Peter Lund Simmonds and the political ecology of waste utilization in Victorian Britain

Technology and Culture

Volumn 52, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 21-44

  Cooper, Timothy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EXETER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; ECOLOGY; HISTORY; HUMAN; POLITICS; POLLUTION; PUBLICATION; UNITED KINGDOM; WASTE MANAGEMENT;

ECOLOGY; ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION; GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HUMANS; PERIODICALS AS TOPIC; POLITICS; WASTE MANAGEMENT;

EID: 79952169366     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: 10973729     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.2011.0003     Document Type: Article

References (138)

1. For some of the most recent theoretical and historical work on waste, see Timothy Cooper, "Modernity and the Politics of Waste in Britain," in Nature's End: History and the Environment, ed. Sverker Soerlin and Paul Warde (Basingstoke, UK, 2009);
2. Sophie Gee, Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination (Princeton, N.J., 2010)
3. and John Scanlan, On Garbage (London, 2005).
4. On the concept of the "production of nature" see Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Oxford, 1990), 368-401.
5. Joel Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, Ohio, 1996);
6. Martin Melosi, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse Reform and the Environment (Pittsburgh, 2004);
7. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present (Pittsburgh, 2008);
8. Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York, 1999);
9. Carl A. Zimring, Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America (New Brunswick, N.J., 2005).
10. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989), 218-19.
11. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1990);
12. Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989).
13. David Gilmartin, "Water and Waste: Nature, Productivity and Colonialism in the Indus Basin," Economic & Political Weekly 38, no. 48 (2003): 5057-65.
14. For details of Simmonds's biography, see David Greysmith, "Simmonds, Peter Lund (1814-1897)," in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, available at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/41011 (accessed 2 February 2010).
15. Peter Lund Simmonds, Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom (London, 1854), 1-2.
16. For a full account of Simmonds's publishing career and its significance, see David Greysmith, "The Empire as Infinite Resource: The Work of P. L. Simmonds (1814-1897)," Journal of Newspaper and Periodical History 6, no. 1 (1990): 3-15.
17. See, for example, Peter Lund Simmonds: The Arctic Regions: A Narrative of British Enterprise to Discover the North-west Passage (London, 1857);
18. Coffee and Chicory: Their Culture, Chemical Composition, Preparation for Market and Consumption, with Simple Tests for Adulteration (London, 1864);
19. Hops: Their Cultivation, Commerce and Uses in Various Countries (London, 1877);
20. and Tropical Agriculture: A Treatise on the Culture, Preparation, Commerce and Consumption of the Principal Products of the Vegetable Kingdom (London, 1877). This is only a partial list of Simmonds's diverse output, but it does reflect his basic concern with the valorization of nature's products.
21. Greysmith, "The Empire as Infinite Resource," 3.
22. William H. Brock, "British Periodicals and Culture: 1820-1850," Victorian Periodicals Review 21 (1988): 47-55.
23. Geoffrey N. Cantor, ed., Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (Cambridge, 2004).
24. Peter Lund Simmonds, "Preface," Simmonds's Colonial Magazine and Foreign Miscellany 2 (1844).
25. Peter Lund Simmonds, "Preface," Simmonds's Colonial Magazine and Foreign Miscellany 2 (1844). Ibid.
26. Peter Lund Simmonds, The Commercial Letter Writer (London, 1866).
27. On the concepts of commodification and external nature, see Noel Castree, "Commodifying What Nature?" Progress in Human Geography 27 (2003): 273-97. (Pubitemid 36777510)
28. P. Vibent, "A Few Hints on Foreign and Home Colonization," Simmonds's Colonial Magazine 5 (1845): 55.
