ABSTRACT
Sources of energy are the foundation of any industrial economy, and energy has been the most politicised of twentieth-century industries. Cabinets were involved in labour disputes in coal mining in 1912, 1921, 1926, 1972, 1974 and, most notoriously, in 1984–85. The British government held a substantial share in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (Anglo-Iranian from 1935, British Petroleum from 1954) from 1914 until 1990. Followers of one political dogma in the 1940s nationalised the coal, gas and electricity industries, perceiving them to be the commanding heights of the economy, and politicians of a different persuasion privatised them in the 1980s. The building of nuclear power stations in the 1950s was part of the British nuclear weapons programme. The ‘dash for gas’ of the 1990s has a political as well as an economic rationale, and in 1999 was the subject of discussion between the highest echelons of the British and United States governments. Energy is of all industries the most exposed to international pressures. Its costs are determined as much by exchange rates as by wages and the price of equipment. The industry changed dramatically in the last forty years, particularly in the last fifteen years of the century. Imports of coal from Australia and Latin America, the extraction of oil and gas from offshore wells, attempts by electricity companies to supply domestic consumers with gas and by gas companies to supply electricity – all would have appeared bizarre before 1960. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the archaeological evidence for the changes in the industry.
