19th Century Changes in the British Tallow Supply

Tallow, fat rendered from sheep and cows, was a major ingredient in soap and candles. While large amounts of animal fats were collected locally from butchers and household waste, Britain imported between £500,000 to £2,500,000 worth of tallow a year between the 1870s and 1890s. This equaled more than twenty-one thousand tons a year in the mid-1780s, increasing to over forty thousand tons in the late 1860s and surpassing a hundred thousand tons a year in the late 1890s.

During the late 18th century the vast majority of the tallow came from Russia. Based on the limited sources I’ve found so far, it appears that some of this tallow originated as sheep grazing on the Kazakh Steppe on the eastern edge of the Russian Empire, while the rest of it was a by-product of Russia’s domestic livestock market. These sheep were rendered near Orenburg and then the tallow traveled vast distances overland to Arkhangelsk, before it was shipped to Britain. I would love to learn about more sources to better understand the Russian side of this trade.

British Tallow Imports 1784-1786 (Total imports: £517,000)

The Russians remained dominant through to the mid-19th century. During the second half of the 19th century the Russian trade collapsed and was replaced by the United States, South America and Australasia. I am still looking into the causes of this dramatic shift, but in general it demonstrates the instability brought on by the globalization of this industrial supply chain. The other factor missing from these maps is the increased importance of palm and coconut oil in soap and candle making. (The maps represent the percentage of the total value of imports from each region.)

Walking Tour

Thanks to everyone who came on the walking tour yesterday. It was amazing to see so much interest in the Lea Valley. It was a lot of fun to enjoy a great walk and to share some of the history of this area.

Again we are sorry we did not have a handout for most of you, but we had no idea so many people would show up! Please visit the Lea Valley Drift website for more information about walking in the Lea Valley and look for information on a walk north of Hackney Wick in the near future.

Here are a few more links for places we visited or that might be interesting:

Cody Dock, House Mill, Abbey Mills Pumping Station, a online history of West Ham, and a new history of East London.

Open House London Walking Tour: September 22

Beyond the Olympic Park – the Lower Lea Valley from Hackney Wick to Leamouth

I’ve teamed up with Ralph Ward, a former regeneration advisory for the Olympics and Thames Gateway, to organize a walking tour of the Lea Valley on September 22 during the Open House London weekend. Between my study of the environmental and social history of the Lower Lea Valley and West Ham through to the early twentieth century and Ralph’s wealth of knowledge derived from working in the region during its recent transformation, we’ll provide a broad overview of the the Lower Lea’s history. If you read my recent post on the history of the region, you’ll see that I believe the history needs to be taken into account as a part of the Olympic legacy.

ActiveHistory.ca: 2012 Olympic Park Through Time


View Larger Map

The 2012 Summer Olympic park is located in the Lower Lea River Valley in the east of London. The games were sold to the British public from the beginning as an opportunity to transform one of London’s most economically disadvantaged regions. Early promotional material on the London 2012 website in 2006 put the goal of revitalizing the “underdeveloped” valley as the main legacy of the games:

Currently one of the capital’s most underdeveloped areas, the Lea Valley is an area of outstanding potential which will be transformed by the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games… The natural river system of the valley will be restored, canals would be dredged and waterways widened. Birdwatchers and ecologists will be able to enjoy three hectares of new wetland habitat… The rehabilitation of the Lower Lea Valley lies at the heart of the Olympic legacy to east London, restoring an eco-system and revitalising an entire community.

Labeling one of the most important sites of Greater London’s industrial development as underdeveloped ignores the significance of the Lower Lea Valley’s history. It might have been more accurate to borrow the phrase “rust belt” from the United States to label the river valley as a major location of deindustrialized brownfields, but even this would disregard the large number of surviving industrial jobs lost only after the expropriation of the Olympic site.

The Otter: Environment & Society Portal

[This post was first published on NiCHE’s Otter Group Blog]

A few weeks ago I attended a great little workshop at the Institute for Environmental History at St. Andrews University in Scotland. The papers ranged from Mark McLaughlin’s investigation of the links between New Brunswick’s scientists and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to a provocative paper on the future of nuclear energy by St. Andrews’ Kirsten Jenkins. One that stood out as a great topic for my upcoming Otter post, however, was Benjamin Tendler’s presentation on the Environment & Society Portal.

Python and the Natural Language Toolkit

A graph showing the use of different words in a corpus of the U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses.

Since the end of the academic year, I’ve been able to focus a lot more attention on my post-doc research. This included a research trip in London archives and a week long course on databases at the Digital Humanities Institute in Victoria. Now I’ve started focusing on learning a programing language called Python. In the short-term, I don’t need to learn advanced computer skills for the Trading Consequences, as we have a team of highly skilled computer and linguistic experts. However, I do need a basic understanding of what we are actually doing when we text mine historical documents and looking forward to the end of the grant, I would like to be able to continued to work with the database. I would also like to develop the skills to continue this kind of research on my own in the future.

I always intended to start with the Programming Historian, but the new version will not come out for another few weeks, so instead, I began working through Learning Python the Hard Way over a few days in May. This was interesting, but solely focused on teaching programing and not particularly connected to the kind of research I would like to do. A few days ago I took a closer look at Natural Language Processing with Python, written by Steven Bird, Edward Loper and one of Trading Consequences team members, Ewan Klein. Reading the preface, it became clear the book was accessible people with no background in programming. The early chapters included both an introduction to computational linguistics and Python.