This volume of archival source material chronicles British environmental politics between 1789 and 1914. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this collection will be of great interest to students of environmental and political history.

Peter Hough is an Associate Professor in International Politics at Middlesex University, London. He is the author of Back to the future: environmental security in nineteenth century global politics (2019).

Volume 1

Acknowledgment

Editorial Note on text

General Introduction

Part 1. Discovering Nature: Science and the Environment in 19th Century Britain

Chronology

Introduction to part 1

1.1 Biodiversity Decline

1. Gilbert White The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789)

2. William Roxburgh Letter to Joseph Banks (1795)

3. Alexander Beatson Tracts Relative To The Island Of St. Helena: Written During A Residence Of Five Years (1816)

4. William Burchell Residence in Cape Town, and Rambles in the Vicinity. (1822)

5. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (1832)

6. Charles Darwin Origin of the Species (1859)

7. James Prichard The natural history of man : comprising inquiries into the modifying influence of physical and moral agencies on the different tribes of the human family (1855)

8. Alfred Newton Abstract of Mr. J. Wolley's researches in Iceland respecting the gare-fowl or great auk (1861)

9. Arthur Tansley Presidential Address (1914)

1.2 Resource Depletion

10. Thomas Malthus An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)

11. William Forster-Lloyd Checks to Population (1833)

12. William Farr Economic Value of Population (1877)

13. William Jevons The Coal Question; An Inquiry concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal-mines (1866)

14. John Cleghorn On the fluctuations in the herring fisheries (1855)

15. Thomas Huxley Inaugural Address. Fisheries Exhibition, London (1883)

16. John Croumbie Browne 'On Forest Schools' (1878)

17. William Somerville Forestry in Some of its Economic Aspects (1909)

1.3 Pollution

18. Henry Fuller, On the Use of the Arsenic in Agriculture-Poisoning by Arsenic, and Symptoms of Cholera-The Possible Effect of the Game Laws (1848)

19. John Snow On the Mode of Communication of Cholera (1849)

20. Robert Smith Air and rain : the beginnings of a chemical climatology (1872)

21. Michael Faraday Observations on the Filth of the Thames (1855)

22. Cardiff Rural Sanitary Authority Pollution on Glamorganshire's Rivers (1878)

23. John Tyndall On Radiation Through the Earth's Atmosphere (1863)

24. Ernest Hart Smoke Abatement (1884)

25. John Graham The Destruction of Daylight. A Study in the Smoke Problem (1907)

Bibliography

Part 2: Romanticizing Nature: environmental conservation as a nationalistic artistic and political movement in 19th Century Britain.

Chronology

Introduction to Volume 2

2.1 Aesthetes and Conservation

26. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Raven (1791)

27. William Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814)

28. Alfred Tennyson In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849)

29. John Ruskin, A Protest Against the Extension of Railways in the Lake District (1876)

30. George Eliot, Silas Marner (1861)

31. William Morris, Under an Elm Tree (1889)

32. John Clare Remembrances 1832

33. Octavia Hill, Our Common Land (1877)

34. Anna Sewell, Black Beauty (1878)

35. Louise De la Ramée, The Waters of Edera (1900)

36. Edward Carpenter, My Days and Dreams (1916)

37. John Muir My First Summer in the Sierra (1911)

2.2 Conserving nature and the Aristocracy

38. Jane Austen, Emma (1815)

39. William Cobbett, Rural Rides (1830)

40. Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil (1845)

41. Thomas Carlyle, Sign of the Times (1858)

42. Thomas Hardy The Dorsetshire Labourer (1883)

43. Thomas Stafford Raffles, London Zoological Society Prospectus (1825)

44. Richard Lydekker, The Game Animals of Africa (dedicated to Herbrand Russell, 11th Duke of Bedford) (1908)

45. Charles Rothschild, Nature Reserves: Formation of a New Society (1912)

2.3 Conservation and Fear of the Future

46. William Deslisle Hay, The Doom of the Great City (1880)

47. Alfred Wallace, The Plunder of the Earth (1898)

48. Reginald Brabazon, The National Standard of Physical Health (1903)

49. Charles Masterton & Phillip Wilson, The Heart of the Empire (1901)

50. H. G. Wells A Modern Utopia (1905)

Bibliography

Index