Journal of Urban History

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Cities, Environments, and European History

Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud and Peter Thorsheim
Journal of Urban History 2007; 33; 691
DOI: 10.1177/0096144207301414

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INTRODUCTION

CITIES, ENVIRONMENTS, AND EUROPEAN

HISTORY

GENEVIÈVE MASSARD-GUILBAUD
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France
PETER THORSHEIM
University of North Carolina at Charlotte

This essay introduces a special issue that explores the history of cities in nineteenth- and twentieth-
century Europe from an environmental perspective. After examining the origins and aims of urban envi-
ronmental history, it traces the relationship between this approach and kindred fields of study. The authors
argue that although North American historiography has played an important role in the development of
European urban environmental history, other influences, both intellectual and historical, have proved no
less significant in shaping the ways that Europeanists approach the natural and built environment. The
case studies in this issue, which examine Austria, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, exemplify the vital-
ity and diversity of current scholarship in European urban environmental history.

Keywords: environment; city; Europe; historiography; urban environmental history

This special issue is not the first that the Journal of Urban History devotes
to the history of urban environment. As early as 1994, Christine Meisner
Rosen and Joel A. Tarr guest edited an issue entitled “The Environment and
the City.” In a memorable introduction, they explained why it is important to
include the urban perspective in environmental history.1 Joining Martin V.
Melosi’s critique of the “agroecological” vision of environmental history set
forth by Donald Worster,2 they argued that urban environmental history
should encompass “the effects of cities on the natural environment; . . . the
impact of the natural environment on cities; . . . societal response to these
impacts and efforts to alleviate environmental problems; and . . . the built
environment and its role and place in human life as part of the physical con-
text in which society evolves.”3 Since then, urban environmental history has

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY, Vol. 33 No. 5, July 2007 691-701

DOI: 10.1177/0096144207301414
© 2007 Sage Publications

691

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692 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / July 2007

blossomed, not only in the United States—where it is now an established

field, and one that some view as the most thought-provoking part of envi-
ronmental history—but elsewhere as well. Recently, the Urban History
Review/Revue d’Histoire Urbaine (Canada) devoted a special issue to the
urban environment, and the French journal Histoire Urbaine has done the
same.4 But the historical study of European urban environments, although it
is no longer a new field, remains a relatively frail one.
When the editor of the Journal of Urban History, David Goldfield, asked
the guest editors of the present issue to prepare a collection on European
urban environmental history, the task seemed rather easy. In actuality, it
proved rather difficult to collect six to seven good papers for the intended
issue, although the Second European Conference on Environmental History,
held in Prague in September 2003, provided a number of good pieces. Even
if chance played a role in the collection (some good urban environmental his-
torians were asked to contribute and simply had no paper ready to submit at
that moment), this may be a clue that the “supply” of European environ-
mental history writing remains limited. The fact that three of the articles in
this issue were written by Americans is also a sign of the respective devel-
opment of the field on both sides of the Atlantic. The editors would have pre-
ferred a set of papers coming from, or dealing with, a larger number of
European countries, had this been possible, but the availability of research
dictated the composition of the issue. As a consequence, this issue does not
pretend to represent all of the work being done in European urban environ-
mental history; it is instead a sampling. The rest of this introduction exam-
ines where European urban environmental history comes from, what it
addresses, what it omits, and the contributions that it may make to a broader
audience.
In contrast to the United States, where urban—and industrial—environ-
mental history developed in an epistemological debate against a historio-
graphical tradition dominated by “wilderness,” the roots of European
environmental history can be found, at least partly, in the history of cities,
and especially the history of urban technical networks. In 1983 Gabriel
Dupuy, a French historian of technology, and Joel Tarr, one of his American
counterparts, organized an international conference on “The City and
Technology.” Without using the term environmental history, the conference,
held in Paris at the École nationale des Ponts-et-Chaussées (major state
school of engineers), explored topics that would soon be considered major
themes in urban environmental history, such as the impact of city building
and technical choices on the environment.5 The first step of European urban
environmental history was therefore a joint Euro-American effort.
In the years that followed, European historians coming from other back-
grounds focused on other aspects of urban environmental history, as another
publication attests. This book, edited by the Swiss historian Christian Pfister
and the British atmospheric chemist Peter Brimblecombe, followed from a

