Preliminary Programme

Coalmining was central to British industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Coal fired the furnaces and powered the engines and mills that made Britain an economic powerhouse. Getting coal from the ground, however, was a hazardous business. Occupational injury rates among coalminers were much higher than those for most other British workers of the time. Disabled people, then, were a significant and highly visible presence in colliery communities.
Employing a diverse range of primary sources, from parliamentary papers and company records to autobiographies and newspaper reports, this paper focuses on such communities to explore the changing meanings and construction of disability in industrializing Britain. In particular, special attention is paid to the question of how work and class intersected with and shaped notions and experiences of disability. In addressing this question, local conditions and regional differences in the coalfields are highlighted to illuminate the contingent nature of disability. These regional perspectives are, in turn, contextualized by linking them to evolving national attitudes and reactions toward disabled people and the coal industry.
The paper explicitly relates the findings presented to broader themes and debates in disability history. For example, the relative significance of industrial economic development to definitions of disability and the lives of disabled people.
The findings presented in the paper are part of a much wider project generously funded by the Wellcome Trust entitled ‘Disability and Industrial Society: A Comparative Cultural History of British Coalfields, 1780–1948’.








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After World War I, British disabled veterans received the attention of a number of government and voluntary schemes for rehabilitation and employment, chiefly the King’s National Roll system established in 1919 to encourage employers to hire those disabled from war. Historians have recently revisited these schemes, noting that in many cases the process could be slow and fraught, with many disabled veterans facing prospects of unemployment. The 1922 Select Committee on the Training and Employment of Disabled ex-Servicemen provides a picture of anxiety, not just of the scheme’s effectiveness but of public opinion, warning that public sentiment of disabled ex-servicemen was “on the decline”.

This paper seeks to add to this complex historical picture by focusing on the specific role of coalmining in the debate. What role was there in this national situation for an industry known for its own high rate of accident and injury? A mixture of responses were received from government officials and from within the industry itself, ranging from scepticism of the industry’s ability to take anybody other than “those disabled men who have previously worked in that Industry”, to attempts to find veterans specifically-targeted jobs above and below ground according to their impairments. The role of the coalmining industry in the history of World War I injured veterans is an important addition to a post-war narrative with contested notions of disability and work at its very centre. (Show less)

The aim of this paper is to explore alternative proposals to the expert model for the management and prevention of asbestos risks in Spain during the 1970s and early 1980s. These proposals emerged in the setting of a growing mobilization of workers and the active stance taken by the Comisiones Obreras (one of the two most important general trades unions) in denouncing occupational health problems during the transition to democracy.
I will argue that workers’ mobilizations and particularly the alternative proposals derived from the incorporation of locally produced knowledge and the instrumental use of expert knowledge became crucial for widening the narrow definition of asbestos health hazards during the transition to democracy. Comisiones Obreras contributed to the redefinition of asbestos health issue by emphasizing both occupational and environmental asbestos carcinogenicity. The Union’s condemnation of asbestos cancers was echoed by the daily press. Asbestos hazards outside the workplace came to appear far more spectacular and troubling to public opinion in comparison to the problems of the workers within. The swift redefinition of asbestos as an environmental issue and the introduction in 1984 of national regulations for the asbestos industry, inspired by a European Council directive (83/477/EEC), contributed to the gradual decline of labor unrest around occupational asbestos hazards. It virtually disappeared from public discourse until the beginning of the 21st century, when civil lawsuits by asbestos victims against their employers brought the issue back to the forefront of media attention
This research is drawn on the analysis of archival records, daily press and oral history. I studied the records of the study group on Occupational Health created in 1977 within the Madrid section of Comisiones Obreras. It was the first assessment and research center on health and working conditions set up by a union since the Spanish Civil War. These records are kept in the Archive of the History of Work at the First of May Foundation in Madrid. Interviews to leading figures of this study group have also been carried out. I also explored the material belonging to Francisco Báez Baquet, a unionist and leading figure in the fight against asbestos in Spain during the transition to democracy. His records are kept at the Historical Archive of Comisiones Obreras of Andalusia in Seville. I also analyzed the coverage of asbestos risks from 1976 to 1984 by general newspapers (El País, ABC) and by regional and local newspapers published in Barcelona (La Vanguardia, El Correo Catalán, Mundo Diario, etc), an area with a high concentration of asbestos manufacturing sites.
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My paper will address the key issue of health and safety in the workplace during the industrial era (19th – mid-20th c.), emphasizing the history of the growth, massive use and regulation of a toxic product – white lead, responsible for heavy lead poisoning. Drawing from an empirical work through a wide range of archives which constitute the core of my present work, I will address 3 main questions in a comparative perspective, through 3 different scales of appraising the history of risk linked to an industrial product :
(i) How does the slow disclosure of an occupational health issue face an irregular chronology, partially reflecting the social interest in risk and safety issues in general ? This will mainly deal with the global trends of occupational medicine, from Ramazzini to the hygienist movement, and the scientific and medical interest in health and safety at work and lead poisoning in particular, during the late 19th c.
(ii) How does the global interplay between manifold stakeholders (employers, employees, unions, politicians, physicians, public opinion) lead the health and safety issue to be on the political agenda ? From the French empirical case, which is emblematic, I will address the question of the making of the prohibition law, in a comparative perspective with Belgium and the United States. What sort of conceptual and practical issues does the parliamentary and legal way raise ?
(iii) Transnationalizing the issue, through hygiene congresses in early 20th c. and mostly ILO after WW1, what is the way of solving this occupational health and safety problem on a global scale ? The white lead issue is high on the agenda of the International Labor Conference in Geneva in 1921, leading to a historic compromise on prohibition, which enlightens the political and economical stakes of occupational health and safety in industrial societies.
I will argue that this history can serve as a historical template to rethink other health and safety issues during the 20th c., as asbestos or, more recently, bisphenol A.
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