Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870–1914 by Steven Gray (review)

In the age of sail, Britain protected its imperial interests with wooden walls. As early as 1611, Arthur Standish insisted "no wood, no kingdom." By the end of the nineteenth century, however, sailors in the Royal Navy sang songs about their "Heart of Oak" while they shovelled coal into the steam engines that powered a global empire. According to an 1882 report, "the command of the sea resolves itself very much into a question of coal supply" (35). In Steam Power and Sea Power, Steven Gray explores the political, economic, social, and cultural implications of the British Navy's transition to, and reliance on, mineral energy. Drawing from a diverse array of government and naval correspondence and reports, parliamentary papers, diaries and journals, ships logs, and a number of newspapers and periodicals from across the British empire, Gray brings together the well-established literature on the relationship between the Royal Navy and the British empire with the quickly-growing field of energy history.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British imperial power rested on the ability of the Navy's steam-powered war ships to access high quality coal everywhere around the world. The first half of the book examines the sophisticated government bureaucracy and naval infrastructure, which Britain developed to maintain a complex and extensive imperial energy network. Gray demonstrates the ways that systems of supply connected coalmines, mainly in Wales and New Zealand, with sites of infrastructure resupply at numerous stations throughout the British Empire. These chapters offer exciting new possibilities for thinking about the material realities of energy's role in shaping imperial and colonial histories.

In the 1870s, the critical link between commercial interests and imperial power demanded a new global defence strategy. Control over high quality coal supplies presented Britain with a distinct advantage over other powerful nations. Gray introduces the concept of "coal consciousness" to describe "a dawning realization about the crucial part that the security of coal and coal infrastructure played in the protection of British interests abroad" (14). Oddly, Gray does not situate this coal consciousness in the context of the publication of William Stanley Jevons's The Coal Question (1865), which insisted that Britain was exhausting its coal reserves and urged the government to place greater value on it as a national interest. By the end of the 1880s, awareness of coal's importance led to what Gray terms a "coaling consensus" within the government and Admiralty. Until World War I, politicians, bureaucrats, and military officers linked imperial interests with coal supply and station security. Not only did this shift in thinking result in the development of infrastructure all over the world to network coal energy for naval power, but also in the creation of a data management system for estimating the Navy's coal requirements, recording coal production, and analyzing its distribution and supply around the world. These aspects of Steam Power and Sea Power make important contributions to our understanding of coal energy and British imperial policy during the late nineteenth century. But Gray does not engage whatsoever with historians, such as Timothy Mitchell, Christopher Jones, and Peter Schulman, whose work pushes historians to consider the relationship between political economy and the material realities of coal energy.

The second half of the book turns our attention to the ways that the Navy's coal supply network altered distant port societies. The energy needs of the Navy integrated these places into the British Empire by expanding the number of opportunities for sailors, imperial subjects, and colonized peoples to exchange goods, services, and cultural experiences. Historians of Britain's empire, especially those familiar with the Royal Navy's role in constructing social and cultural imperial ties, will recognize many ideas that are not particularly new. But here, Gray's contribution comes from pointing out that, in large measure, the...