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Artificial Britain: Risk, Systems and Synthetics Since 1800

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Book cover Governing Risks in Modern Britain

Abstract

This chapter explores the intersection of risk society, synthetic chemistry and enviro-technical systems, focusing primarily on the material dimensions of risk as played out in relation to health. Otter argues that an increasingly artificial human environment underpinned and shaped risk society, even if it did not absolutely determine the way in which risks were comprehended, experienced and managed. Using case histories including benzene, lead and polychlorinated biphenyls, he shows both the enduring persistence of the local in understanding risk and the diffusion of risk across a wide area, as well as the multiple techniques used to prevent, regulate and manage the risks of a technologically complex society.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    T. Huxley, ‘Evolution and Ethics’, [1893] in T. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics: Science and Morals (Amherst, NY, 2004), p. 83.

  2. 2.

    T. Huxley, ‘Evolution and Ethics: Prologomena’, [1894] in Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, pp. 1–2.

  3. 3.

    F.J. Odling-Smee, K. Laland and M. Feldman, Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution (Princeton, NJ, 2003).

  4. 4.

    U. Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. M. Ritter (London, 1992).

  5. 5.

    S. Lash and B. Wynne, ‘Introduction’, in Beck, Risk Society, p. 4.

  6. 6.

    J. Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. J. Wilkinson (New York, 1964).

  7. 7.

    F. Harrison, ‘A Few Words about the Nineteenth Century’, Fortnightly Review 31 (1882), p. 416.

  8. 8.

    C.F.G. Masterman, The Condition of England (London, 1909), p. 96.

  9. 9.

    H. Campbell, The Causation of Disease: An Exposition of the Ultimate Factors which Induce It (London, 1889), cited in R. Russell, Strength and Diet: A Practical Treatise with Special Regard to the Life of Nations (London, 1905), p. 36.

  10. 10.

    S. Lash, ‘Risk Culture’, in B. Adam, U. Beck and J. van Loon (eds), The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory (London, 2000), p. 51; B. Adam and J. van Loon, ‘Introduction: Repositioning Risk; the Challenge for Social Theory’, in Adam, Beck and van Loon (eds), Risk Society, p. 10.

  11. 11.

    U. Beck, Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk, trans. A. Weisz (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 158–9.

  12. 12.

    This critique is not, of course, a novel one. See T. Cooper and S. Bulmer, ‘Refuse and the “Risk Society”: The Political Ecology of Risk in Inter-War Britain’, Social History of Medicine 26 (2013), p. 250.

  13. 13.

    Beck, Risk Society, p. 36, emphasis in original.

  14. 14.

    Ibid., pp. 13, 22, emphasis in original.

  15. 15.

    U. Beck, ‘Risk Society Revisited: Theory, Politics and Research Programmes’, in Adam, Beck and van Loon (eds), Risk Society, p. 218.

  16. 16.

    S. Boudia and N. Jas, ‘Introduction: Risk and “Risk Society” in Historical Perspective’, History and Technology 23 (2007), p. 317.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., p. 319.

  18. 18.

    Cited in H. Bazin, Vaccination: A History from Lady Montagu to Genetic Engineering (Esher, 2011), p. 34.

  19. 19.

    On Beck’s stadial model of risk’s historicity, see Lash and Wynne, ‘Introduction’, p. 3.

  20. 20.

    Beck, Risk Society, p. 49; Adam and van Loon, ‘Introduction’, in Adam, Beck and van Loon (eds), Risk Society, p. 3.

  21. 21.

    Beck, Risk Society, p. 204.

  22. 22.

    H. Ashby, Infant Mortality (Cambridge, 1915), p. 202.

  23. 23.

    R. Fogel¸ The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100: Europe, America, and the Third World (Cambridge, 2004), p. 1.

  24. 24.

    W.S. Jevons, The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal-mines, 3rd edn (New York, 1965), pp. 199–200.

  25. 25.

    E.A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge, 1988), p. 80.

  26. 26.

    F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. S. Reynolds (Berkeley, CA, 1995).