29. C. T. Campbell, "Suggestions for Promoting Emigration to the British Colonies" Simmonds's Colonial Magazine 7 (1846): 130.
30. Greysmith, "The Empire as Infinite Resource" (n. 9 above), 7.
31. Manchester Guardian, 31 January 1849, 8.
32. Peter Lund Simmonds: "On Some Undeveloped and Unappreciated Articles of Raw Produce from Different Parts of the World" Journal of the Society of Arts 2 (1854): 33-42;
33. "A Few Remarks on the Economic Uses of Algae" Journal of the Society of Arts 5 (1856): 362-65;
34. "On the Utilisation of Waste Substances," Journal of the Society of Arts 7 (1859): 175-84.
35. Peter Lund Simmonds, Waste Products and Undeveloped Substances: Or Hints for Enterprise in Neglected Fields (London, 1862) (all citations are to this edition unless otherwise indicated);
36. Donald Woodward, "'Swords into Ploughshares': Recycling in PreIndustrial England," Economic History Review 38 (1985): 175-91.
37. Simmonds argued, for instance, that "in every manufacturing process there is more or less waste of the raw material, which it is the province of others following after the manufacturer to collect and utilize"; see Waste Products, 2.
38. Simmonds, Waste Products, 2 (emphasis added).
39. Peter Lund Simmonds, "The Sources of Resin" Technologist: A Monthly Record of Science Applied to Art and Manufacture 6 (1866): 114.
40. Scanlan (n. 1 above);
41. William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, eds., Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life (Minneapolis, 2005);
42. Gay Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (Lanham, Md., 2006);
43. John Clark, "The Incineration of Refuse Is Beautiful: Torquay and the Introduction of Municipal Refuse Destructors" Urban History 34 (2007): 254-77;
44. Timothy Cooper, "Challenging the 'Refuse Revolution': War, Waste and the Rediscovery of Recycling, 1900-50," Historical Research 81 (2008): 710-21;
45. Mark Riley, "From Salvage to Recycling-New Agendas or Same Old Rubbish?" Area 40 (2008): 79-89;
46. John Scanlan, "In Deadly Time: The Lasting On of Waste in Mayhew's London," Time & Society 16, nos. 2-3 (2007): 189-206;
47. Patrick Brantlinger and Richard Higgins, "Waste and Value: Thorsten Veblen and H. G. Wells," Criticism 48 (2006): 453-75.
48. Emilie Amt, "The Meaning of Waste in Early Pipe Rolls of Henry II," Economic History Review 44 (1991): 240-48.
49. Scanlan, On Garbage, 22.
50. William A. Cohen, "Locating Filth," in Filth, x.
51. Simmonds, Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom (n. 8 above), 1.
52. Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom, Ibid., 2.
53. Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 1861 (467), Select Committee to Inquire into Duties or Prohibitions in Foreign Countries on Export of Rags Used in Manufacture of Paper in United Kingdom, iii-v.
54. Strasser (n. 3 above), 90-93;
55. "Editorial: Paper and Rags," Leeds Mercury, 31 March 1860, 4d;
56. "Editorial: Substitutes for Rags in Making Paper," Lloyds Weekly London Newspaper, 25 February 1866, 7b.
57. Peter Lund Simmonds, "Wood Pulp for Paper," Technologist 6 (1866): 116-32.
58. Peter Lund Simmonds, "The Utilisation of Waste; A Quarter of a Century's Progress," Journal of the Society of Arts 31 (22 December 1882), 97.
59. Popular Science Review 2 (1862): 254.
60. G. M. Medland, Great Barrier Calls (1969), 119
61. quoted in A. Green and K. Troup, eds., The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in Twentieth-Century History and Theory (New York, 1999), 278.
62. C. T. Campbell, "National Emigration," Simmonds's Colonial Magazine 10 (1847): 75-76.
63. Peter Lund Simmonds, "On the Extent and Value of Our Colonial Fisheries," Simmonds's Colonial Magazine 9 (1846): 104.
64. For example, "almost bewildering in its vastness," as a reviewer of the second edition of Waste Products commented; see Nature 9 (1873): 101.
65. Simmonds, Waste Products (n. 23 above), 3.
66. Simmonds, "On Some Undeveloped and Unappreciated Articles of Raw Produce" (n. 22 above), 34.
67. Peter Lund Simmonds, Science and Commerce and Their Influence on Our Manufactures (London, 1873), 253.
68. See, for example, Times (London), 9 October 1872, 6e
69. and also the reply in Freeman's Journal, 10 October 1872, 7a.
70. Editorial, Belfast News-Letter, 29 September 1851.
71. Editorial, Belfast News-Letter, 1851, Ibid.
