What was the importance of energy in the pre-industrial history of Leiden? How much energy â both renewable and non-renewable â was required to sustain the cityâs development? Where did this energy come from? To what extent did the available supply of fuel set a limit on early modern urban growth? And, conversely, how did demand from within the city put pressure on the outside environment and, hence, shape the pre-industrial history of energy itself? Historians usually link the transition to a high-energy society â that is, a society with a heavy demand for energy derived mainly from fossil fuels â to cycles of (early) modern economic growth and industrialisation.1 Especially in the debate on the âlittleâ and âgreatâ divergences in Europe and the world, energy has become a key factor in explaining the rise of economic modernity; and economic modernity, in turn, has become a key factor in explaining the intensification of human-induced environmental change over the past couple of centuries.2 It is not by chance that most of the research has been preoccupied with Britainâs âexceptionalismâ in this story of economic and ecological divergence.3 Indeed, the question why the industrial revolution as well as the roots of global warming were mainly British was answered by its early transition to coal. While other economies remained inherently constrained by the land they lived off, Britain was quick to replace its âorganicâ energy basis of renewable biomass fuels, mostly wood for heat and food for labour, with the âmineralâ energy from non-renewable fossil fuels stored underground.
In an attempt to trace the origins of economic growth before the industrial revolution, similar claims have been made for the Dutch âmiracleâ of the early modern period. Ever since J.W. de Zeeuw argued that the Dutch golden age was
Indeed, the story of Europeâs âspecial pathâ towards economic modernity being rooted in its energy basis may, by now, have become famous, commonly acknowledged in historiography. It is still, however, a story that has remained mostly, if not only, interested in the âbigâ patterns of economic growth in world history. The Dutch peat debate is basically another version of the British coal debate, searching for the roots of the âfirst modern economyâ. The same is true for much of the environmental history of the so-called Anthropocene â the age in which humanityâs impact on nature has reached unprecedented and unsustainable proportions, and which is believed to have begun with the advent of modern, steam-powered economic growth or, even later, with the âgreat accelerationâ during the postwar period.6 Far less interest has been shown in smaller entities of fuel consumption taking shape before the great divergence and how these established a perhaps more regional, but equally complex, relationship with energy, in both its economic and âextra-economicâ dimensions.7 Moreover, as a consequence of the narrative on energy as a precondition of growth, the principal question asked until now has been what energy has done to the economy (or society, more broadly), rather than the other way around. The main puzzle to be solved is how past societies have been supplied by the energy
The focus on one specific city in this book presents a good opportunity to move beyond any kind of supply-side determinism and to ask about the broader aspects of energy consumption, instead of energy production, in (urban) history. Indeed, cities, by their very nature, can essentially be viewed as large consumers of fuel, and thus important drivers of energy transitions. Compared to the rural environment, the demand for fuel in cities is always more pressing and more challenging, relying on a more complex exchange of energy with a hinterland outside the urban boundaries. In this way, cities have exerted a strong âagencyâ in historical energy transitions â especially those that preceded industrialisation â representing the places where changes in energy consumption could be observed earlier and were more pronounced than elsewhere. By focussing on one city, moreover, different actors can also be invited onto the stage which otherwise would remain obscured: most notably, the users of energy.
The concept of âurban metabolismâ can be fruitful here; it emphasises the flows of matter and energy between nature and cities.8 When employing this concept, the question becomes less about how cities were âblessedâ or âcursedâ by the energy basis they rested upon, as if they were passive entities existing by virtue of their natural endowments, and more about how they actively interfered in their immediate and more remote ecological hinterland from which fuel was harvested. Seen this way, processes of urbanisation become a motor, rather than an outcome, of past (and present) energy transitions. In this chapter I thus wish to put energy central to the history of early modern Leiden, not only touching upon its economic trajectories but also taking the social, cultural and ecological features into consideration that were characteristic of urbanity at large.
