Urban air quality is back in the news. For a few weeks running, Beijing and other Chinese cities are suffering under a thick layer of smog. Factories are closing, officials are urging citizens to stay indoors, and physicians are making the first guesses at the death toll. It is a problem that industrial societies around the globe are long familiar with. Wherever people and factories concentrate in large number, smog has been an issue. Smoke is the emblematic pollution problem of the industrial age, and it says a lot about paths of industrialization, national styles of regulation, and popular sentiments.

The presentation takes a long view on the issue, tracing efforts to reduce particulate emissions in Germany, the United States and Great Britain from the nineteenth century to the present. It discusses the various factors that influenced and hindered policies, showing that negligent industrialists were far less important for the failure of policies than frequently assumed. The presentation shall also offer some perspectives on where we stand in our efforts to manage air quality in Europe and in the world.

Frank Uekoetter studied history, political science and the social sciences at universities in Freiburg, Bielefeld, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh. Since receiving his Ph.D. in 2001, he published numerous books and articles on environmental issues, including The Green and the Brown. A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany (2006) and The Age of Smoke first book.

His work lies at the intersection of history and environmental studies, and one of his concerns is to link discussions of the past with current events. After working at the University of Bielefeld for many years, he came to Munich, Germany, in 2006. He was a co-founder of Munich’s Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and is currently moving to a new position at the University of Birmingham (UK).

Urban air quality is back in the news. For a few weeks running, Beijing and other Chinese cities are suffering under a thick layer of smog. Factories are closing, officials are urging citizens to stay indoors, and physicians are making the first guesses at the death toll. It is a problem that industrial societies around the globe are long familiar with. Wherever people and factories concentrate in large number, smog has been an issue. Smoke is the emblematic pollution problem of the industrial age, and it says a lot about paths of industrialization, national styles of regulation, and popular sentiments.

The presentation takes a long view on the issue, tracing efforts to reduce particulate emissions in Germany, the United States and Great Britain from the nineteenth century to the present. It discusses the various factors that influenced and hindered policies, showing that negligent industrialists were far less important for the failure of policies than frequently assumed. The presentation shall also offer some perspectives on where we stand in our efforts to manage air quality in Europe and in the world.

Frank Uekoetter studied history, political science and the social sciences at universities in Freiburg, Bielefeld, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh. Since receiving his Ph.D. in 2001, he published numerous books and articles on environmental issues, including The Green and the Brown. A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany (2006) and The Age of Smoke first book.

His work lies at the intersection of history and environmental studies, and one of his concerns is to link discussions of the past with current events. After working at the University of Bielefeld for many years, he came to Munich, Germany, in 2006. He was a co-founder of Munich’s Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and is currently moving to a new position at the University of Birmingham (UK).

Since the mid 1980’s, the so-called new historiography of occupational health has highlighted the numerous ways through which the deleterious health effects of occupational exposures to hazardous chemicals have been denied and occulted. In order to carry out their investigations, historians have often relied on information provided by workers activism and/or court cases: that is when some visibilisation of what had been made invisible was taken place. What if, however, no –even partial- visibilisation of occupational exposures and their noxious effects on workers health ever occurred? How does the historian get access to these exposures and effects? How does he/she deal with the traces of these exposures and their related sanitary effects that he/she might eventually collect? What kind of history may then be written? What purposes may such a history have? Is making visible that was at the time invisible a task for historians?

The lecture will discuss these questions by investigating how the occupational exposures of farm workers to arsenic compounds used in agriculture as insecticides had been dealt with in France between the 1890s and the early 1960s. These exposures and their likely effects on farm workers’ health never resulted in any kind of process of visibilization - and one may ask whether the use of arsenic compounds in French agriculture ever produced any kind of occupational health problems. Careful enquiry allows however both to obtain traces of these problems and analyze how they were made socially invisible. Shedding light on the processes through which the existence of occupational exposures to arsenic was denied and occulted in French agriculture between 1890s and the 1980s proves to be of great interest for many reasons. It is especially crucial to understand how and why farm workers’ occupational exposures to synthetic pesticides - which have been widely used since the 1950’s- have in France, up to very recently, never given rise to any of sanitarization.