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 Massard-Guilbaud, Thorsheim / INTRODUCTION 693

1988 workshop on European environmental history held in Germany. At this

meeting, a European Association for Environmental History was created, but
unfortunately, this organization proved short-lived. The most probable rea-
son for its failure was that it lacked a true backbone: an international board
to steer and fund its activities beyond the national level. Nonetheless, this
group published an Environmental History Newsletter (in German and
English) from 1989 to 1993. In the book issued from the German workshop,
several contributions were gathered under the caption “urban and industrial
impacts,” most of which dealt with pollution in Germany or England.6 These
contributions can be considered as a second start of urban and industrial
environmental history in Europe, but ten years were to pass before another
European initiative was taken in this field.
In 1998 Christoph Bernhardt, a German scholar, organized a session on
urban environmental problems at the fourth international urban history con-
ference in Venice. Following this meeting, an informal but lively network
was formed, whose “members” met successively in Clermont-Ferrand,
Leicester, Siena, and Paris. The themes for these meetings were successively
“Urban Pollution”; “Resources of the City”; “The Making of European
Contemporary Cities: An Environmental History”; and “Milieu, Material,
and Materiality of European Cities in the 19th-20th Century.” Three books
have followed thus far from these roundtables.7 It is also worth noting that
two historians of this network have recently been appointed to newly estab-
lished chairs in environmental history, which seems a good sign for the
field.8 Something may be changing under the European sun.
This summary of the origins of the environmental history of European
cities must also be placed in a wider scholarly context. Unlike its American
counterpart, European urban environmental history did not have to find its
place within an already established “general” environmental history; it devel-
oped concurrently with it, as one of its trends among others. For at the same
time that the network of urban environmental historians mentioned above
took shape, a new association, the European Society for Environmental
History (ESEH), was launched. This society was created in Dietramzell,
Bavaria, in 1999 by a handful of scholars who had learned their lesson from
the late association for environmental history. Members of the “urban” net-
work were among the founders of ESEH, and others joined the ESEH soon
after its creation. Since then, the ESEH has held several conferences (St.
Andrews, Scotland, in 2001; Prague in 2003; Florence in 2005; and
Amsterdam in 2007), each of which has drawn participants from all over the
world. It is a lively organization, but the place of the city in its conferences
remains underrepresented, not because of any deliberate policy by its suc-
cessive program committees but because relatively few of the panels pro-
posed have dealt with the urban environment.
A second characteristic of European urban environmental history is that it
does not flourish in the same countries or regions as the rest of environmental

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694 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / July 2007

