnavigating Earth as the only way to return home with the loot. While Drake was sailing around Earth with his booty, Martin Frobisher hauled back thousands of tons of fool's gold to England from a bay named after him. England's first colony in the Western Hemisphere disappeared without a trace. Such were the follies of England's early imperial efforts. Before England became an imperial aspirant, it conquered its neighbors. Roman Emperor Hadrian built a wall to keep out the "barbarians" of what became Scotland. A second wall was built farther north a generation later. England first invaded Scotland in 1296, and that region's Scots were subjected to incessant warfare. The Scots fought alongside France in the Hundred Years' War, and my family name reflects that heritage; I have a surname with French roots and spelling, but my direct ancestor came from Scotland. Scotland formally united with England in 1707 and became Great Britain, but warred with England until 1745. A period of Scottish peace with England began in 1560. As England ran out of wood it invaded Ireland, and the conquest was not completed until 1603. An English businessman first suggested moving wood-hungry English glassworks to Ireland in 1589; after the conquest was complete in 1603, the rapid decimation of Ireland's remaining forests commenced.[723] Ireland has yet to recover its forests. The English established a colony in Ireland at Ulster, and used Borderer Scots and other lower-class subjects to populate the colony as a kind of cannon fodder who were promised land for "settling" where the fiercest resistance to the English invasion had been. That colony formed the toehold that became Northern Ireland, and post-colonial strife with Ireland lasted to this century.
England began invading North America with the fort at Jamestown in 1607, and wayward religious fanatics got lost on the way to the mouth of the Hudson River in 1620 and stumbled into today's Massachusetts and became the "pilgrims" of American lore. They brought the witch-hunting craze with them, and witches were executed in trumped-up trials until 1693. North America was "settled" in similar fashion to Ireland's invasion, in that the English gentry got the best land in the valleys while the Scots-Irish "settlers" populated the hills as a buffer people. If they could violently wrest land from the rapidly dispossessed Indians, they were welcome to it, until they lost it to arriving gentry once the frontier was settled.[724] That is where America's "hillbillies" came from, and the borderer culture of the British Isles, with its constant warring, gave birth to the USA's preferred infantryman. That is part of my family's heritage and that of the USA's white underclass. Often-pejorative terms such as "redneck," "cracker," and "Hoosier" originated in the British Isles to describe residents of the borders and highlands.[725] The word "lynching" came from the vigilante "justice" that those border and backwoods peoples engaged in. They largely settled the western USA as they sought free land and gold and performed some of the greatest atrocities against Indians in the final days of the Western Hemisphere's conquest. The genocide of inland tribes in California was inflicted by poor rural whites with dreams of easy gold. Even though it is part of my heritage, I bore the brunt of Appalachian xenophobia when they tried to get me fired from a temporary job that I had at a bank in southern Ohio (by lying to my supervisor about my actions) before I secured permanent employment at a trucking company. Most of our drivers were from Appalachia; I understood their miserable existences and longed to fix it.
By the early 1600s, coal was England's primary fuel, and "coal towns" formed where workforces for new mines lived. Mining towns were ramshackle affairs, populated by migrant workers, and the English class system became pronounced due to the gulf between coal miners and the rest of English society. That ghetto-like existence was new in the British Isles. In Scotland, coal miners were actually slaves, even wearing collars that identified their owners.[726] Coal mining was hellish work, particularly in underground mines, which were dominant on the isle of Great Britain. Miners were killed by mine gas (methane) explosions, asphyxiated by mine gas (carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, which is why they used canaries in coal mines), died in cave-ins, and suffered myriad other horrific fates. Drowning not only became a common way to die as mines began digging below the water table, but solving the water problem became a key event in the Industrial Revolution, and arguably the key event, which will be explored in the next chapter. Coal miners eventually organized to get better working conditions, and coal miners were prominent in the USA's labor movement.[727]
From civilization's earliest days, the sailing ship was humanity's greatest energy technology. Today, the term "prime mover" refers to an engine's component that transforms one kind of energy into another, usually by converting heat energy into mechanical energy (but it is the energy of motion in both instances). But also when environmental energy is captured and turned into mechanical energy, it is accomplished via a prime mover. In that regard, a water wheel and crankshaft is a watermill's prime mover, and a windmill's sail and crankshaft is its prime mover. The prime mover is the machinery's most important component and its heart, where the most advanced technology and materials are brought to bear, as that part endures the greatest stresses. In an automobile, for instance, the prime mover is the combination of combustion cylinders and their attached crankshaft. Chemical energy in gasoline is thereby transformed into mechanical energy via the controlled explosions of rapid fuel combustion, which liberated that solar energy captured so long ago. In a sailing ship, the prime mover is the sail and mast, where wind energy is transferred to the ship. The mast is a sailing ship's most important component, and is like an engine's crankshaft.
