The narratives of disease, hygiene, developments in medicine and the growth of urban environments are fundamental to the discipline of modern history. Here, the eminent urban historian Bill Luckin re-introduces a body of work which, published together for the first time, along with new material and contextualizing notes, marks the beginning of this important strand of historiography. Luckin charts the spread of cholera, fever and the 'everyday' (but frequently deadly) infections that afflicted the inhabitants of London and its 'new manufacturing districts' between the 1830s and the end of the nineteenth century. A second part - 'Pollution and the Ills of Urban-Industrialism' - concentrates on the water and 'smoke' problems and the ways in which they came to be perceived, defined and finally brought under a degree of control. Death and Survival in Urban Britain explores the layered and interacting narratives within the framework of the urban revolution that transformed British society between 1800 and 1950.

Demographically, nineteenth-century London, or what Victorians called the “new Rome,” first equaled, then superseded its ancient ancestor. By the mid-eighteenth century, the British capital had already developed into a global city. Sustained by its enormous empire, between 1800 and the First World War London ballooned in population and land area. Nothing so vast had previously existed anywhere. A Mighty Capital under Threat investigates the environmental history of one of the world’s global cities and the largest city in the United Kingdom. Contributors cover the feeding of London, waste management, movement between the city’s numerous districts, and the making and shaping of the environmental sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Urbanization has long been a focus of bioarchaeological research, but what is missing from the literature is an exploration of the geographic and temporal range of human biological, demographic, and sociocultural responses to this major shift in settlement pattern. Urbanization is characterized by increased population size and density, and is frequently assumed to produce negative biological effects. However, the relationship between urbanization and human “health” requires careful examination given the heterogeneity that exists within and between urban contexts. Studies of contemporary urbanization have found both positive and negative outcomes, which likely have parallels in past human societies. This volume is unique as there is no current bioarchaeological book addressing urbanization, despite various studies of urbanization having been conducted. Collectively, this volume provides a more holistic understanding of the relationships between urbanization and various aspects of human population health. The insight gained from this volume will provide not only a better understanding of urbanization in our past, but it will also have potential implications for those studying urbanization in contemporary communities.

With the increasing interest of pop culture and academia towards environmental issues, which has simultaneously given rise to fiction and artworks dealing with interdisciplinary issues, climate change is an undeniable reality of our time. In accordance with the severe environmental degradation and health crises today, including the COVID-19 pandemic, human beings are awakening to this reality through climate fiction (cli-fi), which depicts ways to deal with the anthropogenic transformations on Earth through apocalyptic worlds as displayed in works of literature, media and art. Appealing to a wide range of readers, from NGOs to students, this book fills a gap in the fields of literature, media and art, and sheds light on the inevitable interconnection of humankind with the nonhuman environment through effective descriptions of associable conditions in the works of climate fiction.

For more than 200 years, everyday life in Britain has been beset by a variety of dangers, from the mundane to the life-threatening. Governing Risks in Modern Britain focuses on the steps taken to manage these dangers and to prevent accidents since approximately 1800. It brings together cutting-edge research to help us understand the multiple and contested ways in which dangers have been governed. It demonstrates that the category of ‘risk’, broadly defined, provides a new means of historicising some key developments in British society. Chapters explore road safety and policing, environmental and technological dangers, and occupational health and safety. The book thus brings together practices and ideas previously treated in isolation, situating them in a common context of risk-related debates, dilemmas and difficulties. Doing so, it argues, advances our understanding of how modern British society has been governed and helps to set our risk-obsessed present in some much needed historical perspective.

In the final decades of the nineteenth century modernizing interpretations of leisure became of interest to social policy makers and cultural critics, producing a discourse of leisure and voluntarism that flourished until the Second World War. The free time of British citizens was increasingly seen as a sphere of social citizenship and community-building. Through major social thinkers, including William Morris, Thomas Hill Green, Bernard Bosanquet and John Hobson, leisure and voluntarism were theorized in terms of the good society. In post-First World War social reconstruction these writers remained influential as leisure became a field of social service, directed towards a new society and working through voluntary association in civic societies, settlements, new estate community-centres, village halls and church-based communities. This volume documents the parallel cultural shift from charitable philanthropy to social service and from rational recreation to leisure, teasing out intellectual influences which included social idealism, liberalism and socialism. Leisure, Robert Snape claims, has been a central and under-recognized organizing force in British communities. Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social Change in Britain, 1880-1939 marks a much needed addition to the historiography of leisure and an antidote to the widely misunderstood implications of leisure to social policy today.

Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain brings together historians with a wide range of interests to take a uniquely wide-lens view of how technology and the environment have been intimately and irreversibly entangled in Britain over the last 300 years. It combines, for the first time, two perspectives with much to say about Britain since the industrial revolution: the history of technology and environmental history. Technologies are modified environments, just as nature is to varying extents engineered. Furthermore, technologies and our living and non-living environment are both predominant material forms of organisation – and self-organisation – that surround and make us. Both have changed over time, in intersecting ways. Technologies discussed in the collection include bulldozers, submarine cables, automobiles, flood barriers, medical devices, museum displays and biotechnologies. Environments investigated include bogs, cities, farms, places of natural beauty and pollution, land and sea. The book explores this diversity but also offers an integrated framework for understanding these intersections.

In twenty-first-century Britain, scientific advice to government is highly organized, integrated across government departments, and led by a chief scientific adviser who reports directly to the prime minister. But at the end of the eighteenth century, when Roland Jackson’s account begins, things were very different. With this book, Jackson turns his attention to the men of science of the day—who derived their knowledge of the natural world from experience, observation, and experiment—focusing on the essential role they played in proffering scientific advice to the state, and the impact of that advice on public policy. At a time that witnessed huge scientific advances and vast industrial development, and as the British state sought to respond to societal, economic, and environmental challenges, practitioners of science, engineering, and medicine were drawn into close involvement with politicians. Jackson explores the contributions of these emerging experts, the motivations behind their involvement, the forces that shaped this new system of advice, and the legacy it left behind. His book provides the first detailed analysis of the provision of scientific, engineering, and medical advice to the nineteenth-century British government, parliament, the civil service, and the military.

This book brings together in one volume the four studies on British population history already published in the series New Studies in Economic and Social History, and adds to them a new essay on British population in the twentieth century. Between them, the authors survey the trends and debates in British population history from 1348 to 1991. Research over the past twenty-five years has transformed our understanding of how population has grown and declined, of why the numbers of births, deaths, marriages and migrants have risen and fallen, and thrown much new light on the economic and social impact of these changes. The studies in this book supply introductions to these problems for readers who are not themselves demographers but who, as students, teachers, or non-specialist historians and social scientists, want to know more about what happened and what are the main topics of current debate. Full bibliographies for further study are included.

A provocative survey of new research in the history of urban public health, Body and City links the approaches of demographic and medical history with the methodologies of urban history and historical geography. It challenges older methodologies, offering new insights into the significance of cultural history, which has largely been overlooked by previous histories of public health. This book explores important issues and experiences in the public health arena in diverse European settings from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century.