history.9 Their respective maps are not opposed, but they do not fully overlap.
Without trying to draw a detailed picture of all the research done in environ-
mental history in Europe or even in urban environmental history, we shall sup-
port this assertion with a few examples. Nordic countries, along with Germany
and Great Britain, were probably the first in Europe to develop a strong school
of environmental history. Scandinavian historians have focused extensively on
the natural environment: forests, lakes, watercourses, and maritime and coastal
milieus and resources, which is not surprising when one looks at a map of
Northern Europe. Environmental history in these countries can boast hundreds
and probably even thousands of references, but relatively little of this scholar-
ship engages with cities despite the strong tradition of urban history in these
countries.10
Germany has produced a more “balanced” environmental history in terms
of the topics that it explores. Scholars there have explored a wide range of
subjects and have made highly valuable contributions, including interesting
methodological breakthroughs and one of the few truly global environmen-
tal histories ever written.11 Important German contributors to urban environ-
mental history include Ilja Mieck (one of the very first Europeans to write
from the perspective of environmental history) and more recently Franz-
Josef Brüggemeier, Dieter Schott, and Christoph Bernhardt.12
Environmental history also enjoyed an early and steady development in
Great Britain. Paradoxically, however, in the country that was the first in the
world to be widely urbanized and industrialized, interest in the history of
urban and industrial environments attracted remarkably little scholarly atten-
tion until recently. There were exceptions, namely, Peter Brimblecombe’s
The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Times,
which appeared as early as 1987, and later Bill Luckin’s and Stephen
Mosley’s works on urban air pollution.13 Many of the first British practition-
ers of environmental history, who were often historical geographers, focused
on forests, rural landscapes, land use, and nature in general.14 Perhaps
because Britain already had strong schools of urban history, history of tech-
nology, and history of medicine, all of which are closely related to urban
environmental history, the latter was slow to develop as a distinct field within
Britain. It may also be that the overwhelming urbanization of England has
pushed historians interested in the environment to focus on natural phenom-
ena. A common language helping, Americans such as Christopher Hamlin,
Harold L. Platt, and Peter Thorsheim are contributing to the historiography
of the British urban environment.15
As far as environmental history in general is concerned, France has been
remarkably late to take off. Fernand Braudel and the other historians of the
Annales school are often viewed as pioneers of environmental history, and
one of them, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, wrote a history of climate and
was the first to use, in French, the phrase “environmental history.” Yet as
Massard-Guilbaud has argued elsewhere, the relationship between the

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 Massard-Guilbaud, Thorsheim / INTRODUCTION 695

Annales school and environmental history is problematic.16 Introducing the

first issue of a scholarly journal in France ever devoted to environmental
history, Le Roy Ladurie wrote in 1974 that he intended to write a history
with the people left out: “une histoire de la pluie et du beau temps” (liter-
ally: “a history of rain and fine weather”).17 Such a program cannot coex-
ist with the expectations of those who think, as do the authors of this
introduction, that environmental history is the history of interactions
between human beings and the ecosystems to which they belong. And if
Braudel devoted a large space to le milieu in his books, the Promethean
paradigm in which he situated himself (along with most of his contempo-
raries) considered the environment chiefly as a hindrance to human
progress: something to be tamed or defeated. In an enlightening essay on
the state of environmental history scholarship, J. R. McNeill returns to this
argument and suggests that instead of stimulating the emergence of envi-
ronmental history, the Annales historians may—in France, at least—have
constricted its development.18 Nevertheless, many environmental histori-
ans, especially those in the United States, credit the Annales school with
helping to inspire historians to consider the natural environment as an
important subject of scholarly inquiry.19 The role of Alain Corbin in rela-
tion to the field of environmental history is similarly contentious. While
some find his focus on sensibilities and perceptions to be extremely illu-
minating, others fault it for being insufficiently grounded in material real-
ity and historical evidence.20
McNeill posits a second reason for the slow emergence of environmental
history in France: the special devotion that French historians have to peasant
history. Their fixation on the peasant—which McNeill astutely describes as
having “a totemic quality almost like that of wilderness for Americans”—
may have prevented them from considering the rural landscape and economy
from another, more environmental, point of view.21 This may help to explain
why, in a country where the rural world has long held a major role in the
economy and in politics, urban environmental history is developing more
strongly than rural environmental history. In fact, if French historians missed
the train of environmental history in general, they did better in terms of urban
environmental history. Although Gabriel Dupuy did not use the term history
of environment when he organized the conference on urban technical net-
works discussed above, he was nonetheless opening a door. André Guillerme’s
writings as well, although not initially called “environmental history,” belong
to the field without any doubt.22 And the first meeting of what was to become
the network for European urban environmental history was held in France,
as already noted. More than elsewhere, French scholars who write environ-
mental history today come from the fields of urban history and the history of
technology.
Elsewhere in Europe, environmental historians often come from historical
geography and landscape studies. Neither cities nor industrialized areas have

