Producing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Society in London, 1550--1750

London was the first city in world history whose air was continually polluted by smoke, and this dissertation shows how Londoners both embraced and regretted their newly smoky air. Between 1550 and 1750 coal became the primary fuel for domestic fireplaces and burgeoning industries, a process resulting from political policies and choices as well as demographic and economic conjunctures. The material and medical consequences of this transformation were severe; by the eighteenth century London's air was dirtier and more unhealthy than that found almost anywhere in the world in the twenty-first century. Its inhabitants were not apathetic to this transformation. Though environmentalism is largely understood as an exclusively modern ideology, in fact many early modern people were highly concerned that London's smoke cloud had made it unhealthy, ugly, and unfit to be a royal capital. While some advocated radical re-organizations of London's space, coal smoke was generally accommodated by limiting its affects on elites and by creating urban and suburban spaces specifically devoted to cleanliness.;Through debates centering on morality, paternalism, and the public good, coal burning came to be associated with the hearth and the family, growth and prosperity, security and power, even as coal smoke was widely perceived to signify dirtiness, disorder, and danger. The production of pollution was both a material and a moral process, both a changing energy regime and a new set of responses to a troubling urban environment.