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Magic Mineral to Killer Dust: Turner & Newall and the Asbestos Hazard. By Geoffrey Tweedale. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2000. xx + 313 pp. Figures, map, graphs, tables. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $29.95. ISBN: Cloth 0-198-29690-8; paper 0-199-24399-9.
Reviewed by Christian Warren
Geoffrey Tweedale's compact, but densely detailed, study describes how the cumulative effects of ignoring workers' health brought down Turner & Newall, Britain's largest producer of asbestos. Magic Mineral is a useful contribution to a growing body of scholarship exploring the complex relations between workers, management, medical science, and the state-a literature that should be of interest to all business historians.
The pioneering work of David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz-- especially Deadly Dust: Silicosis and the Politics of Occupational Disease in Twentieth-Century America (1987)-remains crucial. More recent studies include Mark Aldrich, Safety First: Technology, Labor, and Business in the Building of American Work Safety (1997); Claudia Clark, Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-- 1935 (1997); Christopher C. Sellers, Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (1997); and my own book, Brush With Death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning (2000).
For those already acquainted with the histories of other occupational hazards in the twentieth century, Tweedale presents yet another variation on a familiar theme. At the start of the century, Britain's growing asbestos manufacturers succeeded in "taking a common, relatively cheap imported raw material, and then transforming it with local expertise into a profitable product" (p. 5) of great strategic importance to other industries. Although, from the start, health experts warned of the especially dangerous nature of asbestos dust, manufacturers failed to enact even the most rudimentary measures to reduce their workers' exposure. Belated...