ASEH 2009 Canadian Presentations

This paper explores the attempts of the British government's Empire Marketing Board (EMB) to promote an imperial food system in the interwar period. In doing so, it considers issues of local versus imported foods that are at the centre of critiques of global food systems. The EMB used imperial sentiment, science, and marketing to create a single market out of a culturally and environmentally heterogeneous empire, an effort that reveals the cultural and material changes that were necessary to create a global food system.

From Sewage to Industrial Waste: Pollution and the River Lea in East London and West Ham from 1866-1899. The River Lea is London's second river, flowing southeast from Luton to West Ham where it meets the Thames. In the early nineteenth century, the Lea was so pure it attracted the Calico printing industry to the wetlands of West Ham, beginning the industrial and urban transformation of this once rural landscape. By the middle of the nineteenth century, urban growth led to the declining purity of the Lea and the Calico printing industry left West Ham. The consequences of the increased pollution for the human population became clear after the Cholera epidemic of 1866. Untreated sewage infused water from the Lea supplied East London's drinking water, spreading the deadly disease. The crises led to the 1868 Royal Commission on the Lea's water pollution and the creation of the Lee Conservancy Board to manage and improve the quality of the water. This major human intervention in the working of the river slowly transformed the Lea into an increasingly engineered river, but the problem of pollution in the River Lea continued. Chemical works and other polluting industries grew on the eastern banks of the Lea, beyond the reach of London's regulation of noxious trades. The leaders in West Ham welcomed the economic growth that came with the expansion of industry along the Lower Lea. This paper will trace the continued efforts of the LCB's engineers to control the pollution of the Lea and the shifting priority from diverting and treating sewage to contending with the industrial pollution in the lower Lea.

This talk evaluates the role of historians and historical methodology in shaping recent efforts to develop a clearer sense of past marine ecologies. It looks particularly at the History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP) and similar programs of research, and suggests that although some critiques have been valid and still need to be addressed, there is a spectrum of published research running from egregiously simplistic to extremely nuanced uses of historical data. It also notes that the simple inclusion of historians into these research programs has not been a guarantee of sophistication, nor has the absence of historians necessarily doomed such efforts.

My presentation examined the Oak Ridges Moraine: a region of hills and valleys located immediately north of the city of Toronto. My focus was not on the history of the moraine itself, but on the evolution of the moraine’s identity as a landscape: as picturesque scenery, difficult agricultural terrain, relic of glacial history, problem of conservation, contested resource, and protected area. Thus, I demonstrated how the present identity of the moraine – as a landscape possessing both ample groundwater and ecological values – was constructed over time, and was contingent on changing land uses, environmental values, and scientific knowledge.