Histories of technology, the environment, and modern Britain / edited by Jon Agar and Jacob Ward.

Available through UCL Press.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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.

Intro; Half Title; Title Page; Copyright Page; Acknowledgements; Contents; List of Figures; Notes on Contributors; 1 Technology, environment and modern Britain: historiography and intersections; History of technology and environmental history in -- and of -- Britain; Eight types of combination; (1) Environment as an input into a technological system; (2) Environment as something natural made into, or a component within, a technological system; (3) Environment as something changed, usually damaged, by outputs of technological process; (4) Environment as something alongside an artificial world

(5) Environment as something untouched by artifice(6) Environment as something represented through technology; (7) Environmental knowledge as something organised by being registered with technology; (8) Environment and technologies as interconnected cultural imaginaries; Conclusion; Notes; 2 Encroaching Irish bogland frontiers: science, policy and aspirations from the 1770s to the 1840s; Introduction; Bogland frontiers framed and labelled; Bogland frontiers surveyed and assessed; Bogland frontiers revisited and reopened; Summary; Notes

3 Landscape with bulldozer: machines, modernity and environment in post-war BritainA natural history of the bulldozer; Bombsites and bulldozers: rebuilding Britain; The dark side of the bulldozer; On the tracks of modernity; Notes; 4 Locality and contamination along the transnational asbestos commodity chain; Canada's asbestos culture; Manchester's asbestos culture; Industrial vs domestic exposure; From the factory to the home: changing sites of exposure and contamination; Conclusion; Notes; 5 A machine in the garden: the compressed air bath and the nineteenth-century health resort

Nineteenth-century landscapes of technologyThe compressed air bath and its uses; Encounters physical and spiritual; Decorating the compressed air bath; Conclusion; Acknowledgements; Notes; 6 The Agriculture Gallery: displaying modern farming in the Science Museum; Hand sowing to helicopter; Establishing a new Agriculture Gallery; Time for modern farming; History for the modern; Vividly new; 1951-2017; Acknowledgements; Notes; 7 About Britain: driving the landscape of Britain (at speed?); Speed, scale and topography: driving About Britain

The rubber hits the road: contesting the speed, scale and topography of the QuantocksNotes; 8 Crops in a machine: industrialising barley breeding in twentieth-century Britain; Industrial hybridisation: Proctor barley; Changing attitudes to hybrid plants; Engineering the industrial hybrid; Crosstalk with the brewing industry; Hybrid crops and population growth; Ecological consequences; Barley goes nuclear: Golden Promise; Power over nature; Gamma ray breeding; Competition from hybrids; Measuring fallout on the farm; Conclusion; Notes; 9 Plants are technologies; Introduction; Potato governance

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