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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2015
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Great Britain utilized its extensive coal reserves to emerge as the world's leading industrial power. “If a patch of a few square miles has done so much for central England,” one British writer pondered in 1856, “what may fields containing many hundred square leagues do for the United States?” In the story of American coal, the two most important states on the eve of the nineteenth century were Virginia and Pennsylvania. Virginia was endowed with bituminous coal reserves in both the James River Basin and its western counties, while Pennsylvania enjoyed a virtual monopoly on American anthracite coal as well as a massive bituminous region west of the Allegheny Mountains.
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