Coal-Heaving and Logistical Labour

Abstract: The journey of a nineteenth-century piece of coal from the earth to the hearth created many distinctive jobs, from keelmen to basket men, coal whippers, coal backers, coal heavers, coal higglers, and more. In the age of steam, half of all workers handled coal. They reveal the coal regime to be a logistical network. Passing through so many hands, coal was constantly in transit, arriving and departing as it flowed from mines throughout the world and burned in industrial and domestic furnaces, in buildings, and on ships. Studying coal's circulation reveals the regime's reliance on an intensifying mode of logistical power, the forceful strategies by which states, corporations, and militaries manage the geography of capitalism. Throughout the nineteenth century, coal became both a highly sought-after product moved by logistics and a key component of logistical power. Coal was the fuel, and steam the energy, of the nineteenth-century British Empire. While the coal miner has a long, dense history within scholarship focused on working-class production, the coal handler as distributor or logistics worker does not. This essay briefly describes the rise of coal's logistical networks before turning to popular literary and visual representations of coal handlers to illuminate the social logics of coal's energetic regime.