Did It Fall or Was It Pushed? The Foleys and the End of the Charcoal Iron Industry in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

It is given to few undergraduates, however well matured, even in a past so distant as to be well nigh historical, plausibly and convincingly to revise received historical doctrine; Professor Flinn’s career began thus with a perceptive discussion of some of the problems of the British iron industry in the sixteenth century.1 Since then he has done much to release the historiography of that industry from the stultifying embrace of monocausal explanation,2 and thus legitimised attempts to examine it once again in the round. Until some of this work had been done, it had remained exceedingly difficult to explain convincingly how the charcoal iron industry in Britain managed to survive much beyond the middle of the seventeenth century. Now that these perspectives have lengthened, it seems to have become almost as difficult to provide a reasonably convincing explanation for its demise. Thus it has long been known that a number of charcoal blast furnaces survived, even in Britain, into the nineteenth century, and a few into the twentieth, so that there was no absolute and final physical reason for the end of the industry.3 Indeed, less than a generation separates the end of the last charcoal blast furnace in Britain and the setting up of a highly sophisticated operation in Australia, which produced very large amounts of charcoal iron during the Second World War, because charcoal happened to be the only economically available fue1.4