Besides providing new clues on the peculiarity of cities and their inhabitants as energy consumers, an urban micro-perspective also allows new opportunities for the collection of data prior to the emergence of national statistics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This study relies on the (almost) yearly excise duties collected by the city of Leiden on the consumption of
In terms of energy consumption, Leiden was a typical city at the heart of the âadvanced organic economyâ of Holland â yet always with its own specific characteristics. Unlike Amsterdam and Rotterdam, Leiden was not a port city but an industrial city. And unlike Delft (a city of brewers and potters) and Dordrecht (a city of blacksmiths), Leiden was not an industrial city with much fuel-intensive manufacturing activity. Instead, Leiden was a centre for textile production â a type of production that would only become fuel-intensive after the introduction of the steam engine during the industrial revolution. Most of the cityâs demand for energy must, therefore, have come from its dwellers â or âurban lifeâ as such. In what comes below, a birdâs eye view of the urban energy basis from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries is presented first â going into Leidenâs energy mix in section one and its aggregate energy consumption levels in section two. Then, explanations for Leidenâs early modern energy trajectory are sought at both the supply and demand sides, by
1 Leidenâs Energy Mix
Following the methodology developed within the LEG (Long-term Energy and Growth) network, four basic types of energy carriers are included in the analysis: (1) food energy for human labour; (2) fodder energy for animal labour; (3) wind and water energy for motion; and (4) fuel energy, both renewable (fuelwood) and fossil (peat and coal), for heat.15 Food was based on the tax excise on beer, grain and meat; fodder on the tax excise on the ownership of horses; wind and water on the tax excise on milling; and fuel on the tax excise on firewood, peat and coal. In the case of food and fuel, the excises reveal the physical quantity of products that were sold and taxed on the urban market during a particular year, to which a certain quantity of energy was linked. In the case of wind and water, the amount of grain milled was used as an indication of the amount of wind or water energy required to produce a particular amount of flour. In the case of fodder, the number of horses provided an estimation of the yearly requirements of fodder to feed these horses.16
It is clear from Figure 4.1, which measures the share of each energy carrier relative to the total energy consumed in Leiden over time, that the transition to peat in Holland had deep roots, going back as far as the late Middle Ages. By the end of the fifteenth century, Leiden already derived most of its thermal energy from the consumption of peat. In 1480, 33 per cent of the total energy mix was supplied by it, whereas fuelwood (both firewood and charcoal) provided a mere four per cent. This means that peat had already become the dominant fuel in Leiden before the middle of the fifteenth century. We know, indeed, from qualitative indications in landscape archaeology, historical geography and environmental history that systematic peat digging began in the provinces of Holland and Utrecht from the fourteenth century onwards.17 This was also the case, and probably even at an earlier stage, in Flanders and Brabant.18 From
Energy consumption in Leiden by carrier, 1450â1850
SOURCES: ELO, NL-LdnRAL-0501, nos. 573â644, Rekeningen van de tresoriers; NL-LdnRAL-0501A, nos. 7475â7516, Rekeningen van de tresorier ordinaris; nos. 9722â10095, Blaffaards van de tresorier ordinaris; NL-LdnRAL-0516, nos. 3486â3533, Rekeningen van de gemeenteontvanger
This early use of peat did not yet make the Leiden economy fuel-intensive, however. For the entire energy mix, most energy before the sixteenth century did not come from the combustion of fuels but from burning the calories stored in foodstuffs. Around the turn of the sixteenth century, more than half of the energy in the city was still supplied by food (mostly cereals and beer) which fuelled the human body, not only to support its basal metabolism but also to produce mechanical energy in the form of work. Feed for draught animals as well as wind and water power accounted for a relatively high amount of energy as well: about twelve per cent in 1480, taken together. For an urban environment like Leidenâs this was indeed high, since most of the animal power, wind and water energy were, for obvious reasons, deployed outside the city, in agriculture, land reclamation or, in the case of sailing ships, over water.19 In Leiden,
The heavy reliance on food, fodder, and wind and water power meant that the economy in medieval Leiden still largely had a renewable energy regime as its basis â even if it already consumed significant amounts of peat. This changed over the course of the fifteenth century, when the urbanisation process fully started in Leiden and the cityâs fossil fuel dependence rapidly rose to over sixty per cent of the total energy system (Figure 4.2). During the seventeenth century, pre-industrial Leiden reached its economic and demographic maturity, which was accompanied by an increased percentage of fossil fuels in the energy mix, reaching up to eighty per cent â a number that remained stable thereafter. Even after the urban economy started to decline in the eighteenth century, fossil fuel dependence in Leiden kept on floating around a seventy to eighty per cent level. This was remarkably high, considering that England and Wales, the coal countries par excellence, only reached a similar
Share of fossil fuels in the total energy mix in Leiden, 1450â1850
SOURCES: see Figure 4.1
Around 1500, Leiden achieved the status of a fossil energy regime in which renewable, soil-dependent energy sources such as wood and food were to a
Turfsteken, drawing by Claes Jansz Visscher, c. 1600 âLow peatâ being cut â a type of turf that was situated below the water table and therefore had to be dredged first. After dredging, the peat was trodden in wooden troughs to make it cuttable. Next, blocks of peat were stacked and left to dry. When ready for burning, the peat was loaded onto ships and transported via a dense network of turfvaarten that connected the peateries with their (mostly urban) markets
SOURCE: RIJKSMUSEUM AMSTERDAM, RP-P-OB-77.525
In Leiden, this fossil-dependent system was largely powered by peat, not coal â a fuel that provided energy accumulated over millions, instead of thousands, of years, as was the case in England or the Southern Low Countries (later Belgium). Indeed, the use of coal in the Dutch city would never reach a substantial level until the end of the nineteenth century and later. Before 1800, coal consumption hardly ever exceeded a level of ten per cent. Only after 1815 did the consumption of coal in Leiden start to increase a little, when the unification of the Northern and Southern Low Countries improved the integration of Walloon coal into one national market â resulting in a further expansion of the sources of the cityâs energy provision.23 By the time of Belgian independence in 1830, however, Dutch access to coal from the south was blocked off once again. As Ben Gales has demonstrated, the coal age in the Dutch Low Countries was very much a phenomenon of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.24 Despite the lack of coal, it is nevertheless clear that an early modern city like Leiden, much like industrial societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, already relied heavily on a âstockâ of fossilised energy accumulated over millennia and coming from more remote areas.25 And, as a result, Leiden had abandoned the traditional short supply chain of renewable energy as early as the late fifteenth century.
