Governing Risks in Modern Britain: Danger, Safety and Accidents, c. 1800–2000

For more than 200 years, everyday life in Britain has been beset by a variety of dangers, from the mundane to the life-threatening. Governing Risks in Modern Britain focuses on the steps taken to manage these dangers and to prevent accidents since approximately 1800. It brings together cutting-edge research to help us understand the multiple and contested ways in which dangers have been governed. It demonstrates that the category of ‘risk’, broadly defined, provides a new means of historicising some key developments in British society. Chapters explore road safety and policing, environmental and technological dangers, and occupational health and safety. The book thus brings together practices and ideas previously treated in isolation, situating them in a common context of risk-related debates, dilemmas and difficulties. Doing so, it argues, advances our understanding of how modern British society has been governed and helps to set our risk-obsessed present in some much needed historical perspective.

Tom Crook is Lecturer in Modern British History at Oxford Brookes University, UK. He has published a number of edited collections, including (with Glen O’Hara) Statistics and the Public Sphere: Numbers and the People in Modern Britain, c. 1800–2000 (2011). He is currently completing a study of modernity and the governance of public health in Victorian and Edwardian England.

Mike Esbester is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Portsmouth, UK. His research focuses on the history of risk, safety and accident prevention in modern Britain, and has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health. He co-edited the April 2015 issue of Technology & Culture, on the international history of road safety.