Product Description

This title explains how and why air quality became an important and keenly contested issue in the world's first industrial city. The book opens by looking at the devastating human and environmental costs of Manchester's steam-driven economic miracle, including acid rain, loss of biological diversity, and the adverse health impacts of air pollution. Part 1 also discusses how the rhythms of the urban smoke cycle helped to shape the city's built environment and came to affect almost every aspect of people's day-to-day lives. The analysis then turns to the interpretation of competing environmental discourses, focusing on how highly diverse narratives about smoke were used by contemporaries to rationalise, naturalise or criticise the dramatic changes wrought by air pollution in 19th-century Manchester. The heavily polluted cityscape was hotly disputed terrain, and Mosley offers an extended critique of opposing viewpoints in the debate. He breaks new ground by seeking to understand working-class ideas about air pollution, as well as those of businessmen and middle-class reformers. The third part of the book explores not only decision-making about smoke prevention technologies, but also the development of public policy and interest group responses to air pollution. Mosley considers the technological, political and economic dimensions of pollution control in all their complexity. "The Chimney of the World" concludes by reflecting on the compelling continuities (and striking disjunctures) between past and present attitudes towards air pollution. This broad-ranging work seeks to add a new dimension to the study of urban environmental history: a local perspective that is highly relevant for a better understanding of today's global pollution dilemmas.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1988016 in Books
• Published on: 2001-11-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 250 pages

Review

'The great strength of Stephen Mosley's The Chimney of the World is its melding of environmental and cultural history, which lends an added dimension to his rich and original study' - Matthew Osborn, Business History Review

'This is a joy to read, often unearthing some of the more suprising attitudes to smoke emissions, for example the once popular belief that sulphurous acid in coal acted as a disinfectant, purifying town air ... [The book] establishes itself as not only a leader within the discipline of British urban environmental history, but as a benchmark for others to follow.' - Jodie Thorne, Albion Reviews of Books

'Mosley has given us a beautifully crafted and well-researched book, a pioneering contribution that should certainly be considered required reading for urban environmental historians'. - Christopher Hamlin, University of Notre Dame

About the Author

Stephen Mosley is senior lecturer in history at Leeds Metropolitan University. His research interests are in urban culture and environmental history.