William M. Cavert, University of Cambridge

William M. Cavert is a historian of early modern Britain focusing on urban and environmental history, holding a PhD from Northwestern University, Illinois. He has published 'The Environmental Policy of Charles I: Coal Smoke and the English Monarchy, 1624–1640' in the Journal of British Studies, as well as related studies in Global Environment and Urban History. His work has been supported by grants from The Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, Northwestern University, the University of Cambridge, and the University of St Thomas, Minnesota, and by a fellowship at Clare College, Cambridge. His current research examines Britain during the Little Ice Age, focusing on cold winters, disasters, and relationships with animals.

http://www.cambridge.org/cn/academic/subjects/history/british-history-after-1450/smoke-london-energy-and-environment-early-modern-city?format=HB

The Smoke of London uncovers the origins of urban air pollution, two centuries before the industrial revolution. By 1600, London was a fossil-fueled city, its high-sulfur coal a basic necessity for the poor and a source of cheap energy for its growing manufacturing sector. The resulting smoke was found ugly and dangerous throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, leading to challenges in court, suppression by the crown, doctors' attempts to understand the nature of good air, increasing suburbanization, and changing representations of urban life in poetry and on the London stage. Neither a celebratory account of proto-environmentalism nor a declensionist narrative of degradation, The Smoke of London recovers the seriousness of pre-modern environmental concerns even as it explains their limits and failures. Ultimately, Londoners learned to live with their dirty air, an accommodation that reframes the modern process of urbanization and industrial pollution, both in Britain and beyond.

Describes early modern understandings of environmental pollution, transcending scholarly consensus that only industrialized modernity has prompted any kind of environmentalism

Offers a more rounded account of environmentalism that recovers pre-modern environmental concern and yet also explains its limits and failures

Places ideas and events firmly within their early modern context, but also shows the legacy they left to modern Britain and to the rest of the industrializing world