2
Figure 4.4 visualises the aggregate level of all energy inputs (food, feed, wind and water, and fuels) consumed in Leiden and shows that the transition to peat in the long run also allowed the city to follow a path of growing energy intake. Especially at the height of Leidenâs economic development during the seventeenth century, its energy consumption showed a steep rise. After this rise followed a prolonged decline until the level of energy consumption slightly recovered in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is evident, then, that the development in energy consumption was closely intertwined with the general development of the cityâs economy and demography, and that peat took a leading role in sustaining urban growth in Leiden.
During its golden age, Leiden required well over two million GJ of energy, reaching its phase of âpeak peatâ in the middle of the seventeenth century. If all this energy were to be supplied through the burning of firewood, it would have taken the wood annually produced by a forest the size of 700 km².26 With a little over 200 km² of large woodlands (excluding small woods such as
An early modern, medium-sized Dutch city like Leiden thus seems to have been an important exception to the rule that pre-industrial societies characteristically had a low energy metabolism. In the premodern period, energy was costly and always in short supply;27 but not in Leiden, so it seems. In the fifteenth century, the Holland city annually consumed around 20 GJ of energy per capita (Figure 4.5) â the equivalent of 1.6 metric tons of firewood, which was similar to the level attained in London a century earlier.28 During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when Leiden had switched to peat, the energy consumption per head rose rapidly to a level of about
These estimations situate Leidenâs consumption, even during its century of decline, as proportionate to the most energy-consuming regions of pre-industrial and even early industrial Europe. Around 1800, England and Wales enjoyed a per capita energy consumption level of c. 50 GJ per annum.29 By contrast, countries that were poor in fossil fuels and situated in the warmer climate of Mediterranean Europe, such as Italy, Portugal and Spain, achieved an energy input that before the twentieth century hardly ever exceeded a level of 20 GJ.30 The levels of per capita energy consumption shown by Leiden from the middle of the sixteenth century onwards testify to an extremely energy-rich economy for the pre-industrial period â and one that shows to have been resilient, even after the cityâs boom of the seventeenth century. Even London, the worldâs largest coal market in 1750, consumed about 1 metric ton of coal per head per annum â the equivalent of c. 30 GJ (for fuel energy alone).31 This suggests that the energy regime in Leiden operated within the âindustrialâ scale of England and Wales â but began doing so at an earlier, âpre-industrialâ date.
Compared with the level in the middle of the fifteenth century, the consumption of energy per capita â and probably also per economic output32 â had doubled by the middle of the nineteenth century. Leiden had, as it were, experienced a great acceleration of its own already by the seventeenth century â some three centuries before the âgreat accelerationâ proper of the 1950s.33 Between the years 1450 and 1850, the city had followed and maintained a route towards a growing influx of energy into its urban metabolism. Even when the main peat reserves in Holland and Utrecht started to become exhausted in the eighteenth century (see below), Leiden did not return to its starting position in the low-energy bottleneck of the Middle Ages. Once a higher consumption of peat was attained, it seems not so easy to have avoided falling into the âaddictionâ to a more energy-devouring trajectory. An early modern, but still pre-industrial, city â at least in the case of the Northern Low Countries and probably in the broader âadvanced organic economyâ of the North Sea area â appears to have been less constrained by its energy base
3 Urban Supply and the Hinterland
The most obvious source to search for explanations of these energy transitions is the cost â and hence the supply â of the energy carriers available to consumers. Comparative prices per unit of energy â expressed in the number of stuivers needed to buy the means to produce one GJ â are shown in Figure 4.6.34 It is clear that peat in Leiden had provided a cheap alternative to fuelwood by the second half of the sixteenth century (and probably even earlier). Here again, the exceptional nature of Hollandâs early energy transition to fossil fuels emerges.
