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Title
Rise and fall of imperial chemical industries : synthetics, sensism and the environment.
ISBN
9783031374326 (electronic bk.)
3031374320 (electronic bk.)
3031374312
9783031374319
Publication Details
[S.l.] : PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2023.
Language
English
Description
1 online resource
Item Number
10.1007/978-3-031-37432-6 doi
Call Number
DA1-995
Dewey Decimal Classification
331.04600941
Summary
This book provides a history of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), a large Britain- based chemical firm which was a major industrial player in the twentieth century. Once a model for Britain's industrial reach and dominance, ICI collapsed in the mid-2000s, with some still profitable elements sold off to other chemical firms. The book focuses on the firm's origin site in the Northeast of England, around Middlesbrough, engaging the remnants of the company magazine, oral histories and social media posts, and material artifacts in the world, to relate a history of the social, environmental, cultural and imaginative and bodily impact of the presence (and then absence) of ICI. This unique work is open to coincidence and speculation, drawing on science fictional and urban myth narratives which emanate from the area. Through the lens of global narratives of industrial and philosophical innovation, it inquires into uncommon and diverse themes, such as the manufacture of Quorn, the place of photographic mediation of the factory, and industrial disease. Setting out from a context of heavy industry and material processing, the book seeks to stimulate poetic and creative thinking around the ways in which people's lives were enmeshed with synthetic chemicals and the dreams that seemed to ooze and seep from them as by-products. Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London in the UK, where she is Co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and accreddited as a Senior Fellow of the HEA.
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Access limited to authorized users.
Available in Other Form
ebook version : 9783031374326
Print version: 9783031374319
Intro
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
Synthetic Beginnings
Wonder Stuff: A Preamble
Food and Death
Company Origins
Brave New World
Nature and the Elements
Futurology
Notes
The Highpoints and the Low Ones: In, Over, Around and Under the Chemical Factory
Who is Making Those Clouds?
Old and New Nature
A Plan
Sociology and Chemistry
Notes
ICI and the Senses
End of Days for ICI
Grasping at Threads
News About Clouds
Toxic Ground
Notes
History as Synthesis
Blueprint History
Sources
Method
Chemical City: Origins
A Last Chorus
Notes
Index
