Governing Risks in Modern Britain

Danger, Safety and Accidents, c. 1800–2000

Tom Crook, Mike Esbester, Tom Crook, Mike Esbester

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137467447
• eBook ISBN: 9781137467454
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

For more than 200 years, everyday life in Britain has been beset by a variety of dangers, from the mundane to the life-threatening. Governing Risks in Modern Britain focuses on the steps taken to manage these dangers and to prevent accidents since approximately 1800. It brings together cutting-edge research to help us understand the multiple and contested ways in which dangers have been governed. It demonstrates that the category of 'risk', broadly defined, provides a new means of historicising some key developments in British society. Chapters explore road safety and policing, environmental and technological dangers, and occupational health and safety. The book thus brings together practices and ideas previously treated in isolation, situating them in a common context of risk-related debates, dilemmas and difficulties. Doing so, it argues, advances our understanding of how modern British society has been governed and helps to set our risk-obsessed present in some much needed historical perspective.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Tom Crook and Mike Esbester (eds.)Governing Risks in Modern Britain10.1057/978-1-137-46745-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Risk and the History of Governing Modern Britain, c. 1800–2000

Tom Crook¹ and Mike Esbester²

(1)

Department of History, Philosophy and Religion, Oxford Brookes University, Tonge Building, Headington Campus, Gipsy Lane, Oxford, OX3 0BP, UK

(2)

School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies, University of Portsmouth, Milldam, Burnaby Road, Portsmouth PO1 3AS, UK

End Abstract

This book is about the history of governing risks in modern Britain. To write such a history is itself a risky endeavour, given the variety of problems any such account might encompass. Back in 1998, the sociologist Anthony Giddens began a public lecture by asking: ‘What do the following have in common? Mad cow disease; the troubles at Lloyd’s Insurance; the Nick Leeson affair [and the collapse of Barings Bank]; genetically modified crops; global warming; the notion that red wine is good for you; anxieties about declining sperm counts.’¹ His answer was that they were all considered ‘risks’ and were steeped in conflicting accounts regarding their origins and consequences, causes and effects. All attested to the way in which risk permeates our lives, he went on. Risks might be financial and technological as much as environmental and medical, and personal and local as much as national and global. In what he called the ‘risk society’, after his fellow sociologist, Ulrich Beck, there was no escaping uncertainty, no relief from stumbling, anxiously, into the future. And yet, it might be said, we hardly need an eminent sociologist to remind us of something we confront daily. Confirmation of the diversity of contemporary risks can be found in the pages of our newspapers, where we might read of those relating to an impending terrorist attack, another economic recession, burglary and physical assault, or the side-effects of a particular medicine. We read, too, of accidents involving cars, workplace machinery, leisure pursuits, and household gadgets and chemicals.

We begin by emphasizing this abundance of concerns—the multiplicity of problems that have been, or might be, characterized as ‘risks’—simply to affirm at the outset that this volume does not pretend to exhaust its subject matter. Rather, the focus is on the regulation and representation of a particular set of risks, dangers and accidents that are of a physical and everyday sort. Simply put, it focuses on threats to the human body and, to a lesser extent, property, as these emerged in spaces such as homes, streets, workplaces and sites of recreation. The omissions are thus many. It does not attend, for instance, to the history of financial bubbles, crises and speculative risk taking, a facet of economic historiography that has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years.² Nor, again, does it concern the intensified risks and dangers that accompanied the eruption and execution of mass warfare—whether on the battlefield or, in the twentieth century, on the home front as well—and how this experience impacted on the development of the state and everyday life.³ Nor, finally, does it present any detailed studies of practices of insurance, either of a commercial or a compulsory, state-sponsored sort.⁴

