Trading Consequences: A Digging into Data Project


By Jim Clifford and Colin Coates

This is a post Colin Coates and I published on the NiCHE website about our new research project. In the months ahead, I will add more posts on this website about both my research into global commodity flows and the experience of working on an international and interdisciplinary team research project.

We are embarking on a new research project, supported by a Digging into Data grant, to investigate the environmental and economic histories of the rapid expansion of commodity frontiers and trade in the British Empire and Canada during the nineteenth century. This is a unique opportunity to work with leading computational linguists and visualization specialists in Scotland and to experiment with new digital methods of historical research. In the process we hope both to assess the value of data mining for asking new questions from the growing digital archive and advance our knowledge of the growing importance of commodities in the British Empire and Canada during a period of rapid economic and environmental transformation.

EH Mobile App Demo

By Sean Kheraj:

After a year of fumbling our way through various efforts to produce an environmental history mobile application for iOS, Jim Clifford and I are finally ready to demo Environmental History Mobile 1.0 Beta. As we mentioned in our previous update, the goal of this project was to create an iOS mobile application that would facilitate the dissemination of online content relevant to the environmental history community, including news, blogs, and podcasts. What you can try out below is a demo of our first attempt to aggregate all of that content into a simple application.

Please keep in mind that not all of the components of the application in the web demo will function properly, as it would on an iPhone or iPod Touch. Nevertheless, you can click through most of the different sections of the application, including:

Some early results from a new research project

Over the past few weeks I’ve been collecting together documents on some of the global commodity that supplied factories in the Thames Estuary during the nineteenth century to help me start writing a paper for the ASEH in March.

Cinchona bark is one of the most interesting natural resources consumed in West Ham’s industry throughout the nineteenth century. Cinchona bark, which was native to the tropical mountain forest in eastern South America contained quinine alkaloids (still found in tonic water) used to treat fevers (particularly as the British expanded their empire into tropical zones with higher risks of malaria). Howard & Sons, founded at the end of the 18th century and located near Startford (East London) from 1805, developed into a leading manufacture of quinine during the 19th century. During the mid-century, Britain’s source of the cinchona bark shifted from the forests of Bolivia, Peru, Equator and New Granada (Columbia) to plantations in India and Java. The history of Clements Markham’s efforts to steal/save cinchona seeds and trees from the forests of Peru and the role of Kew Gardens in facilitating this kind of biotic transfer are well developed in the history of science literature [see below], but I believe there is little on the active role of industrialists, like John Eliot Howard, in studying the botany of his major raw material and seeking more stable supply chain. This research project is looking to find connections between industrial development in the Thames Estuary and environmental transformations in other parts of the globe and based on my early research, it seems that the Howards were among the most active industrialists in this regard.

The map above attempts to georeference the description of the establishing India’s cinchona plantations in George King’s A Manual of Cinchona Cultivation in India (1880). As the title to this post suggests, this is an early effort to start thinking about how to use GIS to map global commodity flows in the nineteenth century.

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Brockway, Lucile H. Science and colonial expansion: the role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens. Yale University Press, 2002.

Philip, Kavita. “Imperial Science Rescues a Tree: Global Botanic Networks, Local Knowledge and the Transcontinental Transplantation of Cinchona.” Environment and History 1 (June 1995): 173-200.

Historical 2012 Olympic Tour (1st Edition)

British politicians and planners are using the 2012 Olympic games to “revitalize” the Lower Lea Valley, a post-industrial landscape, situated between four inner-suburban boroughs in the East of London, including West Ham, which was the focus of my dissertation research.

A century ago R. A. Bray described West Ham “as that of a spot somewhere near London to which people went with reluctance if they had business there, and from which they returned with joy as soon as the business was over.”[1] Sadly, I don’t imagine most people would describe it any differently today and most only know it as the home of a struggling football club.

Half a century of rapid industrial and population growth in the second half of the nineteenth century transformed the once green wetlands of the Lower Lea River and Thames Estuary into a dirty manufacturing suburb with a range of social problems that matched the extensive environmental decline. Despite this troubled history and the scarred landscape it left, I would suggest travelers to London should venture eastward and see a different side of London from the regal and imperial parks and buildings in Westminster. The Docklands Light Rail lines make it easy to travel through East London and they are above ground, so you can see where you are going. Most of the West Ham sites listed below are within walking distance of a DLR station.

View Olympic Neighbourhoods in a larger map

Podcast: An Environmental History of the Lower Lea River Valley, Site of the 2012 London Olympics

From ActiveHistory.ca:
The Lower Lea Valley, currently undergoing a massive redevelopment project in preparation for the next Summer Olympics, underwent a number of equally remarkable transformations as London’s heavy industry migrated to the city’s eastern periphery in the second half of the nineteenth century. In this talk, Jim Clifford explored some of the findings of his PhD dissertation on the environmental problems created by half a century of urban-industrial development, and the challenges this history poses for redevelopment.

His lecture, “From a Pastoral Wetland to an Industrial Wasteland, and Back Again? An Environmental History of the Lower Lea River Valley, the Site of the 2012 London Olympics,” is part of the pan-Canadian NiCHE Speakers’ Series and the Mississauga Library System’s ‘History Minds’ series.

Click here to listen to the talk.

April 14th Public Lecture: “From a Pastoral Wetland to an Industrial Wasteland, and Back Again? An Environmental History of the Lower Lea River Valley, the Site of the 2012 London Olympics.”

Reposed from ActiveHistory.ca:
A reminder to our readers that you are all invited to the second lecture in the Mississauga Library System’s ‘History Minds’ series, co-hosted with ActiveHistory.ca. The second talk will be on Thursday, April 14th at 7:30PM in Classroom 3 at the Mississauga Central Library (see below the cut for directions).

“From a Pastoral Wetland to an Industrial Wasteland, and Back Again? An Environmental History of the Lower Lea River Valley, the Site of the 2012 London Olympics.” [part of the pan-Canadian NiCHE Speakers’ Series]
With Dr. Jim Clifford.

The Lower Lea Valley, currently undergoing a massive redevelopment project in perpetration for the next Summer Olympics, underwent a number of equally remarkable transformations as London’s heavy industry migrated to the city’s eastern periphery in the second half of the nineteenth century. In this talk, Jim Clifford will explore some of the findings of his recently defended PhD dissertation on the environmental problems created by half a century of urban-industrial development and discuss some of the challenges this posed for redevelopment.