Nathalie Jas is a permanent research fellow at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA). Historian and a STS scholar, her work analyses the intensification of agriculture and its social, environmental and health effects. She is the coordinator of the research project “SocioAgriPest: Pesticides and Farm Workers Health: Between Visibilization and Invisibilization” (2013-2016) funded by the French Ministry of Environment. She is the author of Au carrefour de la chimie et de l’agriculture: les sciences agronomiques en France et en Allemagne 1840-1914 (Paris: Editions des archives contemporaines, 2001). Among the volumes she has co-edited are with ‘Risk and risk Society in Historical Perspective’ (History and Technology, 2007) and Toxicants, Health and Regulation since 1945 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013) both with Soraya Boudia. She is the French translator of Ludwik Fleck‘s pioneer work Genesis and development of a scientific Fact - Genèse et développement d’un fait scientifique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres 2005 & Flammarion, 2008). She is now writing her forthcoming book, a history of the government of sanitary risks posed the agricultural pesticides in Twentieth Century France.

This paper is based on research and writing that Joseph Melling has undertaken with Christopher Sellers of New York University over several years. They have been looking at the evolution and the distribution of hazards across the globalized economy of the past two centuries. The sharpening unevenness and inequalities in the exposure of different countries and populations to dangerous trades has spurred us to investigate a transnational approach to the history of industrial hazards.

Industrial hazards continue to multiply today. An estimated two million deaths (twice those from malaria) are attributable to employment injuries alone, not to mention environmental ones. Every sign suggests these casualties will increase in the next half-century. What challenges do these dangers pose for us, as historians of what this lecture series has called the toxic environment? How do we explain the proliferation of hazards at a time when the knowledge, networks and laws that could remedy them also appear to be growing? How might we construct a transnational history that can encompass the “movements, flows, and circulation,” that Isabel Hofmeyr sees as fundamental to transnational study?

The social histories of occupational health and environmental hazard that were written in the last two decades of the twentieth century challenged the heroic narratives of medical history but did so in ways that steered away from the more explicit transnationalism of their ‘heroic’ predecessors in writing the history of industrial hazards. More recently, however, social scientists as well as other groups of historians have taken up the challenge of transnational analysisis. Environmental historians have mapped the material ecology of landscapes in which industries emerge, thrive, and despoil or pollute. In alliance with geographers these researchers have exposed the influential roles played by extra-workplace participants in industrial hazard history, from ecologists or geologists to farmers to those living in the vicinity of factories or waste dumps. The new Political Sociology of Science, in particular has compared traditional political and institutional, as well as cultural power dynamics which have shaped policy-relevant knowledge. Feminist accounts of public understanding and use of expertise in science and technology projects have again offered further insights into the gendered character of popular and professional knowledge of industrial dangers.

The paper offers a sketch of this new scholarly terrain that seeks to transnationalize the history of industrial hazards, particularly in its relationship to the history of science. We then proceed to some principles, heuristics, provisional narratives and questions that may help focus and advance more cross-national and comparative scholarship, in a field where questions of knowledge matter immensely.

Joseph Melling is co-Director of the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter, England. He has researched the history of industrial health and safety for many years. His interests include the history of respiratory illness (silicosis), the history of mental health (including a recent project on the history of stress), and the history of management-labour relations. He is presently engaged in new work on transnationalism and environmental health since the 1940s with Chris Sellers and colleague around the world.

At the end of the 18th century et the beginning of the 19th century, France was in the midst of an industrialisation that threw into question the relationship between citizens and their environment. The development of polluting and hazardous activities was a challenge for the Ancien Regime society particularly concerned with public health and the rules of neighbourly conduct, and this led to a transformation in law and institutions. My paper brings to light this revolution, taking into account the range of social and political actors involved, including the state, the town, industrials, jurists, scientists, and public opinion. It details the complex processes that were to give factories and manufacturing plants, particularly in the chemical sector, the possibility of establishing themselves into cities. In particular, the study of the new forms of pollution Parisians were exposed to during this period provides an all-encompassing history of this industrial capital, not as the saga of entrepreneurs but rather through the city’s slow and difficult adaptation to the risks of industry and technology. As part of the new approach of modern manufacturing, where nuisances are considered a part of progress, Paris became the laboratory for testing the legitimacy of pollution, ushering in an alliance between the state, science, and industry, in an entirely new kind of political project.