Yet, to speak of omissions is to assume that the historiography of governing risks has a determinate scope and shape, a settled sense of what it might or should encompass and what it might or should exclude—something which has yet to be established. In any case, even our focus on the field of regulating everyday risks and physical dangers is varied and complex enough to pursue the central aim of this volume: namely, to advance the work of rethinking how modern Britons have been governed since the turn of the nineteenth century. In so doing, this book helps to situate the present in some much-needed historical perspective, not least by exploring when, how and why regulating risks became such a central and obsessive dimension of governing. The ambitions of the book, however, are principally historiographical and the broad argument is twofold. The first aspect is that risks, dangers and accidents constitute a useful means for rethinking some of the dynamics and dilemmas of governing modern Britain, beyond recourse to a state that grows or diminishes, intervenes or neglects, or is more or less ‘liberal’. The second aspect is that these dynamics and difficulties stem—to paraphrase Friedrich Engels’ famous formulation—not only from the government of persons, but also from the administration of things: machines, technologies and infrastructures; consumer products and forms of property; natural and artificial substances; and the environment, man-made or natural and unspoiled.⁵

The remainder of this chapter offers three brief discussions. The first concerns the historiography that this volume at once builds on and seeks to refresh and take in new directions. The second concerns contemporary theorizations of risk. Although the argument of this volume is informed by recent historiographical developments, it is also inspired by innovations in adjacent disciplines, notably in the social sciences, where a substantive body of literature has emerged on the subject of risk (and not least the seminal work of Beck invoked by Giddens above). The third discussion is more historical and concerns some of our key terms—in particular, ‘risk’, ‘danger’ and ‘accident’—and the shifting assumptions and material cultures that have accompanied their changing uses and salience. We then outline the chapters that follow and the structure of the volume as a whole.

Histories of Welfare and Risk

In some respects, the history of governing everyday risks, dangers and accidents has already been dealt with by historians of modern Britain—and even, one might argue, in abundance. Labour historians, for instance, have long been interested in the advent of official state inspectorates for factories and mines during the early Victorian period and their variable success thereafter in enhancing the welfare of workers and preventing industrial accidents.⁶ Key legal developments such as the Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1897, which established routine procedures of financial redress for some of those injured at work, have also attracted attention.⁷ More broadly still, since the 1950s, historians have been charting the development of the welfare state and the growth of collective responsibility for risks and dangers that are thought to lie beyond individual control, in particular, unemployment, sickness and accidental injuries—or what some historians now term the history of ‘the social’ and the ‘socialization of risks’.⁸ The institutional milestones are well known; foremost among them are the 1911 National Insurance Act and the founding of the National Health Service in 1948.

More might be said on this front. Clearly the history of governing physical and health-related risks in modern Britain is not virgin territory—far from it, and valuable work continues to appear in the vein of welfare historiography.⁹ Equally, of course, everything depends on how questions are formulated and posed, and how particular problems and points of reform are set within a broader interpretive framework. The history of the welfare state is a case in point. Since the demise of the so-called classic post-war welfare state during the 1980s, scholars have been busy revising and refreshing our sense of what happened and how. This has partly involved mobilizing new sources and recovering actors and activities hitherto overlooked, and there is much of this in what follows in this volume. But it has also involved matters of interpretation. For some time now, historians have been emphasizing the gradual and contested nature of state-formation in modern Britain and the absence of any ‘modernizing’ teleology or trajectory. From Edwin Chadwick in the nineteenth century to William Beveridge in the twentieth, the actions of key reformers have been shown to be more politicized and peculiar than was assumed by earlier accounts.¹⁰ Likewise, the idea of a ‘Victorian revolution in government’, first advanced by Oliver MacDonagh in the 1950s, no longer serves as a key point of reference.¹¹

In a similar spirit of puncturing ‘heroic’ narratives of necessary progress, historians have pointed to the ‘mixed’ nature of governing and the way that it mobilized an eclectic array of agents.¹² There was no linear assumption of power by experts and officials, whether employed or directed by a central state. Rather, there flourished—and persisted—complex networks of agency that also embraced local and voluntary actors, as well as those of a commercial and transnational sort. The ‘I’, too, has featured in recent accounts of power, to the extent that scholars have sought to recover the encouragement and co-option of the self-governing capacities of individuals. The growing use of the term ‘governance’ is one indication of this, where it refers to a diffuse field of agency that extended far beyond a state.¹³ The terms ‘liberalism’ (for the Victorian period especially), ‘social democracy’ (for the inter- and post-war periods) and even ‘neoliberalism’ (for the post-1970s) have also been redefined and put to new uses to uncover the political stakes of what we now call ‘welfare reform’ and ‘health and safety’.¹⁴ The new common sense is that governing modern Britain was an altogether more contested, confused and contingent enterprise than was previously thought: more messy, multi-faceted and multi-layered.

