Dangerous Trade Histories of Industrial Hazard across a Globalizing World edited by Christopher Sellers and Joseph Melling paper EAN: 978-1-43990-469-5 (ISBN: 1-43990-469-3) $29.95, Dec 11, Available cloth EAN: 978-1-43990-468-8 (ISBN: 1-43990-468-5) $85.50, Dec 11, Available Electronic Book EAN: 978-1-43990-470-1 (ISBN: 1-43990-470-7) $29.95 228 pp 6x9 9 tables 2 map(s) 4 figures

"No other work addresses industrial hazards with such geographic breadth and historical depth. Together, the essays in Dangerous Trade offer a damning indictment of capitalism's impact on working people and the environments in which they have labored and lived. Just as importantly, Dangerous Trade also makes a compelling case regarding the role of workers' movements in improving public health in and beyond the workplace. This book, in short, offers something new to a range of practitioners and academics."
—Thomas Andrews, University of Colorado at Boulder

From anthrax to asbestos to pesticides, industrial toxins and pollutants have troubled the world for the past century and longer. Environmental hazards from industry remain one of the world's foremost killers. Dangerous Trade establishes historical groundwork for a better understanding of how and why these hazards continue to threaten our shrinking world.

In this timely collection, an international group of scholars casts a rigorous eye towards efforts to combat these ailments. Dangerous Trade contains a wide range of case studies that illuminate transnational movements of risk—from the colonial plantations of Indonesia to compensation laws in late 19th century Britain, and from the occupational medicine clinics of 1960s New York City to the burning of electronic waste in early twenty-first century Uruguay.

The essays in Dangerous Trade provide an unprecedented broad perspective of the dangers stirred up by industrial activity across the globe, as well as the voices raised to remedy them.

Excerpt

Excerpt available at www.temple.edu/tempress

Reviews

"Dangerous Trade argues persuasively for examining transnational or post-national histories of industrial health and pollution, and considers the unique nature of specific labor and environmental policies at different times and in different places. The essays are innovative and make valuable contributions to the larger, cohesive work, while the volume as a collective whole provides a critical vantage point for further inquiry into this important topic and how we might approach it."
—Michael Egan, McMaster University

Contents

List of Tables and Figures
Acknowledgments

Introduction: From Dangerous Trades to Trade in Dangers: Toward an Industrial Hazard History of the Present / Christopher Sellers and Joseph Melling

Part I: The Late Nineteenth Century to the Early Twentieth Century

Creating Industrial Hazards in the Developing World
1. Rubber Plantation Workers, Work Hazards, and Health in Colonial Malaya, 1900–1940 / Amarjit Kaur
2. Work, Home, and Natural Environments: Health and Safety in the Mexican Oil Industry, 1900–1938 / Myrna Santiago

Knowing and Controlling in the Developed World
3. Global Markets and Local Conflicts in Mercury Mining: Industrial Restructuring and Workplace Hazards at the Almaden Mines in the Early Twentieth Century / Alfredo Menéndez-Navarro
4. Trade, Spores, and the Culture of Disease: Attempts to Regulate Anthrax in Britain and Its International Trade, 1875–1930 / Tim Carter and Joseph Melling
5. Rayon, Carbon Disulfide, and the Emergence of the Multinational Corporation in Occupational Disease / Paul D. Blanc

Part II: The Middle to the Late Twentieth Century

New Transfers of Production
6. Shipping the “Next Prize”: The Trade in Liquefied Natural Gas from Nigeria to Mexico / Anna Zalik
7. New Hazards and Old Disease: Lead Contamination and the Uruguayan Battery Industry / Daniel E. Renfrew

New Knowledge and Coalitions
8. Objective Collectives? Transnationalism and “Invisible Colleges” in Occupational and Environmental Health from Collis to Selikoff / Joseph Melling and Christopher Sellers
9. Bread and Poison: The Story of Labor Environmentalism in Italy, 1968–1998 / Stefania Barca
10. A New Environmental Turn? How the Environment Came to the Rescue of Occupational Health: Asbestos in France c. 1970–1995 / Emmanuel Henry

New Arenas of Contest
11. A Tale of Two Lawsuits: Making Policy-Relevant Environmental Health Knowledge in Italian and U.S. Chemical Regions / Barbara Allen
12. Pesticide Regulation, Citizen Action, and Toxic Trade: The Role of the Nation-State in the Transnational History of DBCP / Susanna Rankin Bohme
13. Turning the Tide: The Struggle for Compensation for Asbestos-Related Diseases and the Banning of Asbestos / Barry Castleman and Geoffrey Tweedale

Conclusion / Joseph Melling and Christopher Sellers, with Barry Castleman

Contributors
Index

About the Author(s)

Christopher Sellers is an Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science and Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America.

Joseph Melling is Director of the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter. He is the coauthor (with Bill Forsythe) of The Politics of Madness and (with Alan Booth) of Making the Modern Workplace.

Subject Categories

Nature and the Environment
History
Labor Studies and Work