Energy transformation and industrial closures: Lessons for just transitions from the nationalized British coal industry

Abstract

This viewpoint draws on our major historical study of the nationalised British coal industry (1947–1994), the largest state-owned enterprise outside the Soviet bloc upon its formation, to explore the potential of history in better understanding ‘just transitions’. It explores the value of history to explicating such complex processes and also the pitfalls in history's misuse. It also explains what it is to think historically and the perspectives and methods that historians utilise, highlighting the benefits of consilience across history and the social sciences, before exploring what the evidence from nationalised British coal offers to understandings of ‘just transitions’. It concludes with a number of implications.