Silicosis: A World History ed. by Paul-Andre Rosental (review)

Contrary to conventional views in the Global North, silicosis is not a thing of the past. Albeit grossly under-reported, this devastating disease persists in industrialized countries and is expanding in a wide range of industries in nations of the Global South. In the gold mines of South Africa, for example, the rate of silicosis remains nearly as high as it was at the turn of the twentieth century. Elimination of silicosis is currently a joint project of the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization (ILO). Drawing on new research, notably the history of global institutions such as the ILO, this collection of essays by physicians and distinguished historians of silicosis examines the social and political history of the recognition, diagnosis, and prevention of as well as compensation schemes for silicosis in the United States, Western and Eastern Europe, Japan, and South Africa. In so doing, the authors make a powerful case that history matters to any analysis of the persistence of this iconic disease of industrialization.

The editor, social historian Paul-Andre Rosental, has organized this volume as "an experiment in the collective writing of world history" (p. vii). Most chapters have multiple authors with Rosental authoring or coauthoring four chapters, including the introduction and conclusion, making for an unusually tightly structured, thoughtfully thematized, and readable collection centered on the political struggles that simultaneously illuminated and ignored different aspects of the health effects of exposure to silica. As noted in the introduction, while there have been many fine geographically delimited national histories of silica and silicosis, insufficient attention has been paid to the transnational dimensions of the history of exposure, health consequences, and management in industries beyond that of coal mining. Thus, negotiations over recognition of this medically challenging and incurable disease, arguably the most lethal occupational disease in history, (p. 2) the result of repeated historically specific compromises with significant and consequential geographic and temporal variation. Political struggles over hazardous working conditions led to social insurance in some countries, private insurance in others, and workers compensation in still others. In the U.S., litigation was particularly influential in both recognizing and obscuring silicosis. With minimal repetition, the volume details the myriad negotiations over diagnostic criteria for this scientifically complex disease entity. Although largely restricted to the Global North (with the exception of South Africa), the scope of the account is broad, highlighting industrial contexts beyond the English-speaking world.

The opening chapter by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner situates silicosis in the history of colonialism and imperialism, developing several themes that unify the collection—underlying social and scientific assumptions, emerging in part from the rise of bacteriology, that shaped debates over the very existence of silicosis as a distinct disease entity; the production of ignorance about the health effects of silica dust; the striking national specificity of different forms of ignorance; the effects of technological innovation on health of the workers; and the crucial role of physicians and other technical experts in illuminating or obscuring recognition of disease. While workers were the first to recognize the hazards of new technologies, their political power to negotiate disease definitions, prevention, and compensation was fragile.

Yet, as illustrated in chapter 2 by Alberto Baldasseroni and Francesco Carnevale, for a disease that was so widespread and caused such suffering, silicosis was a medically complex entity to specify, especially at the early stages. Importantly silicosis was difficult to distinguish from other respiratory diseases, such as tuberculosis, the most visible respiratory disease of the nineteenth century. In chapter 3, Jock McCulloch, Rosental, and Joseph Melling argue that recognition of silicosis as a disease entity required the convergence of a particular set of circumstances in the early years of the twentieth century—high mortality of British workers returning to Cornwall from the gold mines of South Africa; racially oppressive industrial practices structured into the emerging South African state and supported by the scientific and medical establishment; and, significantly, the emergence of powerful all...