Includes bibliographical references and index.

Once the source of circumscribed local nuisances, the effects of human activities on the environment have turned into global pollution. The climate is warming, the seas are acidifying, the species are disappearing, the bodies are altered: to give an account from a historical point of view makes it possible not to sink in the stupefaction or the discouragement vis-a-vis a process which seems to have become inevitable. Because the great movement of contamination of the world that opens with industrialization is above all a social and political fact, marked by successive cycles, power relations, inertia, cultural transformations. By embracing the history of pollution over three hundred years, on a global scale, François Jarrige and Thomas Le Roux explore conflicts and the organization of powers in the industrial age, but also the dynamics that have shaped capitalist modernity and his imaginary progress.