Fuel prices in Leiden, 1450â1850
NOTE: Firewood prices are Amsterdam prices; nineteenth-century prices are national prices; all other prices are Leiden prices.
SOURCES: Posthumus, Nederlandsche prijsgeschiedenis, 45â49, 126â40, 210â16, 286â98, 405â9, 477, 502â5, 631â39, 753â64; Cornelisse, Energiemarkten en energiehandel, 183; Dutch national accounts, https://nationalaccounts.niwi.knaw.nl/start.htm
According to Robert C. Allen, fossil energy worked as a so-called âbackstop technologyâ: it provided vast amounts of energy at a constant cost â but one that was initially higher than that of conventional sources, thus putting âa lid on wood pricesâ. Once firewood prices started to rise as a result of an acute shortage of wood combined with rapid urban growth â and thus growing demand for fuel â that affected most of early modern Europe, the more or less constant supply (and price) of coal eventually solved the energy crisis. In Britain, this âbackstop modelâ shift happened around the turn of the seventeenth century â an early date, according to Allen, which explains the âBritishnessâ of the industrial revolution.35 The Southern Low Countries (Belgium) experienced a similar ânarrow escapeâ â to borrow John Nefâs phrase â from a nascent energy crisis through a transition to coal in the eighteenth century.36
In Leiden (or the Northern Low Countries, more broadly), it seems that there never was a timber crisis at all. That is to say, there never was such an increase in wood prices as there was in seventeenth-century Britain and the eighteenth-century Southern Low Countries, where there was no (more) peat that could serve as an earlier fossil alternative to wood than coal.37 In the Northern Low
Indeed, the peat prices in Leiden hint at the elasticity of the supply of the fuel throughout the early modern period. The other fossil fuel â coal â was significantly more expensive. Since the mining of domestic coal deposits in the Limburg area, where the seams were harder to reach and required more sophisticated technology, was largely non-existent until the end of the nineteenth century, coal needed to travel large distances and across geopolitical boundaries to reach the Northern Low Countries.38 The imported coal mostly came from Newcastle, Liège, the north of France and the Ruhr area, reaching Holland via the Maas and Rhine rivers through the ports of Rotterdam and
In comparison to cities like London, Antwerp and Ghent, peat was sold in Leiden at an internationally competitive price per unit of energy â also in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.41 Judging from the peat prices, one certainly does not get the impression that the brown fuel was suffering from short supply, even if the most easily accessible peat deposits in the low-lying fens of Holland and Utrecht were starting to reach near exhaustion after the middle of the eighteenth century. The decline in âlow peatâ extraction was compensated, indeed, by an increase in the production of âhigh peatâ from the raised bogs in the north of the Netherlands. As M.A.W. Gerdingâs research has shown, Dutch peat extraction gained a renewed boost in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the nexus of production was reoriented towards the northern provinces of Groningen, Friesland, Drenthe and Overijssel.42 Behind this reorientation was a very conscious strategy adopted by the Dutch government, which pursued a protectionist policy promoting the further exploitation of domestic peat and discouraging the import of foreign coal.43
Qualitative indications indeed reveal how Leiden expanded its energy hinterland in the eighteenth century from its neighbouring peat bogs in Holland and Utrecht to the more remote peat reserves in the north of the Netherlands. Two ordonnances â one from 1582 and 1592 â regulating the sale of peat on the Leiden market made mention of peat extracted in Veenendaal and Moerbeek, two major peat colonies situated at about 85 and 95 kilometres, respectively, from Leiden.44 A century later, a new ordonnance from 1692 was the first to regulate the import and inspection of peat from âover the IJssel, be it from Groningen, Friesland, Drenthe or other peat of that kind, commonly known
Of course, the constant supply of peat in Leiden throughout the early modern period, though it sold cheaply, came at a high ecological price. Within the city itself, the combustion of peat resulted in more emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), sulphur dioxide (SO2) and airborne particles (smog). What entered the urban energy metabolism also had to come out again one way or another â and did so in the form of smoke which polluted the urban air.47 Most of peatâs costs were, however, paid, not by the city itself, but by its ecological hinterland. Even though the transition to peat may have saved the remaining woodlands in the countryside, this merely replaced one ecological pressure for another. During its phase of âpeak peatâ in the middle of the seventeenth century, Leiden consumed around 120,000 tons of the brown fuel annually, which was about twenty per cent of the yearly production of all peat-digging industries in Holland and Utrecht combined.48 Besides the obvious heavy burden on the hinterland to produce sufficient amounts of peat, the high demand for fuel in Leiden was for a significant part responsible for the environmental destruction that was associated with peat digging, such as soil compaction and oxidation.49
Growing ecological pressures on an increasingly remote hinterland and a sustained influx of energy suggest again that urban demand was a strong agent in the history of energy. Indeed, the observations made in this section reinforce the idea that the energy consumption of early modern cities was not solely a matter of supplying urban needs but also of cities actively making an environment of their own and displacing their ecological costs to the surrounding hinterland â close or distant. In the case of early modern Leiden, âurban agencyâ saddled its supply area with ever-heavier demands.50 It is time, now, to take a view from the demand side and, thus, from the urban actors behind Leidenâs energy regime.
