Not long after he was restored as King, Charles II commissioned John Ogilby to produce a road map of England and Wales. This resulted in the publication of Britannia in 1675; an atlas of strip maps showing each of the selected roads. Given the role of roads as a military technology, one might anticipate that the first maps in the atlas would set out the route between the key cities in the kingdom – from London to Nottingham and York, for example – or the direction of the most likely invasion routes – to Edinburgh to meet any invading Scots or to Kent to defend against France. It is somewhat surprising then, that the first route in Britannia is between London and Aberystwyth (roughly corresponding to the modern A40 to Oxford and then the A44 to the west Wales coast).
Why Aberystwyth of all places? Actually, the importance of the road – which today is a difficult and in places dangerous route – had little to do with the town, but rather a lot to do with the silver mine located to the north. And this tells us a lot about the changes taking place in Britain in the seventeenth century. If we treat Britannia as an early-modern update to the Doomsday Book commissioned by William the Conqueror, then we glimpse a shift away from a system based around land to one increasingly dependent upon resources. That is, Charles II is no longer as concerned with how many peasants are producing how much agricultural produce from each manor or county’s land, and more concerned with what resources and manufactures are available to him to operate his government and to fund his military – particularly a Royal Navy which needed to be rebuilt during the ongoing conflict with the Dutch republic.
Roads too were changing. Instead of – or at least as well as – being a means of moving armies around, the seventeenth century roads were also being used for the movement of goods. Moreover, roads became an essential part of the infrastructure of government. The ill-fated Charles I – who was King of the separate kingdoms of England and Scotland had established the Royal Mail in 1635 to maintain communication with the Scottish Privy Council in Edinburgh, but also with public access to the system. Following the Restoration in 1660, the General Post Office – which has survived in one form or another ever since – was established.
Not that roads of the period were up to anything like modern paved throughfares or even the Roman roads a millennium previously. It would be another century before horses and carriages began to regularly haul mail between London and the main British cities and ports. Furthermore, in the eighteenth century, heavy goods were mostly moved using the growing network of canals because neither the quality of roads nor the energy from workhorses or oxen were sufficient for anything more than local and relatively small loads. It would not be until the 1830s, with the development of the first public railways, that heavy goods could be moved easily across land (fatefully, undermining the long-term prospects of a British economy based upon sea power).
Railways brought with them something we take for granted today, but which was unheard of in the millennia before them. Although the network was always unprofitable, a series of railway investment bubbles created a network of tracks and stations across Great Britain. This, in turn, meant that railway operation was far more complex than anything that had preceded it. Most importantly, movement had to be synchronised. And the result, beginning in 1847, was the standardisation of Greenwich Mean Time across the railway network. Prior to this standardisation, towns and counties had operated their own local time – there is roughly a six-minute difference at the solstice, for example, between sunset in Cornwall and Kent, and nearly an hour between Inverness and London. But following the standardisation of railway time, the rest of Britain was obliged to fall in line. Furthermore, the development of steam power had paved the way for the replacement of sailing ships with heavier and more powerful steamships, so that for the first time it was possible to develop reasonably accurate timetables for shipping as well as railways. By the 1880s, Greenwich Mean Time (adjusted for longitude) had become the standard across the British Empire and was adopted as a global standard in 1884.
Just a few years previously, there had been the beginning of a divergence between transport and communication. The development of the telegraph – although tied to rail and shipping lines – allowed the first non-physical communication, with only the “last mile” involving messages written on paper. The telephone, first patented in 1876, went further by doing away with the need for paper and ink altogether. And not long after, the development of radio allowed for voice communication without the need for wire connections (Although, as Clive Ponting laments, European diplomats’ reliance on encrypted telegraph communication in July 1914 meant that the fast-developing crisis got ahead of the attempts to prevent a European war).
In the inter-war years, the development of air travel took travel and communications to a greater and faster level. The infamous 1938 Munich conference, for example, was the first occasion where national leaders used air travel to negotiate face-to-face. Less dramatically, air travel across the USA allowed state representatives to more easily commute to Washington. And during the Second World War, US and UK military and government officials – including both Churchill and Roosevelt – used air travel to more rapidly cover the Atlantic Ocean.