  27. 27.

    V. Smil, Transforming the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations and their Consequences (Oxford, 2006), p. 12.

  28. 28.

    T. Hughes, ‘The Evolution of Large Technological Systems’, in W.E. Bijker, T.P. Hughes and T. Pinch (eds), The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, MA, 1987), p. 51.

  29. 29.

    Ibid., p. 76.

  30. 30.

    R. Duarte-Davidson, C. Courage, L. Rushton and L. Levy, ‘Benzene in the Environment: An Assessment of the Potential Risks to the Health of the Population’, Occupational and Environmental Medicine 58 (2001), p. 7.

  31. 31.

    On Thirlmere, see Harriet Ritvo, The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere and Modern Environmentalism (Chicago, 2009).

  32. 32.

    T.C. Smout, Nature Contested: Environmental History in Scotland and Northern England since 1600 (Edinburgh, 2000), p. 107.

  33. 33.

    J. Burnett, Liquid Pleasures: A Social History of Drinks in Modern Britain (London, 1999), p. 22.

  34. 34.

    A. Ravetz with R. Turkington, The Place of Home: English Domestic Environments, 1914–2000 (London, 1995), p. 133.

  35. 35.

    H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991), p. 93.

  36. 36.

    C. Davidson, A Woman’s Work is Never Done: A History of Homework in the British Isles, 1650–1950 (London, 1982), pp. 67–8.

  37. 37.

    Ravetz, Place of Home, p. 141.

  38. 38.

    Ibid., p. 138.

  39. 39.

    C. Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (New York, 1984).

  40. 40.

    W. Webber, Town Gas and its Uses for the Production of Light, Heat, and Motive Power (London, 1907), p. 27.

  41. 41.

    ‘Gas Explosions’, British Medical Journal, 16 October 1886, p. 730.

  42. 42.

    T. Bartlett Simpson, Gas-Works: The Evils Inseparable from their Existence in Populous Places, and the Necessity of Removing Them from the Metropolis (London, 1866), p. 9.

  43. 43.

    British Architect, 5 September 1879, p. 95.

  44. 44.

    G.M. Binnie, ‘The Collapse of the Dale Dyke Dam in Retrospect’, Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology 11 (1978), p. 305.

  45. 45.

    The Builder, 28 June 1890.

  46. 46.

    P. Bagwell and P. Lyth, Transport in Britain: From Canal Lock to Gridlock (London, 2002), p. 95.

  47. 47.

    E. Muntz, ‘Industrial Accidents and Safety Work’, Journal of Educational Sociology 5 (1932), p. 397.

  48. 48.

    J. Kerr, ‘The Treatment of Industrial Accidents’, British Medical Journal, 26 August 1922, p. 379.

  49. 49.

    T. Legge, Industrial Maladies (London, 1934), p. 198; P.C. Amadio, ‘History of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome’, in R. Luchetti and P. Amadio (eds), Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (New York, 2007), pp. 3–8.

  50. 50.

    Legge, Industrial Maladies, p. 208.

  51. 51.

    Ibid., p. 210.

  52. 52.

    W.A. Lane, The Prevention of the Diseases Peculiar to Civilization (London, 1929), p. 12.

  53. 53.

    J. Bronstein, Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA, 2008), p. 11.

  54. 54.

    Ibid., p. 41.

  55. 55.

    R.C. Smart, The Technology of Industrial Fire and Explosion Hazards (2 vols, London, 1947), I, p. 176.

  56. 56.

    A. Lockwood, The Silent Epidemic: Coal and the Hidden Threat to Human Health (Cambridge, MA, 2012), p. 52.

  57. 57.

    R. Johnston and A. McIvor, ‘Oral History, Subjectivity, and Environmental Reality: Occupational Health Histories in Twentieth-Century Scotland’, Osiris 19 (2004), p. 236.

  58. 58.

    Smart, Technology, I, p. 175.

  59. 59.

    G. Hill and H. Bloch, The Silvertown Explosion (Stroud, 2003).

  60. 60.