4
The principal contributors to the concentrated demand for fuel in cities were private consumers and industrial customers. Other parts of the urban energy consumption came from the heating of public offices, from large institutions such as hospitals, abbeys and monasteries, and from commercial food preparation in hostels and taverns; but the overall proportion demanded by these actors was probably rather small â at least when viewed from the aggregate level of the entire city. Urban consumers mostly needed fuel to warm a home, cook a meal or heat a furnace in a workshop. As we have seen, the use of wind, water and animal power was limited in the city, as it was largely spent outside the urban walls â although cities most certainly also benefited from imported goods and services produced in the countryside.
How did Leiden customers benefit from the transition to cheap peat in the fifteenth century? According to De Zeeuw, the abundance of peat explains the success of many heat-intensive industries in early modern Holland, as it allowed much of the artisanal production to run on âthermal processesâ.51 The largest fuel-dependent industries before the introduction of steam-powered mechanisation in Leiden were textile dyeing, brewing, bread baking, liquor distillation, brick and lime making, soap boiling, glass making and pottery baking. Calculations of the amount of fuel consumed by these industries are given in Table 4.1. These have been obtained by multiplying a fixed energy to economic output ratio per industry (it took, for example, about 30 kg of peat, or 510 MJ of energy, to produce one barrel of beer).52
Fuel consumption by industry in Leiden, 1500â1800 (in GJ)
| 1500 | 1550 | 1600 | 1650 | 1700 | 1750 | 1800 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bleaching and dyeing | (6,750) | 5,400 | 158,374 | 249,761 | 229,514 | 145,657 | 79,472 |
| Brewing | 14,755 | 10,881 | 23,788 | 71,936 | 41,106 | 41,106 | (3,184) |
| Baking | 613 | 339 | 3,504 | 4,587 | 2,806 | 2,746 | 2,213 |
| Distilling | (1,410) | (1,128) | (2,969) | (6,612) | (7,152) | 4,993 | 3,669 |
| Brick and lime | (8,206) | 6,565 | (17,276) | 16,538 | 20,318 | (7,653) | 6,332 |
| Soap | (7,927) | (6,341) | 16,688 | 22,377 | 22,691 | 21,754 | 23,290 |
| Glass | (42,323) | (33,858) | 89,100 | 30,375 | 30,375 | 28,350 | 28,350 |
| Pottery | (550) | (323) | (849) | 1,890 | (2,044) | (14,27) | (1,181) |
| Sum | 82,534 | 64,836 | 312,548 | 404,074 | 356,005 | 253,686 | 147,690 |
| Total fuel energy | 277,236 | 269,300 | 1,534,334 | 2,189,636 | 1,536,650 | 1,188,517 | 925,953 |
| % industrial | 30 | 24 | 20 | 18 | 23 | 21 | 16 |
| % rest | 70 | 76 | 80 | 82 | 77 | 79 | 84 |
NOTE: Figures between brackets have been extrapolated. The years given are reference years and do not always contain data from that particular year. Sometimes data were only available for a single reference year â as in the case of pottery making â meaning that the extrapolated years should be treated with caution. The table only considers the energy derived from the combustion of fuels â thus excluding food, fodder, and wind and water energy.