By that time, oil-power was replacing steam as the primary transport fuel across land as well. Although what was to become the US Interstate highway system was not completed until 1992, the first work had begun as early as 1921, with the formal Federal-Aid Highway Act passing into law in 1956. The UK’s road development followed a similar timeframe but was far less developed in the inter-war years. Moreover, the UK remained dependent upon steam-powered railways for much longer even than continental Europe, where a switch to electrified rail had begun in the interwar years. The UK began decommissioning a large part of its rail network in the early-1960s, around the time that the last mainline steam locomotives were retired (although Britain’s collieries continued to use them for local shunting until the early-1980s). Work on the motorway network began around the same time, with the Preston by-pass (later incorporated into the M6) the first motorway in the UK, opening in 1958. Most of the main motorway connections between the major cities were complete by 1979, but additional motorways continued to be constructed during the decades which followed, such as the M25 London orbital motorway which opened in 1986.
Over the same period, electronic communications moved entirely away from transport, particularly with the use of satellites and networks of dedicated fibre optic cables which enabled mass and rapid communication spanning the entire planet. As we discovered during two years of lockdown, it was even possible to run government remotely, using video communication for all but the most essential – and secretive – government business. Similarly, corporate business meetings could be conducted without the need for any of the participants to be in physical proximity. And a growing proportion of the white-collar workforce had adopted the same communications infrastructure and technologies to spend more of their time working from home (saving companies a fortune on heating and rents… and thereby adding to the unfolding global crisis in commercial property).
Take a step back from this long view and consider the energy which drove it. Charles II had very good personal reason to better understand his kingdom through a resource lens – his father having lost his kingdom and his head for failing to do so. Mapping out where everything was and how it could be moved served both the military imperative of denying an opponent critical resources, along with the civilian desire to trade those resources both within and beyond the national borders.
Different energy sources affected the nature both of transport and communications. If the royalist armies had had radios in the 1640’s, the Stuart family might still rule today. But depending on written notes (sealed with wax to guarantee their authenticity) transported on horseback all too often resulted in armies being in the wrong place or arriving at the wrong time to prevent defeat. Logistics too, scuppered Charles Stuart as the parliamentary armies took control of Britain’s main importing ports, giving them a superiority in munitions over the royalists.
Road transport was always a poor means of moving people and especially goods around. Even with the improvement of roads in the eighteenth century, travelling by horsedrawn carriages was time-consuming and uncomfortable. At the same time, wooden wheels and axles – even when later reinforced with iron – were too weak to allow for heavy loads to be moved. Indeed, for most of Britain’s history it had been easier (though not much more comfortable) to move around the coast by ship than to attempt to go cross-country by horse or on foot. Only with the canal network did movement of goods across country become viable, despite being slow and limited in load weight. Nevertheless, canals, expanding ports, the apex of sailing ship technology, and the planting of colonies in Africa and the Americas allowed for what is probably the most complex economy possible using renewable energy alone – an economy which inevitably consumed (with all of the associated horrors) slaves as the main power source in the production of raw materials for export.
Only with the development of non-renewable external sources of power (mostly coal in the nineteenth century) did the system begin the slow transition from slavery and indentured labour to the payment of wages in exchange for working time. Steam-power, of course, being so much greater than labour power that it made little sense to continue trying to squeeze the last joule of energy out of the muscles of people whose living conditions rendered their muscles far too weak in any case. Later, the additional power derived from oil would provide for even more “labour-saving” technology. And not just in the workplace – the first domestic white goods (refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, etc.) dramatically lowered the labour required to keep on top of housework too.
In short, as the power available from each new energy source increased, so the size and complexity of the economy grew with it. But the tragedy of the process was that communications always lagged behind. As we saw, the continued dependence upon telegraph messages left the diplomats of Europe unable to respond to the July crisis of 1914, so that the march to war was always ahead of them. Something similar can be seen in the British stupidity which resulted in the loss of the American colonies in 1783 – written messages, which might have informed the British government of just how inflammatory the imposition of taxes to pay for the war with France would be, had to be shipped across an ocean which at best took a month to traverse. Nevertheless, the increasing reach and complexity of communications – also a by-product of the available energy – allowed governments to grow in both reach and complexity.
