Ecology & History

"I have no doubt that Inventing Pollution will remain the best text in its field for many years." -- Mark Cioc, author of The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815-2000
"Drawing on an impressive range of source materials, including some excellent photographs, cartoons and advertisements, this concise and clearly-written study explores public understandings of air pollution in Britain over the past two centuries."
"A well crafted and engaging book...Thorsheim demonstrates a level of knowledge about the relevant policies, technologies, and industries that is first rate.... Anybody interested in the story of how an industrial society learned to manage its interactions with the physical environment would benefit from reading Inventing Pollution. -- Business History Review
"Inventing Pollution [is] somewhere between timely and timeless. It is a valuable contribution to the history of energy and the environment, as well as the sociology of science and policy-making." -- Michael Lynch
"Inventing Pollution is a valuable reminder that air pollution was causing environmental, medical, and political controversies long before it became a focus for protests and regulations in the 1960s. By tracing the many responses to 'smoke pollution' in the first industrial nation over the past two centuries, Peter Thorsheim has established himself as a leading environmental historian of modern Britain. His book will be of wide interest on both sides of the Atlantic." -- William Cronon, author of Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England and Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature
"The chapters devoted to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries set a new standard for our understanding of how, in technological, legislative, and local regulatory terms, the behemoth of nineteenth-century smoke fog came gradually to be tamed, only to be replaced by new collective fears of invisible emissions from new industrial processes...and the (pages on the) final great smog crisis of 1952 are rooted in exemplary scholarship, argument, and interpretation." -- The Journal of British Studies
"Thorsheim tells us about the transition from organic effluvia as sources of ill-health to a fixation of coal smoke both in terms of scientific understandings, of the purely administrative responses and of the painfully slow progress of legislation." -- American Historical Review
"Thorsheim makes excellent use of visual material-including photographs, posters, and cartoons from Punch-to illustrate his arguments." -- Journal of Modern History
"Thorsheim's arguments are provocative and compelling.... (He) is to be applauded for bringing this disturbing history to our attention." -- Victorian Studies