SOURCES: Population: Noordam, âDemografische ontwikkelingenâ; Tjalsma, âDe bevolkingâ; ELO, NL-LdnRAL-0516, Generale staat van de bevolking, no. 1059 (1818â1848); Dyeing: Posthumus, De geschiedenis van de leidsche lakenindustrie, 3:930â31, 1098â99. Brewing: Unger, A History of Brewing, 239. Baking and distilling: ELO, NL-LdnRAL-0501, nos. 573â644, Rekeningen van de tresoriers; NL-LdnRAL-0501A, nos. 7475â7516, Rekeningen van de tresorier ordinaris; nos. 9722â10095, Blaffaards van de tresorier ordinaris; NL-LdnRAL-0516, nos. 3486â3533, Rekeningen van de gemeenteontvanger. Brick and lime: Vries and Woude, The First Modern Economy, 304â5; Van Bavel, âEarly Proto-Industrializationâ, 1136; Soap: Zanden, âDe Economie van Hollandâ; ELO, P.J.M. de Baar, Gilden: namen van meesters, leerlingen enz. 1574â1812. Glass: Klein, âNederlandse glasmakerijenâ. Pottery: Roodenburg, De Delftse pottenbakkersnering, 123
The first important industrial customers of fuel were bread bakers and beer brewers. As they produced staples and thus had their fixed place in urban society, brewers and bakers also had a rightful claim to the energy necessary to keep their workshops running.53 These staple industries would, however, quickly be taken over by the textile dyeing sector. This should not come as a surprise. In the century between 1580 and 1680, Leiden rapidly became one of the most important textile centres in Europe, famous for its high-quality dyed cloths. Dyers needed fuel to heat the vats in which textiles were scoured. Since the textile industry was so huge â producing over 130,000 pieces of cloth annually at its peak in the 1660s â the demand for fuel within this sector easily exceeded
Although it is likely that the availability of cheap peat contributed to the success of Leidenâs textile and other industries, and that, vice versa, the cityâs industrial growth was an important driver of the demand for peat, the energy required by industry as a proportion of the urban total was probably rather modest. When grouping all industrial demand together, the energy consumed for manufacturing hardly reached a share of sixteen to thirty per cent within the totality of Leidenâs fuel consumption. Even in the seventeenth century, when the textile industry grew to its height, the ârestâ, non-industrial category â which, so we can assume, almost exclusively consisted of domestic consumers â used about eighty per cent of all the energy consumed in the city. The vast majority of energy inputs, in other words, was consumed, not by industrial production, but in a domestic setting, for cooking and providing warmth.56 Ordinary households must thus have been the most important users of energy, especially when the sole consumption of peat was concerned. Many energy-demanding industries, apart from cloth dyers, indeed also used other fuels than peat. While bread bakers usually preferred charcoal â which burned at higher temperatures than peat and came without the foul smoke of coal â brewers, distillers, brick and lime makers, soap boilers, glass makers and potters are known to have been early coal users â also in the Northern Low Countries where the import of the black fuel from abroad was limited but still important to fuel certain industries.57 Coal gave these industries the advantage not only of producing higher energy levels, but also of offering more compact storage and reduced handling time, consequently enabling them to centralise the labour and capital needed to service a fire.58
The shares of industrial and âotherâ consumers in Table 4.1 indicate that fossil fuels like peat were mostly consumed in a domestic rather than an industrial context; and that the proportion of both remained more or less the same from
For this high-energy pattern to persist throughout the early modern period and after, something must have happened, I believe, in the wider âcultureâ of the city, rather than just in its economy. Apparently, early modern urbanites themselves wanted to consume more energy than they had before â and more than their counterparts living in the countryside.60 Part of this can, of course, be explained by the concentrated nature of urban consumption, where energy could be consumed more effectively and, hence, more abundantly. Once energy was imported into the city, it was easier for industries and households to consume more energy. This explains why urban consumers in Leiden could reach a higher energy use, but not why they actually did so in the early modern period. The proliferation of energy-demanding industrial activity as well as changes in residential energy use do explain this. And considering the greater importance of private consumers over industrial ones in driving Leidenâs energy regime, an overall change in urban life then becomes the most convincing explanation.
Recent research has indeed begun to show that historical energy transitions were deeply rooted in the everyday culture of urban homemakers.61 The expansion of a consumer society during the early modern period, in particular, putting more emphasis on comfort, ease and domesticity, was credited with making the lifestyle of urban citizens considerably more fuel-intensive. Peat
A man weighing gold, painting by Cornelis de Man, c. 1670 A Dutch merchant was counting his money with his wife sitting next to him, as a male servant was about to fire the fireplace with peat he had just retrieved from the attic. Middle-class households like the one depicted here were important consumers of peat in early modern Holland
SOURCE: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Probate-inventory evidence from Leiden certainly points in this direction, as middle-class inventories record ever-more fireplaces, stoves, foot braziers and other heating material culture in which peat could be burned.64 These additional fuel technologies did not simply provide households with more comfort, but also required them to put more diligence and industriousness into maintaining the additional fires these technologies now were burning â work that was usually performed by housewives, or domestic servants if the family was wealthy enough.65 Early modern households, so it appears, had grown more sensible to the comforts of warmth and were ever more willing to put in the time, effort and money needed to sustain these comforts.
