{"product_id":"happy-apocalypse-isbn-9781839765506","title":"Happy Apocalypse","description":"\u003cb\u003eHow risk, disasters and pollution were managed and made acceptable during the Industrial Revolution\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBeing environmentally conscious is not nearly as modern as we imagine. As a mode of thinking it goes back hundreds of years. Yet we typically imagine ourselves among the first to grasp the impact humanity has on the environment. Hence there is a fashion for green confessions and \u003ci\u003emea culpas\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut the notion of a contemporary ecological awakening leads to political impasse. It erases a long history of environmental destruction. Furthermore, by focusing on our present virtues, it overlooks the struggles from which our perspective arose.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn response, \u003ci\u003eHappy Apocalypse\u003c\/i\u003e plunges us into the heart of controversies that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries around factories, machines, vaccines and railways. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz demonstrates how risk was conceived, managed, distributed and erased to facilitate industrialization. He explores how clinical expertise around 1800 allowed vaccination to be presented as completely benign, how the polluter-pays principle emerged in the nineteenth century to legitimize the chemical industry, how safety norms were invented to secure industrial capital and how criticisms and objections were silenced or overcome to establish technological modernity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSocieties of the past did not inadvertently alter their environments on a massive scale. Nor did they disregard the consequences of their decisions. They seriously considered them, sometimes with dread. The history recounted in this book is not one of a sudden awakening but a process of modernising environmental disinhibition.\u003ci\u003eList of Abbreviations\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eIntroduction: Little Modern Disinhibitions\u003cbr\u003e1 Inoculated with Risk\u003cbr\u003e2 The Philanthropic Virus\u003cbr\u003e3 The Ancien Régime and Humanity’s ‘Environmental Surroundings’\u003cbr\u003e4 Liberalising the Environment\u003cbr\u003e5 Lighting up France after Waterloo\u003cbr\u003e6 The Mechanics of Fault\u003cbr\u003eConclusion\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eAfterword\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eIndex\u003c\/i\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eHappy Apocalypse\u003c\/i\u003e offers a compelling, powerful and very timely critique of the claim that we live in a period unprecedentedly marked by an awareness of technological crises and environmental risks. Fressoz shows instead, and in striking detail, how in France and Britain in the decades around 1800, in major fields of concern such as public health, industrial safety and environmental impact, calculations of risk and estimates of safety were both impressively widespread and energetically debated. The book offers a brilliantly original analysis of how industrialists and entrepreneurs, legislators and scientists, public lobbies and private interests, all made sense of the processes that accompanied the establishment of new kinds of capitalist society and their models of welfare, profit and security. \u003ci\u003eHappy Apocalypse\u003c\/i\u003e will be required reading for anyone concerned with the ways in which current crises of safety and survival can be better understood in their proper historical settings.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Simon Schaffer, University of Cambridge\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"This book is a luminous enquiry into how society was remade to acquiesce in the risks presented by new medical procedures, new forms of lighting and industrial waste. Instead of fables of ignorance, a naïve belief in progress, or ridiculous opposition to the novel Fressoz shows how, in nineteenth-century France in particular, a powerful environmental consciousness was remoulded through complex political and juridical processes to make possible the use of the new. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in how the modern world changes, and a refreshing antidote to the banalities and mendacities which still dominate our discussions of technical and medical change.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—David Edgerton, King's College London\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Casting light on how humanity sleepwalked its way into the climate crisis, this meticulous study examines how harmful technologies overcame initial public resistance on their way to widespread acceptance in early 19th-century France.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eJean-Baptiste Fressoz\u003c\/b\u003e is a historian of science and technology, previously at Imperial College London, now based in Paris at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Shock of the Anthropocene \u003c\/i\u003e(with C. Bonneuil) and \u003ci\u003eLes révoltes du ciel\u003c\/i\u003e (with F. Locher).","brand":"Verso","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304980435173,"sku":"NP9781839765506","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781839765506.jpg?v=1767728682","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/happy-apocalypse-isbn-9781839765506","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}