What is it about?
Fossil-fuel use has a much longer history than we often assume. In the early modern period, cities across Northwest Europe were already consuming substantial amounts of energy. Leiden provides a striking example, where both industrial and household users relied heavily on peat.
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Why is it important?
To understand today’s ecological crisis – and how we might move beyond fossil fuels – we need to look back to the early modern city, where the historical roots of the fossil-energy transition first took shape.
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This page is a summary of: The Fuel of the City: Energy Consumption in Early Modern Leiden, 1450–1850, November 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004734227_005.
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