5 Conclusion
The energy consumed in early modern Leiden reached immense proportions. During its golden age in the seventeenth century, the city had a per capita energy consumption of over 50 GJ. Later, in the eighteenth century, it attained a high and stable level of c. 40 GJ â a number that only in the final quarter of the nineteenth century was matched by the average per capita energy consumption in the whole of Europe.66 It is clear that early modern urban societies, in contrast to pre-industrial rural environments or entire (proto-)national polities, could already have embarked on a high-energy trajectory, accounting for a high input of energy, derived mainly from the combustion of fossil fuels â a trajectory that was similar to the one that industrialised nations as a whole would reach only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This high-energy economy Leiden owed to the availability of cheap peat. After becoming its main source of heat in the fifteenth century, peat was consumed in growing quantities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries â gradually
But this equation could just as easily be turned around: urban demand also fuelled its own supply. Indeed, this chapter has emphasised the still poorly studied importance of âurban agencyâ in shaping the history of energy. As large consumers, cities did not produce energy themselves and, therefore, relied on a hinterland to supply their needs. When Leiden switched to peat, it drastically expanded its ecological hinterland from which energy was fetched. Whereas the traditional fuels of wood and food were usually produced in close vicinity to the city and were consumed within a short time frame of a couple of years at most, peat stored the energy that had fossilised over several millennia and could be harvested from more remote areas. When the nearest peat bogs in Holland and Utrecht were suffering from depletion during the eighteenth century, the energy hinterland of Leiden was once again expanded â this time towards the digging industries in the northern provinces of the Netherlands. A little exploration of the most important customers of fuel indicates that demand factors were just as powerful as supply factors in the Leiden history of peat.
It turns out that early modern urban actors â including fuel-dependent industries such as cloth dyeing, but also, and more importantly, middle-class households â wanted to consume more energy and that they were no less limited by the structural energy constraints inherent in a pre-industrial economy than is often thought in the historiography. While the demand for fuel was rising in the early modern city, the ecological burdens were, however, mostly imposed on an ever-more distant hinterland. This study of energy consumption in Leiden from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries highlights, in sum, that historical transitions to fossil fuels were not just the result of the potential of energy production, but that they were closely tied to the fuel-demanding culture of early modern urbanity as well. The early modern city fuelled its own energy history as much as it was fuelled by it.
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For a general overview of the history of energy, see Crosby, Children of the Sun; Fouquet, Heat, Power and Light; Vaclav, Energy and Civilization.
See, for instance, Pomeranz, The Great Divergence; Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich; Malanima, âEnergy Crisis and Growthâ. And on the environmental consequences of modern growth and industrialisation: Jarrige and Le Roux, The Contamination of the Earth.
See, in particular, Wrigley, The Path to Sustained Growth; Allen, The British Industrial Revolution. For the British roots of global warming, see Malm, Fossil Capital, 2016.
De Zeeuw, âPeat and the Dutch Golden Ageâ; Unger, âEnergy Sourcesâ; Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change; Van Zanden, âWerd de Gouden Eeuw uit turf geboren?â; Van der Woude, âSources of Energyâ.
Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, 216â25; Allen, The British Industrial Revolution, 98â104.
Merchant, The Anthropocene and the Humanities; McNeill and Engelke, The Great Acceleration.
Exceptions tackling the relationship between energy and urbanity can be found in Galloway, Keene, and Murphy, âFuelling the Cityâ; Hoffmann, An Environmental History, 227â37; Cavert, The Smoke of London, for the premodern period and Krausmann, âA City and Its Hinterlandâ; Barles, âThe Main Characteristicsâ; Schott, âEnergizing European Citiesâ for the modern period.
For a conceptual outline of societyâs âmetabolismâ, see, for instance, Fischer-Kowalski, âSocietyâs Metabolismâ. See several contributions in Soens et al., Urbanizing Nature, for an innovative historical exploration of the concept.
On the excise tax system in Leiden and the Northern Low Countries in the medieval and early modern periods, see Marsilje, Het financiële beleid; Engels, De belastingen en geldmiddelen.
The energy conversion used for firewood is 12.5 MJ/kg, for peat 17 MJ/kg and for coal 27 MJ/kg: Afeefy, Liebman, and Stein, âNeutral Thermochemical Dataâ.
The energy conversion used for small beer is 1 MJ/l, for strong beer 2.1 MJ/l, for grain 14 MJ/kg and for meat 8.8 MJ/kg: Muldrew, Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness, 118.
Wind and water energy consumption is based on the estimation that, in order to produce one kg of flour, 1.2 MJ of wind or water energy was needed: Davids, âInnovations in Windmill Technologyâ.
The energy derived from fodder is based on the assumption that one horse required about 63 MJ of fodder energy per day: Kander and Warde, âNumber, Size and Energy Consumptionâ.
A more detailed discussion of the methodology behind reconstructing Leidenâs energy regime can be found in Ryckbosch and Saelens, âFuelling the Urban Economyâ.
See Kander, Malanima, and Warde, Power to the People, 17â34 for a detailed outline of this methodology.
The specific energy conversions are provided in footnotes 10 to 13.
Diepeveen, De vervening in Delfland en Schieland, 10â21; Leenders, Verdwenen venen, 245; Cornelisse, Energiemarkten en energiehandel, 19â24.