72. Simmonds, Waste Products (n. 23 above), 271.
73. Waste Products, Ibid., 277.
74. Richard Drayton has charted the emergence of economic botany and the establishment of an imperial network of botanical gardens centered on Kew during the nineteenth century as a response to the imperialist expectation that the transformation of the ecology of empire would contribute to economic and political integration;; see Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the Improvement of the World (New Haven, Conn., 2000).
75. Felix Wakefield, Colonial Surveying with a View to the Disposal of Waste Land (London, 1849), 10.
76. Lyon Playfair, "The Chemical Principles Involved in the Manufactures of the Exhibition as Indicating the Necessity of Industrial Instruction," in Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition of 1851, ed. Royal Society of Arts (London, 1852), 157.
77. Simmonds, "On Some Undeveloped and Unappreciated Articles of Raw Produce" (n. 22 above), 33.
78. Simmonds, Waste Products and Undeveloped Substances: A Synopsis of Progress Made in Their Economic Utilization during the Last Quarter of a Century at Home and Abroad (London, 1873), 10.
79. Simmonds, Waste Products and Undeveloped Substances: A Synopsis of Progress Made in Their Economic Utilization during the Last Quarter of a Century at Home and Abroad (1873), 10, Ibid.
80. Simmonds, "On Some Undeveloped and Unappreciated Articles of Raw Produce," 33.
81. Simmonds, Waste Products (n. 23 above), 4-5.
82. Simmonds, Science and Commerce (n. 43 above), 50.
83. Mike Davis has illustrated the ways in which the logic of imperial ecological transformation was driven by an ideological fixation on free trade, and entire continents were subjected to the "rationalizing" influence of commodity markets, often at the murderous expense of subject colonies; 1 see Davis, Late-Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London, 2002), 280-310.
84. Peter Lund Simmonds, Dictionary of Trade Products, Commercial, Manufacturing and Technical Terms (London, 1858). Playfair returned the compliment by contributing an essay to Technologist;
85. see Lyon Playfair "The Utilisation of Waste," Technologist 3 (1863) 403-12.
86. Trevor H. Levere, "The Rich Economy of Nature: Chemistry in the Nineteenth Century," in Nature and the Victorian Imagination, ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson (Berkeley, Calif., 1978), 189.
87. Nicholas Goddard, "'A Mine of Wealth'? The Victorians and the Agricultural Value of Sewage," Journal of Historical Geography 22 (1996): 274-90;
88. John Sheail, "Town Wastes, Agricultural Sustainability and Victorian Sewage" Urban History 23 (1996): 189-210; (Pubitemid 27124560)
89. Christopher Hamlin, "Providence and Putrefaction: Victorian Sanitarians and the Natural Theology of Health and Disease," Victorian Studies 28 (1985): 381-411.
90. Erland Mårald, "Everything Circulates: Agricultural Chemistry and Recycling Theories in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century," Environment and History 8 (2002): 65-84, esp. 68-69. (Pubitemid 34264916)
91. Simmonds, "The Utilisation of Waste" (n. 35 above), 112.
92. Simmonds, Waste Products (n. 23 above), 8.
93. Simmonds, "The Utilisation of Waste," 113.
94. William Proctor, "Our Coal Tar Dyes," Technologist 2 (1862): 427.
95. Simmonds, Waste Products, 1-2.
96. William Coleman, "Providence, Capitalism, and Environmental Degradation: English Apologetics in an Era of Economic Revolution," Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 40.
97. Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement (Oxford, 2001), 73-114.
98. Hamlin, "Providence and Putrefaction" (n. 60 above), 390-91.
99. Simmonds, Science and Commerce (n. 43 above), 581.
100. Simmonds, Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom (n. 8 above), 5.
101. Vibent, "A Few Hints on Foreign and Home Colonization" (n. 18 above), 58.
102. Simmonds, Waste Products (n. 23 above), 2, 276.
