* This paper was first given at a meeting of the informal seminar at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester in January 1993. I would like to thank members of the group for their comments and especially for numerous bibliographical suggestions which may have improved the comparative dimensions of the article.

¹ See Figlio, K., ‘What is an accident?’ in Weindling, P. (ed.), The Social History of Occupational Health (London, 1986), 180–206Google Scholar and ‘How does medicine mediate social relations?’, in Wright, P. and Treacher, A. (eds), The Problem of Medical Knowledge: Examining the Social Construction of Medicine (Edinburgh, 1982), 174–224.Google Scholar

² Hacking, I., The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge, 1975)Google Scholar; Perrow, C., Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (New York, 1984).Google Scholar

³ Jones, E.L. has posited a four-fold categorization of ‘disasters’ in The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge, 1981), 24.Google Scholar He highlights the ‘geophysical’, the ‘climatic’, the ‘biological’ and the ‘social’ but does not ‘move down’ to the level of the individual accident.

⁴ But there has also been an Annales-influenced commitment to the ‘autonomous’ or quasi-autonomous activity of ‘microorganisms’ in the past. See Braudel, F., Capitalism and Material Life 1400–1800, trans. Kochan, M. (London, 1973), 1–65Google Scholar and Le Roy Ladurie, E., ‘A concept: the unification of the globe (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries)’, in Ladurie, , The Mind and Method of the Historian, trans S. and Reynolds, B. (Brighton, 1981), 28–83.Google Scholar Similar, ‘global’ tendencies are also to be found in McNeill, W.H., Plagues and Peoples (Oxford, 1977).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵ The stereotypical example here is the repeated devastation of Bangladesh by hurricane and flood. See Khondaker, M.S., ‘Perception of and response to floods in Bangladesh’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Manchester, 1989).Google Scholar

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⁷ In relation to grain shortages, and governmental responses to such crises, within the general context of social and environmental calamity see Wrightson, K. and Walter, J., ‘Dearth and the social order in early modern England’, Past and Present, 71 (1976), 22–42Google Scholar; Walter, J. and Schofield, R. (eds), Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Slack, P., ‘Dearth and social policy in early modern England’, Social History of Medicine, 5 (1992), 1–17.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

⁸ The key texts are Lovelock, J., Gaia (Oxford, 1979)Google Scholar and The Ages of Gaia (Oxford, 1988).Google Scholar Gribbin, J. has provided a useful primer, Hothouse Earth: The Greenhouse Effect and Gaia (London, 1990).Google Scholar

⁹ On the incidence of — and methodologies for identifying — large-scale fire in antiquity see Salway, P., Roman Britain (Oxford, 1981), 232–3 and 312–13Google Scholar; and Wacher, J., Towns of Roman Britain (London, 1975).Google Scholar The early modern and modern situations have been described by Thomas, K., Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1971), 17–20Google Scholar; Jones, E.L., The reduction of fire damage in southern England, 1650–1850', Post-Medieval Archæology, ii (1968), 140–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, E.L. and Falkus, M.E., ‘Urban improvement and the English economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Research in Economic History, 4 (1979), 193–233Google Scholar; Jones, E.L., Porter, S. and Turner, M., A Gazetteer of English Urban Fire Disasters 1500–1800, Historical Geography Research Series No. 13 (Norwich, 1984)Google Scholar; and Borsay, P., The English Urban Rennaisance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989), 17–19, 90–5.Google Scholar Two recent contributions emphasize that, in America at least, mass conflagration endured as a large-scale threat well into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Rosen, CM., ‘Business, democracy and progressive reform in the redevelopment of Baltimore after the Great Fire of 1904’, Business History Revieiw, LXIII (1989), 283–328CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Miller, R., American Apocalypse: The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago (Chicago, 1992).Google Scholar

¹⁰ The classic ‘nostalgic’ interpreters are John and Barbara Hammond and G.M. Trevelyan. There is no adequate biography of the Hammonds, but Hartwell, R.M., ‘The rise of modern industry: a review’, in Hartwell, , The Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth (London, 1971), 377–89Google Scholar begins to clear the ground. On Trevelyan see Cannadine, D., G.M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (London, 1992).Google Scholar

¹¹ Such a judgement is, of course, dependent on the view that one takes of the chronology and ‘pace’ of the Industrial Revolution. For a classic statement of the ‘new’ ‘gradualism’ of the late 1970s and 1980s see Samuel, R., ‘The workshop of the world: steam power and hand technology in mid-Victorian Britain’, History Workshop Journal, 3 (1977), 6–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a reaction against this view see Berg, M. and Hudson, P., ‘Rehabilitating the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Review, XLV (1992), 24–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hudson, P., The Industrial Revolution (London, 1992).Google Scholar The historiography of a seemingly unending debate is well handled by Cannadine, D. in ‘The past and the present in the English Industrial Revolution’, Past and Present, 103 (1984), 131–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹² The figures in Hanawalt's, B. The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (Bloomington, 1986), 271–4Google Scholar, are highly suggestive on this point. Rule, J. presents tantalizing hints on the eighteenth century in his Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England 1750–1850 (London, 1986), 139–41.Google Scholar Intermittent nineteenth century parliamentary returns remain unexplored but official investigations undertaken in the late twentieth century are legion. See, for example, Health and Safety Executive, One Hundred Fatal Accidents in Construction (London, 1978).Google Scholar