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696 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / July 2007

been central to their studies, although research in these areas would be par-
ticularly fruitful considering the environmental impact of industrial activity
in Eastern Europe during the period of communist rule.23 Few environmen-
tal historians can be found in Spain, but those who work there are develop-
ing thought-provoking research and using concepts from ecological
economics that may shed new light on the relationship between cities and the
environment.24 In Italy, a country where environmental history is a relatively
new development and where practitioners often come from agricultural
history, a number of notable contributions in urban environmental history
have appeared recently.25
On the whole, European urban environmental history seems to follow its
own rhythm, although it is well integrated in general European environmen-
tal history. Strong links exist between its practitioners and their colleagues in
other disciplines and on the other side of the Atlantic. Perhaps as a conse-
quence of these connections, the themes explored so far by those who study
European urban environmental history do not differ significantly from those
who focus on the environmental history of American cities. The oldest one,
as we have noted, is the theme of urban technical networks. Several publica-
tions followed the pathbreaking book edited by Tarr and Dupuy.26 If histori-
ans who studied these networks often came from the history of technology,
they all reached the conclusion that the implementation of these networks
resulted not only from changes in technical knowledge but also rested on
complex decision-making processes in which political, financial, and cul-
tural factors interacted with technical considerations. Because of their phys-
ical importance and high cost, such systems quickly developed what the
American historian of technology Thomas P. Hughes calls “technological
momentum.”27 They were at the root of new regulations, new patterns of con-
sumption, and new relationships between cities and the resources on which
they relied.28
In this issue, Simone Neri Serneri explores urban technological networks
by focusing on the history of water in Italy. Taking a close look at how Italy’s
water networks came to be modernized and expanded at the end of the nine-
teenth century, he shows that although contemporaries viewed water primar-
ily from the perspective of hygiene, it was, in fact, a more complex and
far-reaching environmental problem. In effect, the question was not only one
of bringing water to the city but also one of removing it after use. The con-
struction of water networks not only equipped the city with a vital infra-
structure but also changed its ecology and redefined its relationship with the
wider environment.
As we have already observed, pollution was another topic that European
historians addressed relatively early.29 More recently, several works of
French history have added to this scholarship.30 In the pages that follow,
Charles E. Closmann engages with this topic from an original angle, as he
explores the consequences of economic crisis (the German hyperinflation of

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 Massard-Guilbaud, Thorsheim / INTRODUCTION 697

the early 1920s) on the environment. He shows that fiscal problems in

Hamburg and neighboring Altona undermined the ability of local govern-
ment to protect people from water pollution at the same time that economic
crisis increased the amount of pollution that flowed into the river. Particularly
fascinating is Closmann’s argument that although inflationary policies hurt
all classes of citizens, geography and class influenced the nature and extent
of pollution that citizens were forced to endure.
Sabine Barles and Laurence Lestel’s article also relates to the degradation
of water, in this instance the river Seine in Paris from the 1830s to the end of
the 1930s. But the focus of their study is quite different from Closmann’s.
Barles and Lestel show that with the discovery of nitrogen’s role in agricul-
ture, authorities realized that something that had hitherto been understood
entirely as pollution (nitrogen in surface water) could become an asset (nitro-
gen as a fertilizer of soils). This understanding, they demonstrate, led reform-
ers to experiment with transforming various kinds of urban wastes into
fertilizer. This practice eventually declined, however, following Haber’s dis-
covery of a process for synthesizing ammonia from the nitrogen contained in
the atmosphere. Far from declaring that the ways in which nineteenth-
century Parisians recycled human wastes was an environmental success (the
authors say that additional research will be needed before affirming this), this
article emphasizes the fact that alternatives to present practices of managing
wastes existed in the past, and it implies that a historical perspective may aid
us in responding to the serious challenges that face us today. It is clear from
Barles and Lestel’s study that historians of the urban environment are
quickly confronted by chemical problems.
The place of chemistry and of chemists is the focus of Christopher
Hamlin’s article in this issue. The question that his thought-provoking article
raises is simple: if cities can be considered chemical systems—and Hamlin
demonstrates the extent to which this is so—why did chemists not become
specialists of cities in the way that engineers, architects, and planners did?
As with many “simple” questions, this particular one has a complex answer.
In a meticulous exploration of this problem, Hamlin shows that the purview
of any profession is not predetermined but rather historically contingent.
Demonstrating how and why chemists failed to take control of the cities in
which they played such an important role, he suggests that our cities may
have been different had they succeeded. Here again, insights from the past
may contribute to the solution of current problems.
Peter Payer’s fascinating article deals with a topic that remains understudied:
the question of urban noise.31 Using a wide range of sources, Payer’s contribu-
tion attests that despite the challenges it poses in terms of sources, the historical
study of noise can yield valuable insights. His article not only examines the
changing urban soundscape of late nineteenth-century Vienna and the rise of
campaigns against noise but also discusses the ways in which these campaigns
were received by the public and how new environmental norms—shaped very