103. J. Addington Symonds, Waste: A Lecture, Delivered to the Bristol Institute for the Advancement of Science, Literature and the Arts (London, 1863), 3. Symonds argued that even the creation of coal indicated the beneficence of waste: "These spoils of ancient forests were transported to lakes and estuaries, and there buried, or, should we rather say, stored up in subterranean treasure houses for the future use of man, and then by a series of volcanic revolutions lifted up to within his reach. It was not for nothing that the grand and stately forests of palms were sepulchred in the depths of the Earth. But for all that enormous destruction, where would have been the blazing hearths of England-where these wonderful changes, social and national, that are involved in the mechanical applications of steam?" (37).
104. Richard Grove, "Coprolite Mining in Cambridgeshire," Agricultural History Review 24 (1976): 36-43.
105. Simmonds, Waste Products, 330.
106. As Symonds put it: "Lord of Nature and the finite beings, subjugating the qualities of matter and the forces of matter to his will and purpose; creating nothing, but taking command of the powers of nature and compelling them to work under new combinations, so as to supply his wants, and augment his pleasures, and gratify his pride; and dealing with form and colour and sound, so that things in the outward world shall be copies of the ideas of his mind, and present to other men, and for ages on ages, the same thoughts and feelings which he was first to conceive"; see Symonds, 33.
107. Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge, 1995);
108. John MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester, 1988);
109. William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford, 2007);
110. Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1959);
111. James Winter, Secure from Rash Assault: Sustaining the Victorian Environment (Berkeley, Calif., 1999).
112. David Arnold, "Plant Capitalism and Company Science: The India Career of Nathaniel Wallich," Modern Asian Studies 42 (2008): 899-928.
113. Drayton, Nature's Government (n. 49 above), 234.
114. Simmonds, "On Some Undeveloped and Unappreciated Articles of Raw Produce" (n. 22 above), 33.
115. On Some Undeveloped and Unappreciated Articles of Raw Produce, Ibid., 34.
116. Peter Lund Simmonds, "On the Extent and Value of Our Colonial Fisheries," Simmonds Colonial Magazine 9 (1846): 104-5, 114.
117. Simmonds, "On Some Undeveloped and Unappreciated Articles of Raw Produce," 41.
118. On Some Undeveloped and Unappreciated Articles of Raw Produce, Ibid., 34.
119. Simmonds, "The Utilisation of Waste" (n. 35 above), 98.
120. Manchester Weekly Times supplement, 23 September 1892, 8.
121. Simmonds, "On Some Undeveloped and Unappreciated Articles of Raw Produce" (n. 22 above), 42.
122. Simmonds, Waste Products (1873 ed.) (n. 53 above), 277.
123. Simmonds, Waste Products (1873), 277, Ibid.
124. Peter Lund Simmonds, "Of the Teak and Other Forest Trees of Madras," Simmonds 's Colonial Magazine 10 (1847): 264.
125. Symonds (n. 74 above), 12.
126. Ibid., 29.
127. Popular Science Review (n. 36 above).
128. M. Norton Wise and Crosbie Smith, "Work and Waste: Political Economy and Natural Philosophy in Nineteenth Century Britain (II)," History of Science 27 (1989): 392.
129. History of Science, Ibid., 423.
130. "As Liebig well observes:-'Science teaches us the simplest means of obtaining the greatest effect with the smallest expenditure of power, and with given means to produce the maximum of force. The unprofitable exertion of power, the waste of force in agriculture, in other branches of industry, or in social economy is characteristic of the want of true civilization'"; quoted in Simmonds, Science and Commerce (n. 43 above), 37.
131. Simmonds, Waste Products (1873 ed.) (n. 53 above), 10.
132. William S. Jevons, The Coal Question (London, 1866), 365.
133. Margaret Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago, 2005).
134. Brantlinger and Higgins, "Waste and Value" (n. 26 above), 436.
135. Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven, Conn., 1991), 68-96;
136. John Bellamy Foster, "Marx's Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology," American Journal of Sociology 105 (1999): 366-405;
137. Jason W. Moore, "Environmental Crises and the Metabolic Rift in World-Historical Perspective," Organisation and Environment 13 (2000): 123-57. (Pubitemid 30337949)
138. Lynn White jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," Science 155 (1967): 1203-7.