Soens and Thoen, âMais où sont les tourbières dâantan?â; Jongepier et al., âThe Brown Goldâ.
The Netherlands is, of course, well known for its historical use of wind energy. See, Davids, âInnovations in Windmill Technologyâ; Kaptein, Nijverheid op windkracht.
Posthumus, De geschiedenis van de Leidsche lakenindustrie, 1939, 2 and 3:953â55; Kaptein, Nijverheid op windkracht, 134â69.
Warde, Energy Consumption, 68.
Hoffmann, An Environmental History, 198.
Van Zanden and Van Riel, The Structures of Inheritance, 206â10.
Gales, âNorth versus Southâ, 224.
Wrigley differentiates between the pre-existing âstocksâ of energy from which mineral economies draw and the contemporaneous âflowsâ of energy tapped by organic economies; Wrigley, The Path to Sustained Growth, 17â18.
Based on an annual firewood production of 3.3 cubic metres per ha: Warde, Energy Consumption, 34.
Hoffmann, An Environmental History, 196.
Galloway, Keene, and Murphy, âFuelling the Cityâ, 455.
Warde, Energy Consumption, 134.
Malanima, âEnergy Consumption in England and Italyâ, 99â101; Henriques, Energy Consumption in Portugal, 135â37; Gales, âNorth versus Southâ, 228â29.
Cavert, The Smoke of London, 17â31.
On the energy intensity in Leiden â that is, the amount of energy consumed per unit of economic output â see Ryckbosch and Saelens, âFuelling the Urban Economyâ, 236â37.
McNeill and Engelke, The Great Acceleration.
Firewood prices are Amsterdam prices and nineteenth-century prices are national prices. This should not affect the picture sketched here, since firewood consumption was marginal and the market was well integrated throughout all of Holland.
Allen, The British Industrial Revolution, 88â104.
Nef, The Rise of the British Coal Industry, 61.
In Flanders, peat resources played an important part in the urbanisation process as well but were rapidly depleted in the late Middle Ages: Soens and Thoen, âMais où sont les tourbières dâantan?â. In England, peat never really played a major role, except in the north and only during the sixteenth century: Warde, Energy Consumption, 22.
Gales, Delven en slepen, 51â57.
Nef, The Rise of the British Coal Industry, 84â87; Unger, âEnergy Sourcesâ, 236â45; Sneller, Geschiedenis van den steenkolenhandel, 216.
Van Zanden, âThe Ecological Constraintsâ, 100.
Allen, âWas There a Timber Crisisâ, 479; Saelens, âDe prijs van energieâ, 139.
Gerding, âVier eeuwen turfwinningâ, 37â41.
Van Zanden, âThe Ecological Constraintsâ, 99â102.
ELO, NL-LdnRAL-0509, nos. 1140 and 1142.
Ibidem, no. 1153.
De Vries, Barges and Capitalism, 26; Gerding, âVier eeuwen turfwinningâ, 279â81.
Hölsgens, âEnergy Transitionsâ, 87â95.
De Zeeuw, âPeat and the Dutch Golden Ageâ, 16.
Joosten, The Global Peatland CO2 Picture.
Cf. Deligne and Charruadas, âCities Hiding the Forestsâ, who accounted for similar findings for the pre-industrial Southern Low Countries.
De Zeeuw, âPeat and the Dutch Golden Ageâ, 23.
Part of the data have already been published in Saelens, âIndustrial Energy Consumptionâ, and has been supplemented here to include the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Radkau, Wood, 94â95.
Posthumus, De geschiedenis van de Leidsche lakenindustrie, 2 and 3:929â36.
Posthumus, Bronnen, 6:668â71.
And this was also true in early modern London as recent research has shown: Cavert, âIndustrial Coal Consumptionâ.
Saelens, âIndustrial Energy Consumptionâ.
Malm, Fossil Capital, 2016.
Saelens, âIndustrial Energy Consumptionâ; Mosley, The Chimney of the World, 102â4.
The difference in energy consumption between town and countryside is hinted at by the difference between national and urban energy consumption levels. Around 1800 the national per capita consumption of energy in the Netherlands was 22 GJ (see Gales, âNorth versus Southâ, 245), while in Leiden it was 37 GJ at the time (cf. Figure 4.5) â which already was a lower number compared to the peak in the early seventeenth century.
See several of the contributions in Saelens, Blondé, and Ryckbosch, Energy in the Early Modern Home.
Saelens, âThe Comforts of Energy?â, 172â89.
De Vries, The Industrious Revolution.
Saelens, âThe Comforts of Energy?â, 95â109.
Cowan, More Work for Mother.
Kander, Malanima, and Warde, Power to the People, 134.