An Environmental History of Britain Since the Industrial Revolution.

Social historians have found much filth behind the prim facade of Victorian society. Environmental historians are finding plenty of muck beneath Victorian Britain's rising tide of economic progress. B.W. Clapp here is concerned to show the environmental consequences of Britain's industrialization. They were major.

The scope of the book is narrower than the title implies. Clapp's Britain very rarely extends to Scotland and only occasionally to Wales. His environmental history is essentially the history of industrial pollution and of natural resource use, with consideration of the preservation of buildings. The transformations of the agricultural landscapes interest him much less, and grazing land not at all. To his credit, Clapp addresses the question of what belongs in an environmental history, and promises no more than he delivers. (p. xi)

Clapp's perspective is that of the economic historian. His previous works are chiefly about Manchester merchants. Here he shows a formidable knowledge of the industrial processes, raw materials trade, and waste products trade of England, c. 1830-1950. His chapters on energy, metals and mining, recycling (broadly defined) and byproducts concentrate strongly on the economic aspects and are rarely linked directly to environmental matters. This perspective, while occasionally frustrating, makes the book unusual. Environmental history in the US is generally written from the perspective of conservation and land management; in Britain it is most often written by historical geographers.

Perhaps the most interesting chapters are the first three: two on air pollution and one on water pollution. Clapp's treatment of air pollution overlaps somewhat with Peter Brimblecombe's The Big Smoke (London, 1987), but extends helpfully beyond London. The chapter on water pollution contains information - drawn substantially from enquiries by royal commissions - ntirely new to me and often fascinating in a morbid way. One learns that the waters of the river Calder (tributary to the Humber) could be used as grey ink in the 1860s; and that in the same decade urchins routinely amused themselves by setting fire to the waters of the Bradford Canal. (pp. 74-5) In 1936, the waters of the Trent were lethal to all animal and plant life for a stretch of 130 miles. (p. 89) None of this made much impression on government, or on those responsible for it. Water (and air) pollution abatement came only when and where direct human health risks became impossible to ignore.

Clapp writes for the British audience. Those (like myself) who do not know where to find towns such as Belper, Bilston, Mossley and Northwich (p. 28) get no help. London neighborhoods, whether famous or obscure, are rarely identified as such and may easily be mistaken for something else by the uninitiated. Minor problems abound. Clapp makes few concessions to readers ill-versed in industrial chemistry. His organization is occasionally opaque, as when consideration of asbestos and vinyl chloride monomer (a constituent of certain plastics) appears in a section devoted to energy sources. (p. 64) His intermittent curmudgeonly outlook, entertaining when he derides modern beer or the British penchant for euphemism, leads him into a discussion of some truly trivial aspects of noise pollution. But one finds minor defects in any book.

I find only two general problems with the work. One is the skimpy and unsystematic treatment of environmental change associated with agriculture. The chapter on land use change does not do justice to that theme. The second is that the book's conclusion, very interesting in its own right, extrapolates from British experience to the global condition. His conclusions, incidentally, are that humanity is by nature disinclined to stewardship and given to profligacy, so that we are most likely to continue our globally wastrel ways. He parts company with the cornucopian contingent in economics in saying that this is regrettable and will eventually lead to serious problems.

Clapp has written the first general environmental history of modern England. He brings to it an economic rigor typically absent from this emergent genre. He writes with admirable clarity - and an opinionated wit typically absent from scholarly works.

J.R. McNeill Georgetown University