Interdisciplinary Dialogues in Industry and Literature, 1770-1830

The reforming nineteenth-century politician Henry Brougham described the half-century from the 1770s to the 1820s as 'the most remarkable, the most brilliant, in the history of the English nation.' 'The mines of this country and of Wales, teeming with wealth, were first fully explored,' he recalled. 'Rocks were blasted - trees felled - the forests cleared - the earth broken up.' In those heady decades, 'the whole face of nature was changed.'

Brougham was certainly exaggerating. Still, many of his contemporaries felt a similar sense of 'wonder and astonishment' at 'the progress of manufactures in Great Britain,' as Patrick Colquhoun put it. Britain was increasingly understood as a new kind of nation, enriched by innovation, trade, and powerful machinery. Its changing landscapes, with their turnpikes, canals, and burgeoning ports and cities, reflected that new identity. What eyewitnesses described as the spread of 'the manufacturing system' later came to be seen as one of the most important turning points in the entire history of the world: the Industrial Revolution.

In retrospect, Brougham's assertions about the reshaping of 'the whole face of nature' strike an ominous note. Changes in Britain's economy pointed not only towards wealth and progress, but also towards the climate breakdown and environmental catastrophes of the present day. Historians of the Industrial Revolution have long seen coal burning and land 'enclosure' as key factors in this economic transformation. Path-breaking modern research has linked those factors to the role played by trade, empire, and slavery: all were ingredients in Britain's escape from the limitations imposed by its environmental resources. Both fossil fuels and the exploitation of people and ecosystems overseas - both 'coal and colonies' - made sustained economic growth possible.

Poets and novelists were anything but detached from this busy new world. They wrote odes to pioneering canals for carrying coal, and assessed the human implications of what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called 'the vast machines of Lancashire.' Their views about what William Wordsworth saw as an unprecedented 'dominion over Nature gained' were typically ambivalent: Romantic-period literature offers sophisticated, urgent responses to the fast-changing landscapes and ecosystems of the first industrial age. Critics have often traced the origins of modern 'green' attitudes back to the Romantic poets. But inventive recent scholarship has changed the debate, bringing to light a more diverse and contested culture of writing about environmental change around 1800, a culture closely bound up with colonial concerns.

Both literary and economic historians have investigated how early industrial Britain shaped the ecological condition and environmental imagination of the modern world. However, over the last generation, a once lively dialogue between their two fields of study has grown quiet. This project brings them back together. It will help those two ways of understanding eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Britain to re-illuminate one other, against the backdrop of the global environmental crisis.

The network will involve academic workshops hosted at sites of industrial heritage, alongside online, low-carbon international symposia. Connecting researchers with museum professionals and volunteer-run organisations, we aim to help custodians of Britain's industrial history tell nuanced and thoughtful stories about the past. Our gatherings in Flintshire and Shropshire will contribute to a re-focusing of attention on the literary and intellectual cultures of Britain's pioneer industrial regions. We will also compile an online cluster of short, illustrated articles, to begin the process of sharing our discussions with the wider world. In these ways, the network offers fresh thinking about an extraordinary few decades of British history, and their repercussions for environmental thought and action today and in the future.