Harry Mead digs deep into a history of coal, more than any other mineral, the stone that changed the world.

COAL: A HUMAN HISTORY by Barbara Freese (Heinemann, £12.99)

BARBARA Freese acknowledges a little difficulty with her subject. Coal lacks glamour. She writes: "It is dirty, old-fashioned, domestic, and cheap... It evokes bleak images of soot-covered coal miners trudging from the mines, supporting their desperately poor families..."

Of course, the miners' grime isn't soot, but let that pass. As Freese pertinently points out, no-one ever speaks of "striking coal" as they speak of "striking oil: a metaphor for sudden, fantastic wealth".

And yet coal, more than any other mineral, is the stone that changed the world. Freese, an assistant attorney general in the US, quotes her fellow American Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, in the 1880s, described coal as "a portable climate" - able to "make Canada as warm as Calcutta".

Coal's further miracle, noted Emerson, was that it possessed "the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted". Sparking the Industrial Revolution, this was thanks to James Watt and George Stephenson, who "whispered in the ear of mankind that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile".

Unglamorous it may be, but coal will for long resonate profoundly in the North-East. But potential buyers of this book should take note: the sub-title is misleading. Here is not a social history of mining, drawing on accounts of mining folk past and present, to present a picture of life in mining communities.

Filling a broader canvas, Freese, who became fascinated by coal when helping to enforce anti-pollution laws in her home state of Minnesota, gives much attention to energy policy, with events in the US and China, that emerging industrial giant, figuring strongly.

But the pollution theme yields some fascinating pages on London's fogs. They would never have been so bad, the American author tells us, had not we Brits preferred our open fires to the more efficient stove adopted by "other advanced nations".

She remarks: "The British hated to lose the sight of the cheery flames... and it's likely that the smokier and darker the city London grew, the more attached they grew to the brightness of their fires. Forced to choose between seeing the sun and their own fires, they chose the latter."

Through that cause or whatever, a fog that blanketed London and 50 miles around in December 1873 was so dense that several people died simply by stumbling into the Thames.

A century later coal was on its uppers. In a chapter The End of an Era, Freese presents an excellent short account, perhaps tilted slightly too much towards Authority, of the titanic union struggles that began around then and culminated in the collapse of the year-long strike in 1985.

Is she right to say that the essence of the strike was "a desire to preserve a traditional lifestyle. The miners wanted to hold on to something already lost to most members of modern society: tight-knit communities... helping each other through hard times... They wanted to hold on to the jobs their fathers and grandfathers had held"?

Freese makes a strong case that the death of coal in Britain was inevitable, regardless of the colour of the Government. In China, a million miners have lost their jobs in the last 20 years. Germany's mining workforce has been dramatically reduced, and "in 2004, France became the first of the world's significant industrial powers to close down its coal industry entirely".

Though the French miners received far better compensation than their British counterparts, Freese notes that "even with such benefits, the resulting inactivity brings social problems like higher rates of alcoholism, suicide and divorce".

But coal's story is almost certainly far from finished. Touching on matters covered in early chapters, Freese remarks: "People will probably always find some use for coal. Any substance versatile enough to pierce ears in Neolithic China, accessorise togas in ancient Rome, smoke out snakes in Dark Ages Britain, darken paint in prehistoric Pennsylvania, and transform itself chemically into goods ranging from pesticides to perfume, from laughing gas to TNT, probably still has undreamed of future uses."

But too late, alas, for those who mined it only yesterday.

Published: 29/03/2005