    Smart, Technology, II, pp. 20–1.

  61. 61.

    Bronstein, Caught in the Machinery, p. 167.

  62. 62.

    Kerr, ‘Treatment’, p. 378.

  63. 63.

    L. Gaster, ‘Industrial Lighting and the Prevention of Accidents’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 71 (1923), p. 614.

  64. 64.

    S. Williams, The Manual of Industrial Safety (Chicago, 1927), p. 134.

  65. 65.

    Webber, Town Gas, p. 28.

  66. 66.

    J. Rees, Refrigeration Nation: A History of Ice, Appliances and Enterprise in America (Baltimore, MD, 2013), p. 43.

  67. 67.

    William Voller, Modern Flour Milling: A Text-Book for Millers and others Interested in the Wheat and Flour Trades, 3rd edn (Gloucester, 1897), p. 440.

  68. 68.

    Smil, Transforming, p. 185.

  69. 69.

    A. Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago, 1995), p. 22, emphasis in original.

  70. 70.

    Smart, Technology, I, p. 13.

  71. 71.

    R.W. Thomas and P.J. Farago, Industrial Chemistry (London, 1973), p. 1.

  72. 72.

    Giulio Natta, cited in F. McMillan, The Chain Straighteners: Fruitful Innovation: The Discovery of Linear and Stereoregular Synthetic Polymers (London, 1979), p. 3.

  73. 73.

    Thomas and Farago, Industrial Chemistry, p. 5.

  74. 74.

    Quoted in Dick Gregory, ‘Food Hazard’, Daily Illini, 5 December 1969, p. 10.

  75. 75.

    J.R. Partington, The Alkali Industry, 2nd edn (London, 1925), p. 2.

  76. 76.

    Alkali Acts, 1863 and 1874: Twelfth and Thirteenth Annual Reports by the Inspector of the Proceedings during the years 1875 and 1876 (Parl. Papers 1877 [C.2199]), p. 11.

  77. 77.

    W. Campbell, ‘General and Fine Inorganic Chemicals’, in Colin Russell (ed.), Chemistry, Society and Environment: A New History of the British Chemical Industry (Cambridge, 2000), p. 193; S. Boudia, ‘Global Regulation: Controlling and Accepting Radioactivity Risks’, History and Technology 23 (2007), p. 391.

  78. 78.

    J. Rambousek, Industrial Poisoning from Fumes, Gases and Poisons of Manufacturing Processes, trans. T. Legge (London, 1913), p. 177; W. Troesken, The Great Lead Water Pipe Disaster (Cambridge, MA, 2006), pp. 30 and 38; C. Warren, Brush with Death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning (Baltimore, MD, 2000), p. 13.

  79. 79.

    Troesken, Great Lead Water Pipe Disaster, pp. 10, 18.

  80. 80.

    Ibid., pp. 21, 238.

  81. 81.

    Legge, Industrial Maladies, p. 52.

  82. 82.

    Warren, Brush with Death, pp. 70–1.

  83. 83.

    Troesken, Great Lead Water Pipe Disaster, p. 196.

  84. 84.

    Legge, Industrial Maladies, p. 51.

  85. 85.

    Warren, Brush with Death, p. 143.

  86. 86.

    Cited in J. Whorton, The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain was Poisoned at Home, Work and Play (Oxford, 2010), p. 183.

  87. 87.

    D. Gee and M. Greenberg, ‘Asbestos: From “Magic” to Malevolent Mineral’, in P. Harremoës et al. (eds), The Precautionary Principle in the Twentieth Century: Late Lessons from Early Warnings (London, 2002), p. 52.

  88. 88.

    Ibid., pp. 54–7.

  89. 89.

    C. Dobbs, ‘Fluoridation of Public Water Supplies’, British Medical Journal, 8 January 1955, pp. 105–6.

  90. 90.

    Rambousek, Industrial Poisoning, pp. 229, 237, 244.

  91. 91.