In practice, government in the Britain of Charles II had been a hotch-potch of largely autonomous individuals and bodies across the two kingdoms (Scotland and England would eventually unite in 1706, with Ireland following in 1800). As we saw, Scotland was nominally governed by a separate Privy Council (a body of trusted advisors to the king) analogous to the Privy Council in England. But these embryonic centralised states were limited in their functions, focusing mainly on finance, taxation, and the defence of the realm. More mundane day-to-day government was localised.
The English common law system (everything is permitted unless explicitly forbidden) made this simpler, since most ordinary people – few of whom were literate – could follow established custom and practice. Local administration was still in the hands of feudal Justices of the Peace, who oversaw everything from prisons to poor relief. Although with the development of trade and early industry, an alternative system of boroughs and royal towns developed as separate entities, each with tax-raising powers of their own. Nevertheless, government in England in the seventeenth century has been described as “a union of partially independent county states, each with its own ethos and loyalty,” with the monarch rarely interfering.
The development of transportation and communications though, began the still ongoing power struggle between local and central government. The former had begun to breakdown with the switch from an agrarian to an industrialised economy, with the county councils reaching the height of their power in the nineteenth century. At the same time though, central government was flexing its own legislative muscle – passing national laws which over-rode the by-laws operated by the counties. Moreover, as national government sought to raise its own taxes to pay for its new functions, it began to exercise more control over the finance (and so freedom to act) of local authorities. So that, by the beginning of the twentieth century, all of the major functions of local government required grant funding from the national Treasury (although to this day, with increasingly dire consequences, local councils have clung like limpets to their power to borrow).
A similar process has occurred internationally over the course of the oil age. Whereas in the interwar years the world was split up into autonomous trade blocs, national states and semi-autonomous colonies, supranational governance was almost entirely absent save for the enfeebled League of Nations. In the aftermath of the Second World War in contrast, a series of US-led supranational bodies (United Nations, Bretton Woods monetary system, international monetary fund, world bank, etc.) were brought into being to harmonise relations (mostly in America’s favour) between western and developing states. And with the apex of oil-powered transport and communications toward the end of the last century, these bodies – along with various think tanks and international NGOs – have attempted to do to national governments what national governments did to local authorities a century before. It is no accident that no sooner has one of these bodies come up with an idea (quantitative easing, interest rate fixing, pandemic lockdowns, central bank digital currencies, 15-minute cities, etc.) than supposedly ideologically diverse and independent national governments set about implementing them.
For those still wedded to the religion of progress, and particularly those who believe that technology rather than energy is what powers the economy, the path to a one-world, neoliberal government seems unstoppable. Beginning with regional government – the North American Free Trade Agreement, The European Union, etc. – it is surely only a matter of time before a world government reigns supreme, while national government is reduced to the equivalent of emptying the bins and directing the traffic.
I believe they are wrong, and economic history bears this out. Had it not been for the USA’s early exploitation of its vast, land-based reserves of oil, the end of the coal-age in the 1920s would have made it all but impossible to escape the Great Depression. Indeed, had coal been the sole fossil fuel, the Great Depression would merely have been the beginning of a process of re-agrarianisation which, at best, would have taken us back to the economy of Charles II and, at worst, the economy of the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy. Oil though, powered the post-coal-powered economy to new heights… the period 1953 to 1973 seeing as much growth and trade as the 150 years which preceded it.
That came to an end in the 1970s. Economies continued to grow, but at a much slower pace, reflecting the increasing energy cost of oil production which, among other things, required the neoliberal exploitation of cheaper labour abroad and the massive expansion of credit at home. But so long as sufficient and relatively cheap oil continued to flow, we could convince ourselves that a return to the growth rates of the post-war boom were just around the corner.
In the 1990s, this seemed to be born out after the collapse of the Soviet Union was hailed as the “end of history,” with the self-identifying liberal democracies as the winners. In reality, the Soviet bloc was merely the first to crash as its economy and totalitarian governance proved too energy-expensive to maintain. The western bloc’s turn came in 2005 with the peak of conventional oil production and the ensuing – and causally-related – 2008 financial crash. The majority of the UK population has seen its standard of living fall ever since (although the already wealthy continue to make huge paper gains) and the rest of the western population has been following this trend since the peak of all oil production in 2018 – although this cause has been largely obscured by the idiocy of supranational and national governments in the years since.
