In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Conclusion Joseph melling and Christopher sellers (with Barry Castleman) C ontributors to this collection share a common aim. We seek to puncture the complacency that prevails in much of the world today concerning industrial dangers. those of us living in affluent, developed nations find it only too easy to congratulate ourselves on the accomplishments of the past century in both occupational and environmental health. even more commonly, citizens in wealthier societies take these historic achievements entirely for granted. such complacency is misplaced. to paraphrase the novelist William Faulkner, many of history ’s worst hazards are not dead; they are not even past. impressive as many of our protective schemes have become, the essays in this volume demonstrate just how short-sighted even tales of past accomplishment can be. repeatedly, discovery and rigorous regulation of a hazard in one part of the world dovetail with an eruption of the very same hazard in another, less shielded, corner. in this and other ways, profound inequalities have long existed in where and for whom the risk and damage of the dangerous trades are the worst. these inequities may even be a defining feature of modern global production. if we are to stand a better chance of ameliorating them, we need a longer, deeper, and broader understanding of their genesis and staying power. We must appreciate the limits of both our past and our present weapons against industrial hazards. toward this end, these essays represent a modest step forward. What intellectual foundation they provide has come from a range of disciplines . Our essayists, drawing from a rich legacy of writing on hazards, include practitioners and activists who bring to the table a firm grasp of 196 / ConCLusIon contemporary knowledge and an appreciation of today’s most pressing issues and conflicts. this concluding essay itself finishes with thoughts developed in collaboration with Barry Castleman, who continues to contribute to campaigns to improve awareness of exploitation in dangerous industries around the world. yet the social forces, contexts, and legacies at work are illuminated by other types of professional culture as well. much of the terrain sketched here draws on the repertoires of those trained and working in history and other social sciences and the humanities—that is to say, academics. in few fields of public health or environment do such scholarly methods and answers have as great a relevance for those working on the front lines. to the interdisciplinary beachhead sketched by this volume, we invite others to add. as a whole, these essays do hint at some initial conclusions about the historical allocation and transfer of workplace-related hazards since the nineteenth century, even while suggesting a great many avenues for further inquiry. First, and most obviously, the volume points to how the current unequal distribution of industrial hazards across the world is nothing new. already in the early twentieth century, the colonial plantations in malayan jungles, British trade in hides from the middle east, and the search by american companies for mexican oil had inflicted an inordinate burden of danger on developing-world workers. Beyond this generalization, however, the trajectories sketched by our contributors pose at least as many questions as answers. Whereas infectious hazards predominate in our earlier developing-world episodes, later hazards appear more likely to emanate from manufactured products, whether chemical pesticides in nicaragua or lead batteries in uruguay. But is this trend a result of changes in hazards themselves or of changes in the lenses through which past actors viewed them? might other histories, for instance, of the long-standing and distinctive dangers associated with mining, defy this tentative chronology? Our studies join others in suggesting that by the later twentieth century, the newest processes and products of hazardous manufacture more readily afflicted developing nations.1 But this pattern also deserves much further scrutiny. indeed, crude and sweeping distinctions between a “developing” and a “developed” world may well have only modest explanatory power regarding the cross-national differences sketched in these essays, not just in the evolution of hazards themselves but in the responses they stirred. What are we to make, for instance, of the case studies here demonstrating the recent emergence in developing countries of those same sorts of movements that led to the containment of dangerous production in more developed states? Contrasting levels of economic development alone would seem to offer little leverage for understanding such a pattern. it remains to be seen what concepts or categories may serve us better. alternative terms of analysis will more likely...

Share