    E. Slosson, Creative Chemistry: Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries (New York, 1920), pp. 62, 64.

  92. 92.

    L.F. Haber, The Chemical Industry during the Nineteenth Century: A Study of the Economic Aspect of Applied Chemistry in Europe and North America (Oxford, 1958), p. 83.

  93. 93.

    ‘Coal Tar Sugar’, Northern Echo, 16 August 1886.

  94. 94.

    Slosson, Creative Chemistry, p. 61.

  95. 95.

    H.A. Waldron, ‘A Brief History of Scrotal Cancer’, British Journal of Industrial Medicine 40 (1983), pp. 390–1.

  96. 96.

    Rambousek, Industrial Poisoning, p. 101.

  97. 97.

    N.K. Weaver, R.L. Gibson and C.W. Smith, ‘Occupational Exposure to Benzene in the Petroleum and Petrochemical Industries’, in M.A. Mehlman (ed.), Carcinogenicity and Toxicity of Benzene (Princeton, NJ, 1983), p. 63; C. Maltoni, ‘Myths and Facts in the History of Benzene Carcinogenicity’, in Mehlman (ed.), Carcinogenicity and Toxicity of Benzene, p. 1.

  98. 98.

    B. Goldstein, ‘Clinical Hematoxicity of Benzene’, in Mehlman (ed.), Carcinogenicity and Toxicity of Benzene, p. 51.

  99. 99.

    ‘Benzene’, British Journal of Industrial Medicine 1 (1944), p. 254.

  100. 100.

    A. Yardley-Jones, D. Anderson and D.V. Parke, ‘The Toxicity of Benzene and its Metabolism and Molecular Pathology in Human Risk Assessment’, British Journal of Industrial Medicine 48 (1991), p. 438.

  101. 101.

    Toxicity of Industrial Organic Solvents: Summaries of Published Work Compiled by Ethel Browning under the Direction of the Committee on the Toxicity of Industrial Solvents (London, 1937), p. 32.

  102. 102.

    Ibid., p. 10.

  103. 103.

    Home Office Report, 1934, cited in Toxicity of Industrial Organic Solvents, p. 46.

  104. 104.

    V.H. Bowers, ‘Reaction of Human Blood-Forming Tissues to Chronic Benzene Exposure’, British Journal of Industrial Medicine 4 (1947), pp. 88–92.

  105. 105.

    Occupational Safety and Health Branch of the International Labour Organization, ‘Survey of Laws and Regulations Concerning the Use of Benzene in Industry’, in Benzene: Uses, Toxic Effects, Substitutes (Geneva, 1968), p. 212.

  106. 106.

    Legge, Industrial Maladies, p. 113.

  107. 107.

    R. Truhart, ‘Measurement of the Concentration of Benzene in the Working Environment and in Industrial Products with other Technical Control Methods’, in Benzene: Uses, Toxic Effects, Substitutes, pp. 148–9.

  108. 108.

    Toxicity of Industrial Organic Solvents, p. 11. Yardley-Jones, Anderson and Parke, ‘Toxicity’, p. 442.

  109. 109.

    Duarte-Davidson, Courage, Rushton and Levy, ‘Benzene in the Environment’, p. 3.

  110. 110.

    Ibid., pp. 4, 5, 9.

  111. 111.

    L. Perbellini, G. Faccini, F. Pasini, F. Cazzoli, S. Pistoia, R. Rosellini, M. Valsecchi and F. Brugnone, ‘Environmental and Occupational Exposure to Benzene by Analysis of Breath and Blood’, British Journal of Industrial Medicine 45 (1988), p. 350.

  112. 112.

    N. Langston, Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES (New Haven, CT, 2010), p. vii.

  113. 113.

    R. Risebrough and B. de Lappe, ‘Accumulation of Polychlorinated Biphenyls in Ecosystems’, Environmental Health Perspectives 1 (1972), p. 39.

  114. 114.

    J. Koppe and J. Keys, ‘PCBs and the Precautionary Principle’, in Harremoës et al. (eds), The Precautionary Principle in the Twentieth Century, p. 65.

