About this deal
The son of a naval officer, Paxman is particularly good on the role that coal-fuelled ships played in establishing the hegemony of the Royal Navy, and thus also of the British Empire, in the late 19th century. I knew the names of most of the government ministers and NCB hierarchy but never appreciated the strained relationships in both political parties. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. The major sign of the book’s ambition is her claim that “novels that might not seem to be about extraction, such as The Mill on the Floss and News from Nowhere, emerge as extractive literature when placed in the context of environmental history and considered from the standpoint of genre” (22).
He describes the fortunes amassed by those people, often aristocrats, who owned land from which coal was extracted: the third Marquess of Bute (1847–1900), for instance, was said to be the richest man in the world. It powered the industrial revolution, turned Britain into the first urban nation and is the industry that made almost all others possible. As Engels put it: 'there is no occupation in which a man may meet his end in so many diverse ways as this one'.Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). I read in another book, discussing the Senghenydd disaster: "One woman said goodbye to her husband, three sons and two brothers on the morning of 14th October 1913.
Both describe, Paxman in far more detail than Miller, the lives of miners and the horrible mining disasters that happened all too frequently.
I don’t find that the absent or non-existent treasure in the “empty” pit in Treasure Island is “exhausted” or that it “explodes the fantasy of open-handed nature” (110), nor do I find convincing that Nostromo, a novel in which a supposedly exhausted mine turns out to be rich in silver, fits her scheme, in large part because of the book’s emphasis upon its protagonist and Decoud. About three quarters of the way through Extractive Capitalism she does explain that “two of the major gains that drove the transition to fossil energy are its capacities for saving time and speeding transport across space” (144) — very general “capacities” that seem related only to business. I think it is something to do with the horror and wonder of the industry; the danger, the long term impacts, the communities that build up around mines, the vile impact of unfettered capitalism that made many fabulously rich whilst killing those tasked with digging this filthy commodity out of the ground.