Here you can find a list of further reading on the topic of the historical making of energy demand and supply. All publications listed are open-access. Our many thanks to Roger Fouquet for compiling this list.
If you have additional sources to contribute, please contact: Carolynne Lord (c.lord@lancaster.ac.uk).
- Fernihough, A. & O’Rouke, K. (2021) ‘Coal and the Industrial Revolution’, The Economic Journal, 131(635): 1135-1149.
This paper shows the critical role coal played in regional economic development, especially in Britain, with an emphasis on the importance of the location of energy resources and transport costs in determining where industries formed.
- Baumeister, C. & Kilian, L. (2016) ‘Forty Years of Oil Price Fluctuations: Why the Price of Oil May Still Surprise Us’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 30(1): 139-160.
This piece provides an overview of the causes of major oil price fluctuations between 1973 and 2014.
- Fouquet, R. (2014) ‘Long-Run Demand for Energy Services: Income and Price Elasticities over Two Hundred Years’, Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 8(2): 187-207.
This article shows how energy consumption is driven by the demand for energy services (such as heating and cooling, power, transport, lighting, computing) and this demand varies greatly at different phases of economic development.
- Fouquet, R. (2018) ‘Consumer Surplus from Energy Transitions’, The Energy Journal, 39(3): 167-188.
This article measures the net benefits to consumers from energy technologies and transitions, indicating how lives were especially transformed by the introduction of the railways and gas lighting in the nineteenth century.
- Fouquet, R. & Pearson, P. (2006) ‘Seven Centuries of Energy Services: The Price and Use of Lighting in the United Kingdom (1300-2000)’, The Energy Journal, 27(1): 139-177.
This piece charts the dramatic reductions in the cost of lighting associated with energy efficiency improvements ad energy transitions – from tallow candles to coal gas to electricity – and the even more spectacular rises in the use of lighting over seven hundred years.
- Gales, B., Kander, A., Malanima, P. & Rubio, M. (2007) ‘North vs South: Energy Transition and Energy Intensity in Europe Over 200 Years’, European Review of Economic History, 11(2): 219-253.
This presents an analysis of aggregate historical energy transitions in four European economies, incorporating the biomass (and often non-commercial) energy sources.
- Geels, F. (2005) ‘The Dynamics of Transitions in Socio-Technical Systems: A Multi-Level Analysis of the Transition Pathway from Horse-Drawn Carriages to Automobiles (1860-1930)’, Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 17(4): 445-476.
This piece offers an alternative perspective on energy transitions, indicating that they occur as a result of transformations on a number of different levels.
- Henriques, S. & Warde, P. (2018) ‘Fuelling the English Breakfast: Hidden Energy Flows in the Anglo-Danish Trade 1870-1913’, Regional Environmental Change, 18: 965-977.
This article charts the flows of energy and hidden energy embodied in the bilateral trade between the UK and Denmark showing the transformations that occurred in Danish agriculture to meet the growing demand for breakfast foods in the UK required significant quantities of feed and coal.
- Pearson, P. & Foxon, T. (2012) ‘A Low Carbon Industrial Revolution? Insights and Challenges from Past Technological and Economic Transformations’, Energy Policy, 50: 117-127.
This paper examines the challenges facing a low carbon transition by drawing on insights from the first British Industrial Revolution and concluding that while achieving a low carbon transition may require societal changes on a scale comparable with those of previous industrial revolutions, this transitions does not yet resemble previous industrial revolutions.
- Turnball, T. (2021) ‘Energy, History, and the Humanities: Against a New Determinism’, History & Technology, 37(2): 247-292.
This piece contrasts early thinkers in the literature on energy history, showing the influence of broader factors driving arguments.
- Wright, G. (1990) ‘The Origins of American Industrial Success, 1879-1940’, American Economic Review, 80(4): 651-668.
This paper explains the role of natural resources, particularly coal and oil, and government policies that encouraged the extraction of these resources, played in driving and influencing US economic development.
- Wrigley, E. (2013) ‘Energy and the Industrial Revolution’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 371: 20110568.
This piece reviews how changes in the availability of energy sources were critical to the Industrial Revolution, as energy usage increased massively with the use of fossil fuels but also implies limits to economic development.
- van de Ven, D. & Fouquet, R. (2017) ‘Historical Energy Price Shocks and their Changing Effects on the Economy’, Energy Economics, 62: 204-216.
This article identifies energy price shocks over the last three hundred years, indicating that vulnerability and resilience to shocks did not improve specifically as the economy developed, but instead, that a diversified mix of energy sources reduces vulnerability and increases resilience to energy price shocks.