  115. 115.

    Ibid., p. 70.

  116. 116.

    V. Hottenroth, Artificial Silk: A Complete Treatise on the Theory, Manufacture and Manipulation of all the Known Types of Artificial Silk, trans. E. Fyleman (London, 1928), p. 258.

  117. 117.

    P. Blanc, ‘Rayon, Carbon Disulfide, and the Emergence of the Multinational Corporation in Occupational Disease’, in C. Sellers and J. Melling (eds), Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard across a Globalizing World (Philadelphia, PA, 2012), p. 80.

  118. 118.

    Slosson, Creative Chemistry, p. 121.

  119. 119.

    Toxicity of Industrial Organic Solvents, pp. 361, 363; M. Tolonen, S. Hernberg, M. Nurminen and K. Tiitola, ‘A Follow-up Study of Coronary Heart Disease in Viscose Rayon Workers Exposed to Carbon Disulphide’, British Journal of Industrial Medicine 32 (1975), p. 9.

  120. 120.

    Legge, Industrial Maladies, p. 4.

  121. 121.

    W. Haynes, This Chemical Age: The Miracle of Man-Made Materials (New York, 1942), p. 309.

  122. 122.

    Charles Stine, cited in S. Fenichell, Plastic: The Making of a Synthetic Century (New York, 1996), p. 135.

  123. 123.

    V. Smil, Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization (Chichester, 2014), p. 62.

  124. 124.

    Ibid., p. 63; Smil, Transforming, p. 131.

  125. 125.

    M. Bess, The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960–2000 (Chicago, 2003), p. 276.

  126. 126.

    Beck, Risk Society, p. 37.

  127. 127.

    P. Brimblecombe and G. Bentham, ‘The Air that We Breathe: Smogs, Smoke and Health’, in M. Hulme and E. Barrow (eds), Climates of the British Isles: Present, Past and Future (London, 1997), pp. 253–5.

  128. 128.

    Ibid., pp. 255–6.

  129. 129.

    K. Smith and M. Ezzati, ‘How Environmental Health Risks Change with Development: The Epidemiologic and Environmental Risk Transitions Revisited’, Annual Review of Environment and Resources 30 (2005), p. 295.

  130. 130.

    Lockwood, The Silent Epidemic, p. 71.

  131. 131.

    Ibid., p. 3. A terawatt is 1012 W.

  132. 132.

    Jevons, Coal Question.

  133. 133.

    D. Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry 35 (2009), p. 217.

  134. 134.

    For a more developed argument along these lines, see D.L. Smail and A. Shryock, ‘History and the “Pre”’, American Historical Review 118 (2013), pp. 709–37.

  135. 135.

    S. Graham and S. Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London, 2001).

  136. 136.

    D. Lieberman, The Story of the Human Body (New York, 2013), p. 349.

  137. 137.

    N. Talley, ‘Dyspepsia and Non-ulcer Dyspepsia: An Historical Perspective’, in T.S. Chen and P.S. Chen (eds), The History of Gastroenterology (London, 1995), p. 127.

  138. 138.

    The literature here is large, spectacular and endlessly depressing. See, for example, G. Markowitz and D. Rosner, Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (Berkeley, CA, 2002); N. Oreskes and E. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York, 2010); and R. Proctor, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition (Berkeley, CA, 2011).

  139. 139.

    B. Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry 30 (2004), pp. 224–48.

  140. 140.

    Beck, Risk Society, p. 81.

  141. 141.

    J. Ellul, What I Believe (Grand Rapids, MI, 1989), p. 133, cited in Smil, Transforming, p. 256.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History, Ohio State University, 263 Dulles Hall, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA

    Chris Otter

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, United Kingdom

    Tom Crook

  2. School of Social, Historical and Literar, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, United Kingdom

    Mike Esbester

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Otter, C. (2016). Artificial Britain: Risk, Systems and Synthetics Since 1800. In: Crook, T., Esbester, M. (eds) Governing Risks in Modern Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46745-4_4

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