Textiles: the ‘environmental turn’
I’ve spent a lot of this week thinking about the environmental history of the textile industry, and how CE tools might be effectively used to develop new historical understanding in this area. In this exploratory work, I have focussed on two principal areas: river pollution and ghost acres.
Extract from a map included in the Third Report of the Commissioners appointed in 1868 to inquire into the best means of preventing the pollution of rivers: pollution arising from the woollen manufacture, and processes connected therewith (1871). The map highlights particular areas of concern, with the Aire and Calder river basins at the centre.
Pollution to local rivers is the most obvious place to start when thinking about the environmental impacts of textiles. Stories about Bradford Beck’s trout dying en masse, or the river itself catching fire, illustrate well the extent of the environmental pressures on the city’s river systems caused by rapid expansion in the nineteenth century. A series of royal commissions on water pollution in the nineteenth century examined the effects of river pollution, with particular attention being paid to the rivers Aire and Calder and the damage caused by textile mills. One 1871 report describes Bradford Beck a ‘black, filthy and oppressive stream’. These are all available through Parliamentary Papers Online, and include hundreds of pages of personal testimony, interviews, and water analysis data that could be mined. I am going to run some SpaCy experiments with some extracts, to familiarise myself both with the materials, and with SpaCy.
Another extract from the 1871 report, describing Bradford Beck as a ‘black, filthy, and offensive stream’, and including tabular data on the chemical composition of Bradford’s rivers.
I’m interested in combining some of this data with more recent scientific research data into water quality. I have had some really productive conversations with Tasha and Daniel about using scientific data more generally. I think there’s lots of potential here to explore how natural environments (and scientific data about them!) might fit into our concept of a ‘national collection’, as well as the long-term impacts of industrialisation on people and the environment.
I’m also keen to link this to the current state of the rivers around Bradford, partly inspired by this project looking at the long-term connection between textiles and river pollution in Staffordshire. Tasha, who is also interested in this theme, knows some of the geographers who were involved in this project, and also pointed out that there are community groups in Bradford who are documenting and campaigning around the health of Bradford’s becks: the one that I have come across is Friends of Bradford Becks. They have done extensive research into river quality, and I am going to contact them this week to discuss further.
I won’t go into too much detail on this now, but I’ve been collecting data on ‘global ghost acres’: this is essentially a way to calculate, in terms of land, the amount of space needed to fulfil the raw material demands of an industrialising nation like Britain in the nineteenth century, and popularised by Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence. I’ve been collecting data originally compiled by Dimitrios Theodoridis for calculating ghost acres, focussing specifically on wool. However, at the moment I am cautious of using this data for anything but the crudest estimates – there are all sorts of issues including variations over time and space, and the reliability of the source base. I can imagine, however, that this data could be used to give rough estimates of the environmental footprint of individual collection items, as a kind of historical analogue to carbon footprint calculations. I’d be interested to hear from others about the desirability/feasibility of this kind of work, and potential tools to work with. There is also potential here to trace direct linkages between the sources of raw materials like the alpaca wool that made Titus Salt rich, and modern-day Bradford. More on this soon!
Other Textiles updates
As part of my initial scoping work on raw materials and textiles, I have come across C. F. Mallett’s Weekly Wool Chart, which circulated information on the Bradford wool market around the world. I’ve found an intriguing publication which refers to their “private service of cables to all parts of the world”, which I am going to consult in a library later this week – perhaps a fruitful overlap with the communications strand!
No news on Once upon a sheep yet, but this week I plan to do some more experimenting with video annotation tools.
Meetings