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698 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / July 2007

much along class lines—came to be accepted. He shows that urban noise con-
tributed, much more than we would imagine, to the reorganization of public
space according to middle-class perceptions and ideals.
Reinterrogating the relationship between public health conceptions and
urban planning, Harold L. Platt seeks, in this issue, to elucidate how Victorian
representations of health—including their gender, medical, and political
dimensions—influenced the course of urban reform in late-nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century Manchester. Employing a distinctly “environmental
historical” way of questioning the past, he asks whether and how the discov-
ery of microorganisms had environmental and spatial consequences, and he
explores the relationship between slum clearance and the building of subur-
ban garden cities.
Finally, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz addresses a problem with which our cities
are still confronted today: technological risk and the ways that people cope
with it. Just ten days after the September 2001 terrorist attack on the Twin
Towers an ammonium nitrate plant exploded in the heart of the French city
of Toulouse. This accident, which killed thirty people and injured thousands
of others, reactivated long-held concerns about the wisdom of situating
potentially catastrophic industrial activities in urban areas. One cannot help
being struck, when reading Fressoz’s comparative study of the ways in which
Britain and France coped with industrial hazards during the nineteenth
century, by similarities between the terms of the debate then and now. Yet his
analysis also clearly shows that, confronted by the same problem, people in
Paris and London reacted quite differently to it. Although the decision
process in both cases rested on expertise, the nature of this expertise differed
widely in the two countries, and the same technological controversy led to
very different conclusions and behaviors.
The articles presented here do not, of course, cover the entire field of urban
environmental questions in Europe, but we hope that the diversity of topics
and approaches that they represent, along with the quality of their scholarship,
will convince readers of the importance of the urban environment in European
history.32 The historiography of European urban environmental history is still
in its infancy, so it may be premature to assess its limitations or failures. One
theme nonetheless appears strikingly absent from the European historiogra-
phy, especially when compared with the American one: the history of envi-
ronmental justice. Bill Luckin, who recently devoted a paper to this question,
concluded—hinting in particular to environmental justice—that “only an
arch-British patriot would deny that over the last thirty years environmental
history has been dominated by American initiative and American innova-
tion.”33 In this issue, Harold L. Platt does refer to environmental justice in his
article on Manchester. But Platt is an American, and one of those who con-
tributed to the introduction of the concept of environmental justice as a tool
for historians, so one cannot be surprised by his use of the concept. If envi-
ronmental justice has not so far seduced European historians as, in the words

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 Massard-Guilbaud, Thorsheim / INTRODUCTION 699

of Maureen A. Flanagan, “A Theme for Urban Environmental History,”34 it

may be because race has not played the same role in Europe as in the United
States and has therefore not had the same place in its historiography. But in
the aftermath of the 2005 riots in France, in which children of former colonial
subjects raged against discrimination and inequality—including residential
segregation—perhaps the time has come for European historians to attend to
questions of environmental justice.