¹³ A highly perceptive culturalist interpretation can be found in Schivelbusch, W., The Railway Journey: The Industrialazation of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Leamington Spa, 1977), 129–49.Google Scholar See, also, Crouzet, F., The Victorian Economy, trans. Forster, A. (London, 1982), 285–7Google Scholar and Craven, P., ‘The meaning of misadventure: the Baptiste Creek railway disaster of 1854 and its aftermath’, in Hall, R. et al. (eds), Patterns of the Past: Interpreting Ontario's History (Toronto, 1988), 108–29.Google Scholar But much empirical work still remains to be done on the primary sources in relation to nineteenth century railway accidents. The car is not much better served; but see Plowden, W., The Motor Car and Politics 1896–1970 (London, 1971)Google Scholar, chapter 13 and Luckin, B., ‘Class war on the roads: the black-out, traffic accidents and social relations in Britain, 1939–45’, in R.J. Cooler and B. Luckin (eds), Accidents in History: Injuries, Fatalities and Social Relations (forthcoming).Google Scholar Recent developments are discussed in Irwin, A., Risk and the Control of Technology: Public Policies for Road Traffic Safety in Britain and the United States (Manchester, 1985).Google Scholar For a social constructivist approach to the automobile accident in the United States during the 1970s see Gusfield, J.P., The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order (Chicago, 1984).Google Scholar

¹⁴ On the issue of risk and anxiety in the pre-nuclear and nuclear ages see Wager, W.W., Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things (Bloomington, 1982)Google Scholar and Weart, S.R., Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, Mass., 1988).Google Scholar

¹⁵ The literature on risk is now dauntingly massive: see the bibliographies in Bryant, E., Natural Hazards (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar and Smith, K., Environmental Hazards (London, 1991).Google Scholar Beck's, U. controversial Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Ritter, M. (London, 1992)Google Scholar should also be consulted.

¹⁶ Very few historians have yet engaged with these problems but Houlbrooke, R. (ed.), Death, Ritual and Bereavement (London, 1989)Google Scholar is a useful collection of essays. Theoretical issues are outlined in Parkes, C.M., Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life (London, 1972).Google Scholar

¹⁷ For typologies of accidents and emergency provision see Cliff, K.S., Accidents: Causes, Prevention and Services (London, 1984).Google Scholar Professionalization and rationalization in medicine are anatomized by Cooter, R.J., Surgery and Society in Peace and War: Orthopaedics and the Organization of Modern Medicine 1880–1948 (London, forthcoming).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸ Anthropological insights are provided in plenty by Douglas, M., Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1966)Google Scholar and ‘Environments at risk’, in her collection Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (London, 1975), 230–48.Google Scholar See also Douglas, M. and Wildavsky, A., Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers (Berkeley, 1982).Google Scholar For a brilliant analysis of ‘loaded’ environments in England during the early modern period, see Thomas, , Religion and Decline of Magic, chapter 1. The same author's Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London, 1983)Google Scholar is also invaluable for contextual purposes.

¹⁹ Thomas, , Religion and Decline of Magic, chapters 21 and 22.Google Scholar

²⁰ See Eyler, J.M., ‘William Farr on the cholera: the sanitarian's disease theory and the statistician's method’, Journal of the History of Medicine, 28 (1973), 79–100Google Scholar and the same author's Victorian Social Medicine: The Ideas and Methods of William Farr (Baltimore, 1979).Google Scholar See also Cullen, J., The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain: The Foundations of Empirical Social Science (New York, 1975)Google Scholar and Porter, T.M., The Rise of Statistical Thinking 1820–1900 (Princeton, 1988).Google Scholar

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²² This is an under-researched field: but for continuing technical difficulties, culminating in a series of gas-work explosions in the inter-war period, see Redford, A. and Russell, I.S., The History of Local Government in Manchester: Vol. III, The Last Half Century (London, 1940), 77–93 and 274–81Google Scholar and especially 279. ‘The gas industry's turnover in cash and corpses is a world wonder. They consider it a very popular industry and it certainly is the most popular form of suicide, many hundreds die of it every year, but it is painless and that is in its favour’, Electrical Times, 12 02 1931, 280.Google Scholar An element of truth lurked behind some of this ‘electrically-inspired’, ‘anti- gas’ propaganda.

