In his paper, Saelens challenges the notion of a nineteenth-century ‘great silence’ surrounding industrial air pollution, by examining popular perceptions of coal smoke in the Belgian city of Ghent. While environmental historians have often argued that concern over smoke pollution emerged only around the turn of the twentieth century, with the rise of scientific expertise and modern environmental policy, Saelens' study demonstrates that urban residents voiced objections much earlier. Drawing on the so-called enquêtes de commodo et incommodo – public inquiries of citizens living near offensive industry – he reconstructs street-level experiences of smoke nuisance throughout the nineteenth century. These sources reveal that neighbors across social strata frequently protested coal smoke, citing not only damage to property and daily inconvenience but also threats to health and the local environment. Far from being indifferent, city dwellers possessed a first-hand understanding of airborne industrial pollution well before it was formally recognised by science and the state. These bottom-up concerns were, however, systematically filtered through regulatory frameworks that limited legal recourse, expert knowledge rooted in miasma theory and economic policies favoring industrial development. Salens' paper concludes that coal smoke in nineteenth-century Ghent was characterised less by silence than by a structural muting of popular environmental knowledge, highlighting the contested politics of pollution in the early stages of industrialisation.

PhD candidate Catherine Simpson will comment on Saelens' work.