NOTES

1. Christine M. Rosen and Joel A. Tarr, “The Importance of an Urban Perspective in Environmental
History,” Journal of Urban History 20 (1994): 299-310.
2. Martin V. Melosi, “The Place of the City in Environmental History,” Environmental History
Review 17, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 1-23; Donald Worster, “Transformations of the Earth: Toward an
Agroecological Perspective in History,” Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (1990): 1087-1106.
3. Rosen and Tarr, “Importance of an Urban Perspective,” 301.
4. Urban History Review/Revue d’Histoire Urbaine (Canada) 24, no. 1 (2005), Histoire Urbaine
(France) no. 18 (2007)
5. See “Les réseaux techniques urbains,” Les Annales de la Recherche urbaine 23-24 (July-
December 1984), and Joel A. Tarr and Gabriel Dupuy, eds., Technology and the Rise of the Networked
City in Europe and America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). On the relationship between
urban history and environmental history in the United States, see Joel A. Tarr, “Urban History and
Environmental History in the United States: Complementary and Overlapping Fields,” in Christoph
Bernhardt, ed., Environmental Problems in European Cities in the 19th and 20th Century (Münster:
Waxmann, 2001).
6. Peter Brimblecombe and Christian Pfister, eds., The Silent Countdown: Essays in Environmental
History (Berlin: Springer, 1990). Contributors included, among others, Peter Brimblecombe, Engelbert
Schramm, and Franz-Josef Brüggemeier.
7. Christoph Bernhardt, ed., Environmental Problems in European Cities in the 19th and 20th
Century (Münster: Waxmann, 2001); Christoph Bernhardt and Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, eds., The
Modern Demon: Pollution in Urban and Industrial European Societies (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses
Universitaires Blaise-Pascal, 2002); and Dieter Schott, Bill Luckin, and Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud,
eds., Resources of the City: Contributions to an Environmental History of Modern Europe (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2005). To contact this network, please write to massard.guilbaud@wanadoo.fr.
8. Dieter Schott was appointed professor in modern history with a focus on “urban and environ-
mental history” by the Technical University of Darmstadt, and Massard-Guilbaud, whose work has
always dealt with cities, was selected to occupy the first chair in France specifically devoted to environ-
mental history, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
9. For a recent survey on environmental history in Europe, see Verena Winiwarter, ed.,
“Environmental History in Europe from 1994 to 2004: Enthusiasm and Consolidation,” Environment and
History 10, no. 4 (2004): 501-30.
10. Mark Cioc, Björn-Ola Linnér, and Matt Osborn, “Environmental History Writing in Northern
Europe,” Environmental History 5 (July 2000): 396-406, esp. 399-401.
11. Joachim Radkau, Natur und Macht: Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt (Munich: Beck, 2000). For
other global histories of the environment, see J. R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An
Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); and Clive
Ponting, A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (New
York: St. Martin’s, 1991). On methodology, see Helmut Haberl, Karl-Heinz Erb, and Fridolin Krausmann,
“How to Calculate and Interpret Ecological Footprints for Long Periods of Time: The Case of Austria,
1926-1995,” Ecological Economics 38 (2001): 25-45.
12. Ilja Mieck, “‘Aerem corrumpere non licet’: Luftverschmützung und Immissionschütz in Preußen
bis zur Gewerbeordnung 1869,” Technikgeschichte 34 (1967): 36-78; idem, “Berliner Umweltprobleme

