ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role played by landed property in the development of the British coal industry. It shows that the industry's changing fortunes were in part a production of the impact of the private ownership of land. For the purposes of analysis, the British coal industry in the century leading up to the Second World War is usually considered in terms of two periods, the one neatly separated from the other by the First World War. The royalty constituted a payment for access to the land by mining capital. In pursuit of surplus profits, capitalists could invest larger sums of finance, as it became available to them, even if all were reduced tendentially to a common level of profitability by competition. This would be encouraged by landowners whilst that capital flowed onto their own land and they would share in the surplus profits with the mineowners.
