Abstract

"The Return of the Natural: Soda Manufacturing and the Twentieth-Century Global Chemical Industry"

Joris Mercelis, Johns Hopkins University (jorismercelis@gmail.com)

As a driver of growth and a notorious polluter, soda manufacturing strongly shaped the image of the chemical industry in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, however, soda production was no longer seen as a cutting-edge area of chemical enterprise in Europe and the United States, and many histories of the chemical industry stop covering developments in this field once they have reached the 1900s. This paper, by contrast, highlights the value of the subsequent history of soda manufacturing for generating new perspectives on the global chemical industry and for highlighting limitations of current narratives. It does so by focusing on the relationship between “natural” and “synthetic” compounds and the environmental resources, knowledge, and techniques enabling their creation. In particular, I demonstrate that soda manufacturing complicates the common narrative of laboratory-made synthetic chemicals (e.g., dyes, plastics, and rubber) replacing natural substances in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To be sure, in the soda industry as well, a consequential shift toward synthetic methods took place—resulting from the widespread adoption of the so-called Leblanc and Solvay processes—and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industry observers doubted that natural soda ash would ever be competitive again on global markets. Ironically, however, by the late twentieth century, synthetic soda ash producers depended on tariffs and other protective measures to withstand a striking return of “natural” sodium carbonate mined in (among other places) Kenya and the United States. This paper discusses the environmental, technological, and economic factors behind the unexpected revival of the natural soda ash industry in the second half of the twentieth century. In its conclusion, I also reflect on whether similar developments might happen in other branches of the global chemical industry, or indeed have already been taking place.