This was the position in which China found itself. In 1700 it had a vibrant textile industry, perhaps equally ripe for mechanisation, but it was a long way from coalfields, and its domestic iron industry was dependent entirely on charcoal, whose price was rising as forests retreated. Part of the problem was that Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, where the coal was, had been depopulated by barbarians and plague in the three centuries after 1100, so the country’s demographic and economic centre of gravity shifted south to the Yangtze valley. Because none of the coal reserves were close to navigable
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