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4 Trade, spores, and the Culture of Disease Attempts to Regulate Anthrax in Britain and Its International Trade, 1875–1930 tim Carter and Joseph melling A mong the dangerous trades that have injured and killed workers since the early days of industrialisation, the processing of animal parts such as wool and the manufacture of woollen products would appear to have presented few dangers. nevertheless, this essay examines a peculiar hazard faced by British laborers engaged in wool textile work during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. these laborers were identified as the first casualties of anthrax as an industrial disease in the united Kingdom during the late victorian era. We consider the responses of successive British governments and the contribution of key activists, most noticeably those in regional and national labor movements who pressed for effective regulation of hazardous working conditions and the introduction of compensation for those injured—not by a sudden catastrophe but by a disease contracted at the workplace. it is remarkable that anthrax attracted extraordinary public interest in latevictorian Britain, and the resources devoted to its diagnosis, detection, and eradication may appear disproportionate to the scale of the dangers it posed, particularly in comparison to other health risks known to exist in industrial occupations at this time.1 in seeking to explain the unusual attention given to the industrial victims of an illness more readily associated with pastoral agriculture, Bartrip recently suggested that public anxieties about the spread of anthrax can be linked to deep-seated concerns about the dangers Britain faced from imported diseases, alien intrusion, and immigration in the late victorian and edwardian periods.2 however, though superficially TraDe, sPores, anD The CuLTure oF DIsease / 61 attractive, this explanation does not accord with the known evidence that anthrax raised less alarm in the great port cities than in provincial textile centres, where migration patterns were relatively stable. nor does it take into consideration the role of free international trade within the global capitalist economy, where anthrax created the potential for conflicts among the actors involved: manufacturers seeking to secure low-cost but high-quality wool supplies, workers exposed to risk from such wools, and regulatory arms of governments seeking to reduce the risk but limit the regulation of dangerous wools to avoid penalties on national industry in the absence of international agreements on controlling wool shipments. this essay offers an alternative explanation for the emergence of anthrax as an industrial illness and the for decisive transformation of compensation that extended legal redress to a disease that had its origins in foreign agriculture rather than British industry. in constructing effective explanations of illness at moments of social and political conflict, we share White’s concern for locating the competing epistemologies of diseases such as anthrax within a specific historical period, and for tracing the points at which lay experience of illness connected with scientific authority.3 We argue here that the political and cultural potency of anthrax in Britain may reflect the ways in which class relationships were changing in these years, with the growth of a politically active organised labor movement at its strongest in long established industrial areas such as those where most textile production took place. Ownership and production were more diverse in woollen, worsted, and carpet manufacture, where class relationships acquired a particular complexion from the distinct pattern of industrialisation and cultural conflict that marked the early nineteenth century.4 Contemporaries understood anthrax not only in class but in gender terms, associating it strongly with senior male workers who sorted the imported materials; they did not consider its absolute risk across the whole of the wool and spinning sector in which much of the workforce was female. this led to subtle but significant variations in how the disease was represented by those advocating controls. there is an interesting comparison to be made with Blanc’s study (in this volume) of poisoning from carbon disulphide during rayon production. in that case a single large manufacturer dominated production and the labor movement found a strong political voice, highlighting the impact that different constituencies and distinctive vocabularies of concern may have had on the development of occupational health policy. in researching dangerous trades, it is important to understand the omissions and occlusions in policy making, including the unequal concern for different groups affected by similar hazards, because the framing of regulations reveals something of the structure, assumptions, and preferences of contemporary government. One notable feature of the British campaigns against anthrax was that...

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