Dangerous Trade

Christopher Sellers is an Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University, and author of Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science. 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.

"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 "The authors' backgrounds run the gamut from anthropology to medicine, so the authors offer diverse perspectives on both the history of industrial pollution and the current state of these problems across the globe. The nations discussed range from developing countries like Malaysia, Nigeria, and Mexico to more developed nations like France, Spain, and Italy. The array of problems considered is also broad, including, for example, rubber plantations, liquefied natural gas, oil, asbestos, and mercury. This book is a fine account of some international problems in industrial health and is especially valuable for undergraduate collections that support environmental programs. Summing Up: Highly Recommended." -CHOICE "[A] compelling collection of essays that provides integral groundwork for understanding our contemporary globalized industrial hazards... These essays show the challenges confronting our contemporary globalized industrial hazard situation including scientific and lay knowledge production and the translation of resistance to regulation... Together these essays provide an important foundation for looking at industrial hazards on a larger geographic scope and through a wider interdisciplinary lens." -Environmental History

• 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 Menendez-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