The chapters contained in this volume endorse and deepen the thrust of this revisionism. They do so in various ways, but none situate their particular subject matter in terms of the evolution of a welfare state, even if they concern matters of health, security and safety. They also affirm that governing has always been deeply problematic and, crucially, not just in terms of generating contest about the limits of the state and how ‘big’ or ‘small’ it should be. But whereas the categories of ‘welfare’ and ‘the state’ have come under sustained scrutiny in relation to their meaning and interpretive utility, this is not true of ‘risks’, ‘dangers’ and ‘accidents’. Historical works that place these concerns centre stage are still relatively few.

A key intervention in this respect was Roger Cooter and Bill Luckin’s collection, Accidents in History, published in 1997. As Cooter and Luckin argued in their introduction, though ‘accidents can seem nearly as pervasive as the air we breathe … there is hardly a comparable subject in which historical investment has been so meagre’.¹⁵ Accidents barely constituted a ‘minority interest’. Only a handful of articles had sought to pose the problem of ‘the accidental’ in an historical and critical fashion, notably Karl Figlio’s ‘What is an Accident?’, published in 1985.¹⁶ Their point was not that accidents per se had been overlooked; rather, it was that accidents had been marginalized as significant sites of power and contested meanings, and as deeply historical and social in themselves. ‘The “accident”’, they concluded, ‘far from being “accidental” or wholly arbitrary in occurrence and meaning is, in fact, historically contingent, as well as germane to our understanding of some of the most fundamental features of social, political, cultural and material life.’¹⁷

What was only a ‘minority interest’ in the mid-1990s, however, is no longer so. Certainly the study of everyday risks, dangers and accidents has yet to emerge as a recognizable subfield of modern British studies in the way that the history of the welfare state once was, which is now served by multiple summative and general surveys. Indeed, in terms of genres of historiography, the work that has appeared is, to varying degrees, of a cultural, medical, urban, industrial, technological and environmental sort, and not all of it concerns Britain. Nonetheless, two complementary developments might be highlighted. On the one hand, new histories of ‘the accident’ have emerged, notably in relation to modern forms of transport, such as railways and automobiles, but extending to industrial machinery and even water networks and reservoirs.¹⁸ As Ryan Vieira has recently suggested, surveying the literature on the subject, accidents are no longer seen as a ‘motor of progress’, as unfortunate teething problems that are eventually resolved on a predestined path towards greater safety and security. Instead, historians have sought to recover the assumptions—about society and human agency in particular—that structured the very idea and representation of ‘accidents’, as well as their problematic status as a product rather than a negation of ‘progress’ and the onset of growing levels of material and technological complexity.¹⁹

On the other hand, historical studies of the formation and regulation of risks and dangers—of which accidents represent an actualization, a shift from the potential or probable to the real—have also begun to emerge. This was already apparent in Cooter and Luckin’s volume, which included chapters on ‘hazards’ and ‘risk management’, but it is a focus that has become much more pronounced and articulate since then. The most notable instance is Arwen Mohun’s Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society, published in 2013.²⁰ It is the first study of its kind to integrate a variety of practices around a single risk-based narrative of broad chronological sweep. Beginning with fire prev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Risk and the History of Governing Modern Britain, c. 1800–2000
• 1. Early Risk Societies
• 2. Environmental Risks
• 3. Mobility and Leisure Risks
• 4. Occupational Risks
• Backmatter