From coal mining in the Central Belt to drilling oil and gas offshore and the growth of wind power, the meaning of prosperity has been redefined by the addition of new means of generating motive force, heat and electricity along with the ebbing away of older ones. The transition from an economy based around manufacturing towards one centred on services and the movement of economic prosperity Eastwards and Northwards over the twentieth century were pivotally bound up in the evolution of Scotland’s energy economy. Historian Ewan Gibbs presents a people’s energy history of Scotland using records of government, industry and trade unions. He also draws on oral histories recorded with workers and their families from the coalfields and oil and gas communities. They help to explain why energy has been both a repeated source of political controversy pinned to hopes for security and enrichment but also experienced as a recurring source of fear and precarity.

Ewan Gibbs is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow. He is a scholar of energy, industry work and protest. Ewan published Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Postwar Scotland with the University of London Press in 2021 and his next book, An Injury to All: The Unmaking of the British Working Class, will be published by Verso in October 2026. In 2024 Ewan also reported for the Just Transition Commission, an independent advisory body to the Scottish government, on the closure of Grangemouth oil refinery