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700 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / July 2007

im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Ingolf Lamprecht and Kurt Eberhard, eds., Umweltprobleme einer Gross-Stadt:
Das Beispiel Berlin (Berlin: Colloquium, 1990); Dieter Schott, ed., Energy and the City in Europe: From
Preindustrial Wood-Shortage to the Oil Crisis of the 1970s (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997); idem, Kommunale
Energiepolitik, öffentlicher Nahverkehr und die ‘Produktion’ der modernen Stadt; Darmstadt-Mannheim-
Mainz, 1880-1918 (Darmstadt: Wissenchaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999); Franz-Josef Brüggemeier and
Thomas Rommelspacher, Blauer Himmel über der Ruhr: Geschichte der Umwelt im Ruhrgebiet, 1840-
1990 (Essen: Klartext, 1992); Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Das unendliche Meer der Lüfte:
Luftverschmutzung, Industrialisierung und Risikodebatten im 19. Jahrhundert (Essen: Klartext, 1996);
and Bernhardt, Environmental Problems in European Cities.
13. Peter Brimblecombe, The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Times
(London: Methuen, 1987); Bill Luckin, “Town, Country, and Metropolis: The Formation of an Air
Pollution Problem in London, 1800-1870,” in Dieter Schott, ed., Energy and the City in Europe: From
Preindustrial Wood-Shortage to the Oil Crisis of the 1970s (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997), 77-91; idem,
“Pollution in the City,” in Martin Daunton, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain: Volume 3;
1840-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 207-28; and idem, “‘The Heart and Home
of Horror’: The Great London Fogs of the Late Nineteenth Century,” Social History 28, no. 1 (January
2003): 31-48. Several years earlier, Bill Luckin also published Pollution and Control: A Social History
of the Thames in Nineteenth Century (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1986). Stephen Mosley, The Chimney of the
World: A History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester (Cambridge: White Horse
Press, 2001); and idem, “Fresh Air and Foul: The Role of the Open Fireplace in Ventilating the British
Home, 1837-1910,” Planning Perspectives 18, no. 1 (2003): 1-21.
14. See, for example, W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London: Hodder and
Stoughton, 1955); Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside (London: Dent, 1986); Joan Thirsk,
The English Rural Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Keith Thomas, Man and the
Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983). One geographer whose
work has covered a wide range of environmental history topics, although he does not focus specifically
on cities, is John Sheail. See his Nature Conservation in Britain: The Formative Years (London:
Stationery Office, 1998), and An Environmental History of Twentieth-Century Britain (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
15. Christopher Hamlin, A Science of Impurity: Water Analysis in Nineteenth Century Britain
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); idem, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of
Chadwick: Britain, 1800-1854 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Harold L. Platt, Shock
Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2005); and Peter Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain
since 1800 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006).
16. Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, “De la ‘part du milieu’ à l’histoire de l’environnement,” Le
Mouvement Social 200 (July-September 2002): 64-72.
17. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, introduction to Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations 29
(1974): 3.
18. J. R. McNeill, “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History,” History and
Theory 42 (December 2003): 5-43.
19. Donald Worster, “Appendix: Doing Environmental History,” in Donald Worster, ed., The Ends of
the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1988), 291-92; and Alfred W. Crosby, “The Past and Present of Environmental History,” American
Historical Review 100 (October 1995): 1177-89.
20. Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, translated by
Miriam L. Kochan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986; French ed., 1982); and idem, The
Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750-1840, translated by Jocelyn
Phelps (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994; French ed., 1988). For an insightful examination
of the issues raised in such controversies, see Kristin Asdal, “The Problematic Nature of Nature: The
Post-Constructivist Challenge to Environmental History,” History and Theory 42 (December 2003):
60-74.
21. McNeill, “Observations,” 29. See also Michael Bess, Mark Cioc, and James Sievert, “Environmental
History Writing in Southern Europe,” Environmental History 5 (October 2000): 545-56, esp. 548.
22. André Guillerme, The Age of Water: The Urban Environment in the North of France, A.D. 300-
1800 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1988); idem, “Chaleur et cauffage: l’introduction du
confort à Paris sous la Restauration,” History of Technology 14 (1992): 16-53.

