Victorian Pioneers of Corporate Sustainability

Abstract:     
Historical scholarship on business-environment interactions has largely sidestepped the study of corporate innovations that had both economic and environmental benefits. This issue is examined through late-nineteenth-century initiatives sponsored by the British Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, whose aim was to document and promote the creation of profitable by-products out of polluting industrial waste and emissions. A case is made that the individuals involved in this effort not only anticipated concepts and debates now at the heart of the modern sustainable development literature, but also that their work questions some fundamental premises of this discourse.

Keywords: Business and the Environment, Corporate Innovations, Corporate Responsiblity, Industrial Waste, Emissions, Pollution

JEL Classification: M14, N53, Q2

Accepted Paper Series