John U. Nef, The Conquest of the Material World

Although John U. Nef never reduced European history to the pursuit of ever more "heat energy," there were moments in his many works when it seemed so. For Nef, coal was the mainspring of European and especially British ascendancy, the impulse behind the mechanization that he feared had taken command of human destiny. Moreover, the heat energy released by atomic weapons seared his imagination; the scholar who had centered the industrial revolution on a vast shift in humanity's ability to mobilize the earth's storehouse of energy now trembled before this destructive power. Thus the peculiar tension that haunted Nef's collected essays, The Conquest of the Material World, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1964. A celebration of Europe's increasing proficiency in mining and metallurgy, it was also the search for a moral compass that would prevent our self-destruction in a burst of mushroom clouds.

Nef was born in 1899, hailed from Chicago's professional elite, married into even greater wealth, and counted himself among the generation that "grew to maturity during and just after the first World War." ¹ Freed from financial constraints, he relished open touring cars during his European ventures, and his descriptions of the pleasures of Cap d'Antibes conjure up F. Scott Fitzgerald. Above all, he was a collector: Nef lined the walls of his apartment with original works by modern masters, filled his memoirs with a lineup of creative luminaries from T. S. Eliot to R. H. Tawney, Robert Hutchins to Jacques Maritain, and Marc Chagall to Artur Schnabel, and furnished the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought, which he helped found in 1941, with a lively and nettlesome assembly of the learned. His attention to the cross-disciplinary had deep roots, and this commitment, among others, convinced Nef that he was a "nonconforming" historian. ²

Nef made his name as a historian with The Rise of the British Coal Industry, a magisterial two-volume work, published in 1932. Certainly he was not the first historian of Britain's industrial revolution to dig in the archives, but he did so intensively. He was not a lone pioneer in exploring this great transformation quantitatively, but he did so skillfully and aggressively. He tackled large questions, including the importance of the substitution of coal for wood, the stimulus provided to metalworking and other trades by Britain's precocious coal industry, and, most notably, the limits of locating the cockpit of the industrial revolution in the last decades of the eighteenth century. In fact, these volumes marked the debut of the "Nef thesis," neatly encapsulated in one of his chapter titles: "An Early Industrial Revolution." ³ This daring chronology, Nef believed, was yet another aspect of his career as a nonconforming historian. Unfortunately, Nef's unyielding allegiance to a crucial acceleration of industrial growth and a decisive breach in technological practice in the Elizabethan era left him battle scarred. He was still picking at these wounds in The Conquest of the Material World, which appeared more than thirty years after his pathbreaking entry into Britain's mines.

To Nef, the conquest of the visible natural world was the outcome of an earlier triumph underground. Securing vast stores of mineral wealth, he claimed in the first paragraph of The Conquest of the Material World, was the prime mover behind humanity's relatively recent mastery of the physical world. ⁴ And this trend took off in Nef's century, 1540-1640, particularly in England. ⁵ Yet it would be inappropriate to identify this book as a sequel to Nef's work on coal, largely because several of the chapters of The Conquest of the Material World first appeared within a few years of his masterpiece. For example, the linchpin of the book, chapter three, "The Progress of Technology and the Growth of Large-Scale Industry in Great Britain, 1540-1640," was published in 1934 in the Economic History...