This demonstration follows a chronological structure putting forward the idea of a major shift in environmental policy, where chemistry was a leading force for changes. The preventive regulation and practices under the Ancien Regime were replaced by a more modernising political agenda by 1770 onwards, driven by the pressing demand from industrials to alleviate the “environmental” constraints on their sites of production. The development of industry and the emergence of new factories and manufacturing plants, particularly in the chemical sector, rendered the traditional regulatory practices outdated. This pressure on the local regulations unfavourable to industrial development increased during the Revolution when the responsibility for redefining environmental regulation was awarded to scientists, chemists for the most part. After fifteen years of revolution, members of the Academy – all chemists, among them Chaptal - were called upon to advise as to the health dangers of polluting industries. Their report in 1804 favoured industry and minimised these nuisances. In 1810, after many debates, trials and controversies, the state laid down the decree on harmful industries – a legislative framework that protected industrial interests rather than a so-called “environmental law”. The Paris Health Council, an authority of the Minister and the Prefect, was won over to industrial progress and suggested addressing problems of pollution through technical improvement, whilst simultaneously proclaiming most industries to be harmless : the technological progress of these industries, based on chemical knowledge, had to resolve the various nuisances that it produced.

Thomas Le Roux is a researcher at the CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research) and he is currently appointed at the Maison Française d'Oxford. His works deals with the impact of early industrialisation on the environment from 1700 to 1850. After having done his PhD dissertation (University of Sorbonne, Paris) on industrial nuisances in Paris (end 18th c, early 19th c.), he works on a comparison between Paris and London, as well as occupational health and industrial accidents. He is running a collective research program in the history of industrial accidents in France and Great Britain (17th-19th c.). He is also running a research seminar in Environmental history in Oxford, involving French and British colleagues. His publications include Le laboratoire des pollutions industrielles. Paris, 1770-1830, Paris, Albin Michel, 2011.

The objective of this seminar is to explore the process of consideration of asbestos as a risk to the general population. Asbestos is a fibrous mineral with fire retardant qualities used in many industrial processes and manufactured products. International alarms that emerged in the mid-sixties on the carcinogenic properties of asbestos and the environmental dimension of the problem had little impact on our country. The treatment in media of the risks of asbestos in the seventies abounded in its perception as a labour problem of Pneumoconiosis circumscribed to certain areas of risk. However, at the beginning of the democratic transition, the news that focused on the treatment of the occupational hazards of asbestos associated with industrial disputes, they soon gave rise to the consideration of asbestos as a risk for the general population given its carcinogenic nature and its ubiquity in many industrial products and consumer goods. The trade union movement played a key role in this process of social redefinition of the problem, articulating its public denunciation campaign around labour and environmental carcinogenic risks. This commitment to the denunciation of the environmental dimension of the problem and the enactment of the Regulations on Works with Asbestos Hazard in 1984, finally contributed to minimise the labour impact of occupational risks of asbestos in Spain.

Alfredo Menéndez-Navarro is Professor of History of Science at the University of Granada. His main research interest is the history of occupational health. In his doctoral thesis (UGR, 1992, Special Award), he analised occupational hazards and the process of health care resources introduction in the Almadén mercury mines in the 18th c. and 19th c. Afterwards, he has analysed the professionalization of work medicine in our country and he has devoted special attention to the development of campaigns against occupational hazards and diseases such as silicosis and hookworm in contemporary Spain. Currently, he leads the project “Los riesgos del amianto en España (1960-2002) (“The risks of asbestos in Spain” 1960-2002), a multidisciplinary project whose main objective is the historical analysis of the emergence of health problems caused by occupational and environmental exposure to asbestos in Spain, as well as strategies of such risks and their evolution in our country from 1960, a period in which consumption intensified, and their final prohibition in 2002.