Reinventing Borderlands: Central European Coal in the Late 19th Century

Aleksandra Dul, University of Cambridge

The coal-bearing geological formation running across Europe, stretching from France, across Germany, and into Poland/Czechia, coinciding with some of Europe’s most densely populated and industrialized regions, has been subject of both historical and economic research, all pointing to the idea of coal being the historical fuel for civilization. E.A. Wrigley’s influential work analysed its western end, a coal deposit stretching from Pas-de-Calais to the Ruhr. The unique geopolitical conditions of this area, in the late 19th century divided between Germany, France and Belgium, allowed for the first-of-its-kind study of industrialization in trans-national perspective. The eastern end of this formation, on top of comparable natural endowments, shows another striking similarity. It too was divided between three countries, all of them major European powers: Germany, Austria and Russia, making it the perfect candidate to test whether the developmental patterns of the Western European industrialization were in fact a common European experience. This paper attempts to answer this question through the analysis of the three regional coal industries. This study follows the story of the two opposing forces: free market, trans-national in character, and national institutions with their differences and individualities. Its aim is to show, much like Wrigley did for the West, how the first overpowered the other, to which the similarities observed between the three regions is a testimony. The core of this study’s methodology is labour productivity being a proxy for the overall economic performance. The paper offers productivity time series for the three regional mining industries, for the German, Austrian and Russian parts of the coalfield respectively, spanning from 1870’s to 1910’s. They are subsequently layered with trends in occupational structure evolution covering the same decades. The paper explains how the regional occupational structures respond to productivity transitions, mainly through the shift from the primary to the secondary sector.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 12. Political Economy, Trade, and Development