CONDITIONS IN PARTICULAR INDUSTRIES. 333

and to South America comes from ports in the Bristol Channel. In
1913, 58.8 per zent of the British coal exports to Mediterranean ports
{exclusive of France and Spain) came from South Wales; 85.1 per
cent of the exports to Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, and Chile,
and 56.8 per cent of those to France and Spain were from the same
source. In 1913 the Bristol Channel ports exported 81,579,520 short
tons, of which 11,718,560 went to the Mediterranean (excluding
 France and Spain), 6,584,480 to Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay,
Chile, and Peru, and 10,363.360 to France and Spain. (See Pt.
IT, p. 596.)
Exports of British coal are of two kinds—(1) shipments to coaling
stations for the use of steamships, and (2) shipments for the use of
industries in countries without available coal supplies of their own.
All over the world at strategic points along the great ocean routes
are coaling stations on which ships depend for their coal. Thus, at
Gibraltar, Malta, Port Said, Colombo, Singapore, and scores of other
places great stores of coal are maintained to bunker ships. This
bunker trade has developed with the growth of ocean shipping and,
since Great Britain has led in ocean shipping, the British coal
firms which bunkered British ships at British ports naturally extended
 their operations to serve these customers all along their sailing
 routes. Thus the British coal merchants have been the chief
factors in the important bunker trade of the world. But this business
 of selling coal to ships in foreign ports led to the business of
selling coal to other customers in those ports and hence it is interwoven
 with the importation of coal into such countries as Argentina
or Brazil which require imports of coal for their domestic industries.
The British have been engaged in this business for many years,
and many firms share in it. They know all the details of the business,
 have established their depots, have made their connections, and
in many instances mine operators, coal distributing companies, and
transportation interests gre united for the most advantageous conduct
 of the business. A few such combinations are discussed briefly
herewith to indicate their nature and the part they have in the
British export coal trade.
The Cambrian Coal Combine.—In England as in America the
trend of industrial development has been toward amalgamation and
interrelation rather than cartelization. The coal industry is no
exception to the rule, and the interests in South Wales known as
the Cambrian Combine, comprising interrelated operators, distributors,
 railways, and ship lines, is a typical expression of this economic
tendency in Great Britain.
The Cambrian Coal Combine was the name originally given to a
group of four collieries in South Wales closely associated through
several common directors, of whom D. A. Thomas (now Lord