Research Wout Saelens

Abstract

This project seeks to drop new lines in the water of environmental history to 'catch' how ordinary people developed an ecological awareness of their own during the industrialisation of nineteenth-century Northwest Europe. The take-off of modern environmentalism is usually told as the story of a three-stage rocket – from sanitationists to conservationists in the mid- and late-nineteenth century, to the 'mature' environmental movement of the mid-twentieth – and largely as a story of the affluent classes. Using sportfishing as its lens, this project instead explores how alternative environmentalisms could have emerged from below rather than from above. Focusing on Britain, Belgium and France – and in particular the industrial cities of Sheffield, Ghent and Lyon – it investigates how working-class anglers and their clubs acquired practical knowledge of their natural surroundings, how they conceived of being in nature and, ultimately, how they confronted the pollution of their rivers. Through analysing angling club periodicals and archives, working-class autobiographies, proletarian literature and popular songs, among other sources, the project aims to recover the forgotten voices of common people in the history of modern environmentalism, hence challenging the persisting myth that the working classes were 'too poor to be green'.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Van Ginderachter Maarten
• Fellow: Saelens Wout

Research team(s)

• Power in History - Centre for Political History01/10/2026 - 30/09/2029

Funding

• FWO
• FWO

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

The transition to fossil energy looms large in economic and environmental history. Ghent – the first industrial city on the European mainland – was quick to embrace coal as a new source of energy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The fossil fuel may have brought great wealth but its combustion also produced heavy environmental stress. How could such a heavily polluting fuel be implemented so easily in densely populated cities? The need for cheap coal for the labouring poor, the greedy manufacturer and the bourgeois consumer ran counter to civil sensibilities towards cleanliness and health. The objective of this proposal is to study how governments and citizens of the early industrial city dealt with the 'Faustian bargain' of coal as a source of both economic prosperity and environmental disaster. The 'everyday politics of smoke' is used here as a perspective to grasp the divergent motives of different interest groups in their daily struggle with coal and pollution: how, why and by whom was the concern for a clean environment balanced against industrial, residential and consumer interests? This research proposal thus seeks to add greater emphasis on the far too neglected role of the political choices and social experiences that were behind energy transitions in the past.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Soens Tim
• Fellow: Saelens Wout

Research team(s)

• Centre for Urban History01/10/2022 - 30/09/2026

Funding

• FWO

Project type(s)

• Research Project