Ventilating the empire: environmental machines in the British Atlantic world, 1700-1850
Description
TitleVentilating the empire: environmental machines in the British Atlantic world, 1700-1850
Date Created2020
Other Date2020-10 (degree)
Extent1 online resource (ix, 219 pages) : illustrations
DescriptionThis dissertation provides a scientific and social history of ventilation in the British Atlantic World during the long eighteenth century. Emerging amidst the enlightened craze for improvement, the first ventilating machines, or “ventilators,” aimed to extend the providential balance of particles in the atmosphere into enclosed and crowded spaces. These machines were widely adopted in the Royal Navy and in English prisons, where their use was promoted as a cornerstone of institutional reform. Early advocates of ventilation like the experimenter and clergyman Stephen Hales promised that his ventilators would thoroughly refresh these dank, putrid spaces and preserve the health of sailors, slaves and prisoners. In ships, ventilators were proposed as a means of mitigating the dangers of transition between climates, thus preserving the valuable labor resource of skilled sailors. In prisons, ventilation was proposed as a means of excluding and curing both moral and physical contagion in the new “perflated” and strictly disciplined prisons. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the failures of ventilation to fully extinguish epidemic disease was accompanied by the emergence of tropical medicine, which essentialized hot, humid environments as unhealthy and impossible to ventilate. This led to claims by abolitionists that slave ships constituted such an irredeemable space, and to claims by prison reformers that both the moral and physical environments of prisoners had to be completely controlled. Contemporaneously, the rationale for ventilation was changing as new chemical conceptions of air proposed by Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier emphasized the quality and temperature of air over its free circulation. These developments, and the commodification of ventilating devices by the Marquis de Chabannes and others led sanitary reformers and chemical experts like David Boswell Reid to prioritize comfortable temperatures and air purification rather than open access to the external air. These developments led to ventilation devices becoming luxury goods that aimed to provide a comfortable atmosphere insulated from the miasma and filth of the emerging industrial city.
In summation, I argue that while ventilating machines were initially designed to mitigate the negative environmental and social effects of empire through free circulation of air, the fear of hot, humid, putrid, “tropical” environments transformed ventilation into an infrastructural technology which ultimately aimed to insulate certain elements of society from others. By tracing the history of ventilating devices, Ventilating the Empire provides a cautionary tale of how racial and class dynamics can exert a strong influence on technological projects to avert environmental danger.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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