Coal had to be dug, loaded, and moved by large concentrated workforces along narrow fixed channels (mines, railways, ports), giving workers the physical ability to halt energy flows through strikes and sabotage. This leverage over a vulnerable chain, not abstract ideals, is what let workers in industrialized societies win broad democratic and welfare concessions between roughly 1880 and 1920.
Oil flows through pipelines and tankers that need far fewer workers and can be rerouted around any blockage, dispersing the choke points that gave coal workers their power. The shift from coal to oil was partly a deliberate move to break the capacity of energy workers to disrupt supply and extract political demands.
Modern mass democracy should be understood not as the spread of enlightened ideas but as a set of political possibilities built on specific flows of carbon energy and the vulnerabilities of their distribution networks. The forms of agency available to ordinary people depend on where they sit in the physical apparatus that moves fuel.
The idea of "the economy" as a measurable, limitless, growing national total emerged only in the mid-twentieth century, when cheap abundant oil made energy seem unlimited and removed natural resources from the accounting. This framing let politics promise perpetual growth by treating the physical limits of fossil fuels as invisible.
Oil companies and producing states repeatedly worked to restrict and control output rather than maximize it, using arrangements like the Red Line Agreement and later OPEC to keep prices and profits stable. The persistent threat invoked in politics was not that oil would run out but that too much of it would collapse the price structure.