Chemical Pollution and Regulatory Choices at the Start of Industrialization: Comparing France and Great Britain

In both Britain and France, pollution from emergent chemical manufacturing during the early industrial era presented a choice between two regulatory approaches. One option, consistent with longstanding restrictions in both countries on the location of malodorous trades, insisted on the separation of chemical plants from (upper-class) residences. The alternative approach allowed polluting firms to operate near residences, subject to incremental technology-based mitigation. By 1810, France issued a decree that conferred on most chemical manufacturers the right to operate inside cities, subject to permitting requirements. For residents of working-class industrial neighborhoods, who never stood a realistic chance of removing polluters, a regulatory regime geared at incremental mitigation held the potential for modest environmental improvement. For wealthy landowners, however, partial technological mitigation was far inferior to the complete relief obtainable through the removal of pollution sources. France’s example loomed large over chemical pollution debates in nineteenth-century Britain. Manufacturers hoped the courts would remove locational restrictions on chemical plants, while the near absence of pollution mitigation within working-class areas alarmed liberal reformers. The road to a compromise solution patterned after France’s was impeded in Britain, however, by a deep-seated aversion to uniform, centralized pollution control. This reticence was rooted in common-law-inspired understandings of nuisance law as the sole and inviolable constitutional means for the regulation of land use. By the 1860s, through the combined impact of St. Helens v. Tipping (1865) and the Alkali Act of 1863, Britain moved towards the French approach. Nevertheless, compared with France, British law remained more protective of landowners, more reactive in its implementation, and more willing to vary required mitigation based on sociodemographic factors. Beyond its contribution to comparative environmental history, in revealing the legal-ideological underpinnings of the Franco-British divide over the regulation of early chemical pollution, this Article also seeks to shine a light on the lingering role of legal ideology within contemporary cross-national divisions over the efficacy and legitimacy of centralized technology-based regulatory instruments