²³ In the British context, the Workmen's Compensation Act of 1897 has seemed to be highly significant. P. Bartrip has argued that the legislation was the best that could be secured in the prevailing political and economic climate: Bartrip, , ‘The rise and decline of workmen's compensation’, in Weindling (ed.), Social History of Occupational Health, 157–79.Google Scholar But he also admits that coverage was very patchy in the years between 1897 and 1918. Furthermore, real levels of assistance were decisively determined by numbers of dependents: ‘A father of six children who was injured at work could expect to receive no more in compensation than a similarly incapacitated married, yet childless man’, 167. For further detail see Bartrip, P., The Wounded Soldiers of Industry: Industrial Compensation Policy 1833–1897 (Oxford, 1983)Google Scholar and Bartrip, P.W.J., Workmen's Compensation in Twentieth Century Britain: Law, History and Social Policy (Aldershot, 1987).Google Scholar

²⁴ Figlio, , ‘What is an accident?’, 180–206.Google Scholar

²⁵ Ibid., 184. For a revealing twentieth century context see G. Wilke and K. Wagner, ‘Family and household: social structures in a German village between the two world wars’, in Evans, R.J. and Lee, W.R. (eds), The German Family: Essays in the Social History of the Family in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany (London, 1981), 120–47.Google Scholar

²⁶ Figlio, , ‘What is an accident?’, 185.Google Scholar

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ Ibid., 183.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ Ibid., 201–2.

³¹ Ibid., 202.

³² Obelkevich, , Religion and Rural Society, passim.Google Scholar

³³ A suggestive theoretical framework may be derived from Mauss, M., The Gift, trans. Cunnison, I. (London, 1954)Google Scholar and Titmuss, R.M., The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy (London, 1970).Google Scholar

³⁴ The precise chronologies of three processes — the withdrawal of the gentry from urban affairs, the purchase by the merchant interest of suburban or semi-rural residences, and increased spatial segregation within industrializing areas themselves — are crucial. For regional and local detail see Wilson, R.G., Gentlemen Merchants: The Merchant Community in Leeds 1700–1830 (Manchester, 1971), chapters 9 and 10Google Scholar: Foster, J., Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution: Early Industrial Capitalism in Three English Towns (London, 1974), chapter 5 and esp. p. 182Google Scholar: and Earle, P., The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London 1660–1730 (London, 1989).Google Scholar

³⁵ Yet this is precisely the ‘equation’ which is implicitly central to but not resolved in Cowan's, R.S. otherwise impressive More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York, 1983).Google Scholar Hayden, D., The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities (Cambridge, Mass., 1981)Google Scholar is also germane to this problem and the period in which it is located. British feminist historians have been slow to follow up the leads provided by Cowan and Hayden.

³⁶ For Britain the best general survey is Wohl, A.S., Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (London, 1983).Google Scholar But see also McKeown, T., The Modern Rise of Population (London, 1976).Google Scholar

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³⁹ Explicitly political movements and agendas also played a role. See Parkin, F., Middle-Class Radicalism: The Social Bases of the British C.N.D. (Manchester, 1968)Google Scholar and Byrne, P., The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (London, 1988).Google Scholar

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⁴² The key articles here are Bowden, S., ‘The consumer durables revolution in England 1932–1938: a regional analysis’, Explorations in Economic History, 25 (1988), 42–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘Credit facilities and the growth of consumer demand for electric appliances in England in the 1930's', Business History, XXXII (1990), 52–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁴⁴ On this point see Abrams, P., Historical Sociology (Shepton Mallet, 1982), chapter 6Google Scholar; Anderson, P., Arguments within English Marxism (London, 1980)Google Scholar; and Eley, G. and Nield, K., ‘Why does social history ignore politics?’, Social History, 5 (1980), 249–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁴⁶ That so many of the individuals and groups referred to by the contributors to Weindling (ed.), Social History of Occupational Health were the victims of lingering ‘industrial’ conditions suggests that these were in fact legislatively and administratively defined states, rather than ‘accidents’. Figlio seems to arrive at just such a conclusion in ‘What is an accident?’, 201–2.

⁴⁷ Agendas on how to write medical history ‘from below’ threaten to torpedo the project itself. But see Fissell, M.E., Patients, Power and the Poor in Eighteenth Century Bristol, (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar, chapter 8; Porter, R. (ed.), Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-Industrial Society (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar: and Porter, R. and Porter, D., In Sickness and in Health: The British Experience 1650–1850 (London, 1988).Google Scholar

⁴⁸ The extent to which there has been a shift away from Webbian chronicles of trade unions — committees, subcommittees and national, regional and local organizations — may be assessed in the light of the lengthy bibliography appended to Joyce, P., ‘Work’, in Thompson, F.M.L. (ed.), Cambridge Social History of Britain Vol. 2: People and their Environment (Cambridge, 1990), 131–94.Google Scholar