The two primary uses of wood in civilizations have always been fuel and making structures. Just as 90% of Rome's wood was used for fuel, burning wood has always been its greatest use on Earth, even to the present day. Firewood does not need to be long and straight, and coppice and "waste" wood has long been used for firewood and in pulp mills. Other stands of trees were allowed to grow for a century and more to provide long, straight wood for making structures. For seafaring nations, that always meant ships; securing wood for shipbuilding was a major goal in the earliest seafaring civilizations, and became an obsession during the rise of Mediterranean civilizations. The war between Athens and Sparta largely centered over wood to build navies.
As Europe learned to sail the high seas, ships became larger and so did the masts. The naval ship was humanity's highest-performance equipment well into the industrial age, and technological innovations were first used in Europe's navies if they could be, as they were the key equipment in vying for imperial dominance. Military ships were the largest ones on the high seas, and their masts needed to be the largest. A military ship's mainmast was the greatest energy-generating technology on Earth, and research showed that single-tree masts were superior for military ships, partly because they held together better when hit by a cannonball and they weathered storms better.[728] Although the English began deforesting Ireland as soon as they could, mast wood was largely supplied by Scandinavian polities (Norway, Denmark, Sweden, etc.). By the late 1600s, after centuries of providing most of Europe's mast wood, Baltic nations not only refused to sell England trees greater than about a half-meter in diameter (22 inches), they no longer had trees greater than 0.7 meter (28 inches). By 1850, Sweden was deforested and starving, and a great wave of migration from Sweden to the USA began.[729] That environmental catastrophe is also part of my heritage, as a Swedish-American ancestor married into my mother's Norwegian family that migrated to the USA in the late 19[SUP]th[/SUP] century. The Pacific Northwest had a fishing industry and environs that reminded my ancestors of their homeland. Europe could not provide mast wood large enough to meet England's needs in its imperial arms races. While the Dutch and English were both fighting Spain, they were friendly, but by the middle of the 17[SUP]th[/SUP] century they became bitter rivals, and their first war began in 1652. The day's naval ships carried up to 100 guns. England's "ships of the line" needed to be increasingly large to defeat England's rivals, and ever-larger masts were critical to their success. By 1900, masts for merchant ships reached 60 meters tall, and the British Navy began adopting steam power before the mid-19[SUP]th[/SUP] century.
In 1602, the first Englishmen visited what became New England, and the expedition's primary finding was that the gigantic trees that they found, particularly the tall, straight white pine, would provide England with an independent source of mast wood. By 1634, mast wood was shipped to England from New England, and within a generation, several hundred masts per year were shipped. The Netherlands tried to deny England access to Baltic mast wood in 1658, between their first two wars, and seized some of New England's first mast wood shipments. Eventually, as with the Spanish silver fleet, which was an armada designed to fend off piracy of Spain's New World plunder, England developed its mast fleet, which was anticipated with nearly as much anxiety as Rome's wheat fleet from Africa was. By 1700, all English "ships of the line" were masted with New England's timber.[730] The Dutch won their wars with the English in the 1600s but lost to France, and were on their way by the late 1600s to becoming another imperial also-ran. A seemingly minor outcome of their wars against England was that the Dutch lost their North American colonies, but this could be seen as an early step in the development of the polity that became the USA. After defeating the Dutch, France then became the premier Continental power and England's primary imperial rival. The late 1600s and early 1700s also marked the heart of the Little Ice Age, as sunspot activity fell to a nadir called the Maunder Minimum.
No historian has argued that England had a grand plan of industrialization, but the Epochal Event was the culmination of several trends. Although the science of energy had yet to be invented, the obvious advantages of watermills, windmills, and sailing ships were not lost on people, and the control of arable land, forests, low-energy transportation lanes, workforces, and markets was always the road to riches from Sumer onward. People knew what they were doing, even if they had little or no long-term perspective.
A key trend for England's industrialization was removing peasants from the land so that they could no longer feed themselves. Those dispossessed peasants became the Industrial Revolution's workforce, and the dispossession began in England with the forest laws enacted by William the Conqueror; deer were reserved for hunting by the elite, not commoners. Sherwood Forest was one of many royal forests, where "criminals" such as Robin Hood hunted the King's deer. Modern English Game Laws began in 1671, and in 1723 the infamous Black Act was passed, which made "poaching" a capital crime.[731] Europe's feudal era was anything but halcyonic, but slaves became serfs, and as bad as serfdom was, they still had some rights, and provisioning themselves from the "commons" in the open field system was a universal right in feudal Europe. As England began its rise to dominance, English landowners began removing peasants from the land via Enclosure Laws, beginning in the 1200s, usually to establish "deer parks" for elite hunting grounds. In the late 1400s, Enclosure measures were stepped up with anti-Enclosure laws. The first anti-Enclosure rebellion began in 1549, and revolts continued into the 1600s. But the landowners won and became England's first capitalists, as they raised food for sale after the "primitive accumulation" gained by dispossessing the peasantry. The mechanization of farming began in earnest with the lands cleared of peasants, and England's agricultural revolution began.
Agricultural output increased, England's population rose, and those dispossessed peasants toiled in English mines and mills. One common misconception regarding the Industrial Revolution is that it was an urban phenomenon, but it really began in the countryside, where the energy was.[732] England's watermills, necessaril

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