Inventing Pollution : Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800

Authors

• Peter Thorsheim

Files

Series

Series in Ecology and History

Description

Going as far back as the thirteenth century, Britons mined and burned coal. Britain’s supremacy in the nineteenth century depended in large part on its vast deposits of coal, which powered industry, warmed homes, and cooked food. As coal consumption skyrocketed, the air in Britain’s cities and towns filled with ever-greater and denser clouds of smoke. Yet, for much of the nineteenth century, few people in Britain even considered coal smoke to be pollution.
Inventing Pollution examines the radically new understanding of pollution that emerged in the late nineteenth century, one that centered not on organic decay but on coal combustion. This change, as Peter Thorsheim argues, gave birth to the smoke-abatement movement and to new ways of thinking about the relationships among humanity, technology, and the environment.

Even as coal production in Britain has plummeted in recent decades, it has surged in other countries. This reissue of Thorsheim’s far-reaching study includes a new preface that reveals the book’s relevance to the contentious national and international debates—which aren’t going away anytime soon—around coal, air pollution more generally, and the grave threat of human-induced climate change.

Copyright Statement

Inventing Pollution © 2006, 2017 by Ohio University Press is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND. To view a copy of this license, visit: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language

eng

ISBN

9780821446270

Publication Date

4-16-2018

Publisher

Ohio University Press

City

Athens

Keywords

Smoke pollution, history of combustion, industrial pollution, history of pollution, coal burning, fossil fuel consumption

Disciplines

Environmental Policy | Environmental Public Health | European History | Health Policy | History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Physical and Environmental Geography | Public Policy

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Thorsheim, Peter, "Inventing Pollution : Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800" (2018). Ohio University Press Open Access Books. 114.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/114