Dear Conference Organizers,
Ever since their emergence in the nineteenth century, the modern chemical and photographic industries have had to respond to public and private concerns about the harmful effects of chemical pollution. As pollution has received increased public scrutiny from the 1960s onward, many chemical firms in recent decades have had to comply with more stringent environmental and public health monitoring regimes. Moreover, as business historians such as Geoffrey Jones and Christina Lubinski have shown, some of these companies have been going beyond legal minimum requirements in order to restyle themselves as “green giants.” But even today, as chemical firms work, whether obligatorily or voluntarily, to do business in the public interest, a question often remains unsettled: in the interest of which public? The public interests chemical firms might take into account are not necessarily those of the people who are most negatively affected by their activities. Indeed, as the papers in our proposed session demonstrate from transnational or global perspectives, the impact of twentieth- and twenty-first-century chemical and photographic manufacturing work could be felt thousands of miles away from the countries and sites that have received most attention. The first two papers specifically focus on raw and intermediate commodities used in the U.S. photochemical industry, especially sulfuric acid, camphor, and gelatin. The last two papers turn to the heavy chemicals industry—particularly to soda manufacturing and mining—and to global asymmetries associated with the production and use of chemical pesticides during the so-called Green Revolution. All papers propose new ways of looking at either individual (photo)chemical multinational enterprises or at an entire industry or area of chemical technology, with important implications for your conference theme of “Doing Business in the Public Interest.”
We are listing the papers here in our preferred order of presentation, and will separately add the paper abstracts and one-page CVs:
• Katherine “Kappy” Mintie, Yale University: “Oil of Vitriol: Sicilian Sulfur Mining and the Photo-Chemical Trade at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”
• Emmet von Stackelberg, Harvard University: “From the World to Rochester: The Raw Materials of Kodak’s Motion Picture Film”
• Joris Mercelis, Johns Hopkins University: “The Return of the Natural: Soda Manufacturing and the Twentieth-Century Global Chemical Industry”
• Alison McManus, Johns Hopkins University: “Patents and Pesticides in the Ongoing Green Revolution”
We look forward to hearing from you,
Sincerely,
Joris Mercelis and Emmet von Stackelberg