Capital's commodity frontiers strategy has at once woven together regional differences within an expanding world-system and remade the productive and reproductive activities of humans and the rest of nature. Keywords: commodity frontier, coal, world-systems analysis, historical geography, environmental history Coal in truth stands not beside but entirely above all other commodities. It is the material energy of the country -the universal aid -the factor in everything we do. With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of early times. With such facts familiarly before us, it can be no matter of surprise that year by year we make larger draughts upon a material of such myriad qualities -of such miraculous powers.-Stanley Jevons, 1865Coal has always cursed the land in which it lies. When men begin to wrest it from the earth it leaves a legacy of foul streams, hideous slag heaps and polluted air. It peoples this transformed land with blind and crippled men and with widows and orphans. It is an extractive industry which takes all away and restores nothing. It mars but never beautifies. It corrupts but never purifies. . . . [T]he curse of coal [is] a crown of sorrow.