When oil was cheap to produce in comparison to the rewards earned by selling it (that is, while the energy cost of energy was low) the economy could grow in scope and complexity seemingly forever. But once the energy cost of energy began to grow, ever less surplus energy was available to the economy. With the result that the cost of essentials like food, heating and housing grew even as discretionary sectors like hospitality and tourism experienced increasing deflationary pressure. But within this broad picture is another layer concerning the nature of energy sources. In the western states we currently have as diverse an energy landscape as we have ever seen. Coal use has fallen (so that, ironically, there is plenty of this early industrial fuel still in the ground) but gas use has risen. Oil remains the mainstay of transport, with petrol and diesel powering most land transport. Nuclear and (where practical) hydroelectric power provide a large slice of electricity generation, while wind and solar have also expanded in recent years. So that it appears that we might do without oil, or at least cut back to a large extent. This though, ignores the central role of heavy oil, and the diesel fuel derived from it, to all of these other sources of energy.
The peak of coal-powered coal production was in the mid-1920s and led directly to the Great Depression of the 1930s. The only reason the world economy has been able to produce logarithmically greater volumes of coal in the century since, is due to the use of the massively powerful mining machinery enabled by diesel fuel. Take away the diesel trucks and machinery and we are back to the Great depression in a matter of months. The same is true for all of those other energy sources. Just imagine, for example, how difficult it would be to transport something as large and heavy as a wind turbine blade without massive diesel engines… and let’s not get started on the transportation of the transformers that are essential grid infrastructure. In short, almost all of our energy infrastructure breaks down without diesel fuel.
The kicker is that since 2008, there has been no stable “Goldilocks” oil price at which oil is both cheap enough for consumers and profitable enough for producers. Instead, we have yo-yoed between periods when oil prices drop far below the level needed to maintain investment and periods where prices rise beyond the point where consumers have to cut back. And even this process is coming to an end in the 2020s, as the failure to invest is translating into oil shortages.
In the absence of a cheap, energy-dense and easily-storable alternative to oil in general and diesel in particular, the retreat of prosperity we have been witnessing across the western states can only gather pace. Indeed, the biggest threat to government in an energy-depleting economy is the modern equivalent of the walking away which pulled the rug out from beneath the Western Roman Empire. Towards its end, that empire had attempted to force lower returns on its farmers, and to force the children of farmers to stay tied to the farms. However, lacking energy (having cut down its trees) and fodder for its cavalry horses (because farm productivity had plummeted) along with periodic invasions from marauding tribes, the Roman state lacked the means to enforce its rule. And so, farmers simply abandoned the land, causing people to grow ever hungrier. The modern equivalent of this is likely to involve currency rather than farm produce, as the various charges on people’s incomes are forced to grow because loans taken out in more prosperous times are ever harder to repay in a declining economy.
To bring this into the immediate short-term, the UK government is signalling a swathe of tax increases along with a Cameron-Osborne-like package of austerity cuts. At the same time, public utilities like water and energy companies are increasing their prices. Local councils are also seeking to raise local taxes as high as permitted. And on top of this, while we are witnessing deflation in the discretionary sectors of the economy – resulting in a low official rate of inflation – the price of essentials continues to grow. The question – to which I strongly suspect the answer is no – is whether UK households and businesses can bear all of these additional costs. And if not, what then?
We have already seen the BBC lose half-a-million licence fee payers – an £84,500,000 hit to its income – in the last year… mostly for cost reasons rather than people recoiling from its pro-neoliberal propagandist tone. Other public services may be harder to avoid paying for – although don’t rule out growing numbers by-passing electricity and water meters as times get harder. Certainly, anything entirely discretionary – like TV subscriptions or apparently free social media platforms – is under enormous threat as people’s discretionary income falls. And this gives an insight into how modern government may also come unstuck.