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 Massard-Guilbaud, Thorsheim / INTRODUCTION 701

23. But see Eagle Glassheim, “Ethnic Cleansing, Communism, and Environmental Devastation in
Czechoslovakia’s Borderlands, 1945-1989,” Journal of Modern History, 78 (2006): 65-92.
24. Juan Martínez-Alier and Klaus Schlüpmann, La ecologia y la economia (Mexico City: Fondo de
Cultura Económica, 1991); Xavier Cussó, Ramon Garrabou, and Enric Tello, “Social Metabolism in an
Agrarian Region of Catalonia (Spain) in 1860–1870: Flows, Energy Balance and Land Use,” Ecological
Economics, 58 (2006): 49-65.
25. See, for instance, Simone Neri Serneri, Natura, industria e società: Per una storia dell’ambiente
in età contemporanea (Siena: Ciscam, 2000).
26. Marjetta Hietala, Services and Urbanization at the Turn of the Century: The Diffusion of
Innovations (Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1987); Schott, Die Vernetzung der Stadt; Tapio S.
Katko, Water! Evolution of Water Supply and Sanitation in Finland from the mid-1800s to 2000 (Helsinki:
Finish Water and Waste Water Works Association, 1997). On the convergence of environmental history
and the history of technology, see Jeffrey K. Stine and Joel A. Tarr, “At the Intersection of Histories:
Technology and the Environment,” Technology and Culture 39, no. 4 (1998): 601-40.
27. Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm,
1870-1970 (New York: Viking, 1989), 459-70.
28. See the concise but excellent summary of this in Dieter Schott, “Urban Environmental History:
What Lessons Are There to Be Learnt?” Boreal Environment Research 9, no. 6 (2004): 519-28.
29. See notes 6 and 7.
30. Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, “Culture, technique, gestion de l’espace: Une histoire sociale de la
pollution industrielle dans les villes françaises, 1789-1914” (habilitation thesis, Université Lumière Lyon
2, 2003); and André Guillerme, Anne-Cécile Lefort, and Gérard Jigaudon, Dangereux, insalubres et
incommodes: Paysages industriels en banlieue parisienne, XIXe-XXe siècles (Seyssel: Champ Vallon,
2004). Although the latter book deals primarily with the place of industry in the Parisian suburbs, readers
interested in industrial pollution will find much information in it. See also Estelle Baret-Bourgoin, La ville
industrielle et ses poisons: Les mutations des sensibilités aux nuisances et pollutions industrielles à
Grenoble, 1810-1914 (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2005).
31. Pioneering works on urban noise include Olivier Faure and Olivier Balaÿ, Lyon au XIXe siècle:
l’environnement sonore et la ville (Lyon: Centre Pierre Léon, 1992); Olivier Balaÿ, L’espace sonore de la
ville au XIXe siècle ([Bernin]: À la croisée, 2003); and Michael Toyka-Seid, “Noise Abatement and the
Search for Quiet Space in the Modern City,” in Dieter Schott, Bill Luckin, and Geneviève Massard-
Guilbaud, eds., Resources of the City: Contributions to an Environmental History of Modern Europe
(Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005), 215-29.
32. Readers interested in waste treatment may see the recent book by Sabine Barles, L’invention des
déchets urbains: France, 1790-1970 (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2005); many more references can be found
in Resources of the City, which has a detailed index.
33. Bill Luckin, “Environmental Justice, History and the City: The United States and Britain, 1970-
2000,” in Resources of the City, 230-45.
34. Maureen A. Flanagan, “Environmental Justice in the City: A Theme for Environmental History,”
Environmental History 5, no. 2 (2000).

Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud is a directrice d’études (professor) at the Ecole des

Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Her main interests are urban,
industrial, and environmental modern history. Her publications include Resources of
the City: Contributions to an Environmental History of Modern Europe (with Dieter
Schott and Bill Luckin, eds., 2005) and a forthcoming book on the history of indus-
trial pollution in France.

Peter Thorsheim is an associate professor of history at the University of North

Carolina at Charlotte. His work focuses on cities, technology, and the environment
in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. He is the author of Inventing Pollution:
Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800 (2006).

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