The ecological consequences of London’s nineteenth century leather tanning industry

• In Event: Local and Global Environmental Histories of Production and Trade

Abstract

In 1801 there were at least 2 million shoes in London. By the turn of the twentieth century, there were at least 12.5 million shoes in London. These shoes were made of leather and most of them would have been manufactured in London using materials from all over the world. Quite literally then, Londoner’s shoes had a global footprint.
During the early nineteenth century, most of the hides and skins used to manufacture shoes in London came from around Europe and North America. By the end of the century, hides and skins came in incredible volumes from every continent. Similarly, during the first half of the nineteenth century, the vegetable materials used to tan hides and skins into leather came mainly from a few species of tree in Europe. By the end of the century, almost a dozen different species of tannins were being imported to London from North and South America, South Africa, India and Malaysia.
This paper explores the ecological consequences for the sites of resource extraction of hides/skins and tannin materials around the world. The paper will demonstrate that the scale of industrial production necessary to produce the footwear for London relied on the exploitation of numerous distant and distinct environments around the world. In this way, the flow of commodities around the world can be tied into specific and co-determinous examples of environmental change.

Author

• Andrew Watson, University of Saskatchewan