It is almost impossible to exaggerate the role that the coal industry played in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. Coal, along with cotton, was the driving force of the British industrial revolution. By the time the First World War broke out in 1914, nearly two-thirds of all the coal entering world trade was mined in Britain, and coal mining accounted for one in ten of Great Britain's entire occupied male population. The rapid expansion of coal mining had a profound impact not just upon the British economy but upon the social, cultural, religious, industrial and political life of the country.This six-volume, reset collection in two parts provides scholars with a wide variety of sources relating to the Victorian coal industry. It is no longer possible to think of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century industry in terms simply of an unending - and unchanging - confrontation between grasping coal owners and militant miners locked together in an incessant stream of toxic strikes and debilitating lockouts. The collection takes into account the recent developments in the historiography of coal mining, showing that miners and their families did not live bleakly narrow lives in featureless, single-industry communities cut off from the rest of society.Coal is a topic that has been, remains, and will continue to be of significant interest to those concerned with the causes, course and consequences of industrialization and de-industrialization.

Sources are rare and have been selected so as to reflect both the diversity of, as well as the changes taking place within, the coal industry, the communities which serviced it, and the industrial relations practices which emerged to regulate it during the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.