The Contamination of the Earth. A History of Pollutions in the Industrial Age

Abstract

Jarrige and Le Roux’s book appeared in French in 2017; three years later MIT Press published a translation of this excellent work on the history of pollution. The book makes an important contribution to the fields of environmental history, social and economic history, the history of law and the state, histories of science and technology, and political ecology or ecological economics, among other eco-disciplines. It analyses pollution from the point of view of production and consumption, regulation, industrial lobbying, labour pressure, and devotion to economic growth all over the planet. Thus it presents a global history of pollution, divided chronologically into three parts from 1700 to the present day. The first part traces the emergence of industrial pollution between 1700 and 1830, from agrarian states and rural pollution to industrialisation and urban pollution. During this time there was a mandatory distance of more than twenty kilometres of gunpowder factories from cities, enforced by a public health police. But coal cities carried out what they called “the regulatory revolution” (p. 63). These changes in the protection, estimation, and compensation of industrial damage have been widely studied by historians. Jarrige and Le Roux, both experts on France, have managed to extend this story to all the industrial countries of the nineteenth century. The second part, “Naturalizing Pollutions in the Age of Progress (1830–1914),” shows that the pattern was global: instead of shutting down polluting factories, notions of progress required protecting them with new experts and new interpretations of the law. Chemistry became a “new frontier” (p. 106), organised and prepared to pollute without limits for the sake of progress. Thus were born the great chemical multinational corporations at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as new solvents, fertilisers, insecticides, and synthetic products. Legal and regulatory change up to the GreatWar was also global and always aimed at protecting the industry. This explains why public and neighbourhood protests were ubiquitous but unresolved, and not even the hygienists questioned the benefits of chemistry