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Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the environmental legislation and legal dispute of smoke pollution during the industrialisation process of the nineteenth-century Southern Low Countries (Belgium) – a time when the law was faced with the acute problem of how to balance industrial and environmental interests.

Paper long abstract:

Coal-fired industrialisation in the nineteenth century confronted governments with a major legal problem: how should the law balance the economic benefit of industrial development with the protection of environment and health from the nuisance caused by severe smoke pollution? Historians usually take that it was not until the end of the nineteenth century, when the theory of miasma was discarded and the modern notion of pollution ‘invented’, before the abatement of smoke pollution was to become legally enshrined. Was smoke pollution not regulated or contested, then, at all during the early stages of industrialisation? Did it not run counter to the old common law of nuisance that protected one’s private property from any kind of actionable annoyance to which many nineteenth-century, liberal-oriented governments still held on so dearly? Not only was nuisance considered to be a matter of public attention, private actors could also take issues of smoke pollution to court themselves. In this paper I wish to study the legal regulation and dispute of smoke pollution in the ‘second industrial nation of the world’ during the nineteenth century. To what extent had nineteenth-century citizens a right to clean air and how was it used? It will be argued that there was not simply a ‘great silence’ on the issue of smoke pollution before the end of the nineteenth century, but that a process of silencing of the voices calling for clean air was taking place under a new regulatory framework that increasingly protected the interests of the industry.