Bodies, Tides, Timber, and the Global History of London’s Docks, 1860–1928

Abstract

This article examines changes in the bodies and environment of labourers carrying timber imported into London’s docks in the 1860s to the 1920s to provide a history of global capitalism from the ground up. Moving between London and Sweden, it shows how microphysical alterations in the skeletons of dockers, the wood they carried, and rivers in both countries materialized and modified macro-level changes in tides, forestry, and shipping. Repurposing the concept ‘lines of force’ from nineteenth-century physics, the article argues that lines — material, temporal, and spatial — reveal hidden relations between bodies and environments. Lines etched into bones or running through wood grain show how humans and other-than-humans were exposed to one another across varying distances, and how this exposure became accentuated under industrial capitalism. Second, they show how this mutual exposure operated over multiple timescales, from a worker’s lifetime to century-long modifications in tree growth and river flows. Finally, such lines reveal how ‘the world’ was not simply a space which steamships crossed, but a predicament, unique to and made by the relationships that living beings had with one another.