Consider social media and electronic communications more broadly. The business model is based on ever expanding global mass use to sell the subscriptions and advertising which funds it all. To a large extent, this also depends upon the ever-growing sales of smartphones – which provide internet access without the need for wires and cables. But with 4.3 billion smartphone owners around the world, pretty much everyone who can afford to take out subscriptions or to purchase the items being advertised is already on board. Moreover, with all of the easy technological improvements already in place, the smartphone market itself is slowing down – the days when smartphones were replaced annually because of the functional improvements to the latest model ended years ago, with recent updates mostly offering only styling changes. Indeed, peak smartphone happened eight years ago.
This is important because the communications hardware – including the cables, satellites, relay stations, datacentres and phone masts depend upon a critical mass of consumers for maintenance and further expansion. So that, as consumption slows, the cost of hardware increases and the entire system gets more expensive to operate. Now add in the years of stagnation between the Crash and the Covid, followed by the declining living standards of the last four years, and you begin to glimpse the unravelling of the communications network itself… bad news if you are one of those people who shares pictures of your dinner on Facebook, but catastrophic if you are a supranational governance body which depends upon cheap communications to operate.
Now consider the other suite of technologies which allowed supranational government to grow during the oil age. As with communications, aviation (as currently configured) depends upon mass air travel to remain viable. But with living standards falling across the western (consuming) states, fewer people are able to afford holiday flights, even on the discount airlines. And since living standards will continue to fall, the only viable long-term business model for airlines is a return to the luxury-only system of the 1950s – that is, only a few very wealthy people flying between a handful of major airports on a much smaller fleet of planes… bad news for Bob and Doris who used to go to Benidorm every summer, but catastrophic if you are a supranational governance body which depends upon relatively cheap air travel to operate.
Put simply, without the communications and transport systems which allowed them to grow, the supranational governance bodies will unravel. Even if the technocrats involved do not understand the thermodynamic cause of their predicament, they are surely aware – though they won’t admit it publicly – that the package of reforms they have been promoting have been having the opposite outcome to the one they intended. And this, in turn, helps us understand why national-populist movements have emerged as the primary opposition.
Not that national government is in a much healthier state. In the 1950s, when most of the cheap oil and mineral resources were still in the ground, governments could “print” (mostly they borrowed) new currency into existence to kick start the economy. This resulted in the exponential growth of oil and mineral production between 1953 and 1973 (it would have continued until the early-1980s but for the 1973 OPEC oil embargo and the 1979 Iranian revolution and ensuing war with Iraq). Thereafter, the energy cost of energy made further expansion far more costly, with the result that when governments attempted to use borrowing and spending to stimulate growth, they created supply shocks (which they mistook for monetary inflation) instead. Neoliberalism provided a medium-term fix for this problem, but the underlying drain from energy and resource depletion continued, with the end of cheap oil in 2005 triggering the 2008 crash and leaving most national economies on life-support ever since.
This has created a turning point in national transport and communications systems (although there is still considerable variation between nations). In the UK – which is getting its collapse in early to avoid the rush – the irrationally complex rail network is running at so great a loss that no affordable combination of ticket pricing and government subsidies can save it. The road network is falling apart, with insurance costs rising steeply because of the increasing likelihood of damage caused by potholes. On top of that are all of the new de facto taxes (congestion charges, emissions zones, etc.) imposed by local government to fill their own shrinking coffers. And the General Post Office first launched under Charles II has become under Charles III, a private Czech company that no longer guarantees to deliver letters (still less on time and to the correct address). As with the supranational bodies, national government can work around this to some extent so long as cheap air travel and video conferencing remains. But, as we have seen, both depend upon a globally expanding mass market to continue, while the global economy is already slowing.
This does not, of course, mean that national government is about to disappear. What it does point to however, is a slower and simplified national government, as the pace and breadth of communications and transport obliges government to shrink in size and to relinquish many of its current functions. Most likely, this will mean a reversal in the balance of power with local government – although not until local authorities have also recovered from their coming debt default crisis – with former national functions having to devolve to the local level or to disappear entirely.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Re: The long and the short of it (Three: a failure of communication)
Thanks for posting. A very good exposition of the effects of the end of cheap energy.These are likely to be far more drastic in the long run than climate change and any geopolitical upheavals.Though both will have consequences in the shorter term lack of cheap energy will reduce the risk. A detailed elaboration of this message can be found at
on September 3, 2024, 9:19 pm