By the late nineteenth century smoke presented an immense pollution problem for the burgeoning industrial cities of Europe and North America. Any book that tackles the complex efforts to mitigate this problem in two major countries over a span of nearly a century therefore sets itself a formidable task. Not only does the sheer amount of empirical material make it easy to miss the forest for the trees, but the attempt at comparative analysis also requires a particularly rigorous conceptual framework. Frank Uekoetter's account of smoke abatement policies in the United States and Germany thus certainly does not lack for ambition. But nor, more importantly, does it lack for things to say. This fine study—an abridged and updated translation of the German original published in 2003—offers a series of original, wide-ranging, and broadly convincing arguments not only about the development of air pollution policies in the two countries but also about the crucial role of older regulatory traditions in shaping the rise of modern environmental movements.

What makes the story intrinsically interesting is that the solutions devised for very similar problems proved to be remarkably different in the two countries. While one might be tempted to attribute this to the existence of distinctive “national styles” of regulation, Uekoetter wisely eschews such assumptions—without, however, rejecting them wholesale. His argument is a prudent one that recognizes the importance of ingrained habits and institutions without treating them as intrinsic or immutable. The overall impression is what one might call a loose-path dependency: different national regulatory traditions in the United States and Germany are presented as the outcome of a series of decisions and actions that, when they appeared to work, were eventually adopted elsewhere within each country.

The book structures this story largely along a chronological axis. It starts by investigating early efforts at smoke abatement and the importance of bourgeois social concerns in sparking local campaigns. As Uekoetter shows, there was a marked contrast between the effectiveness of smoke inspection schemes arising out of prewar urban civic movements in the U.S. and the incompetence or sheer disregard of the powerful German state bureaucracy concerning air-quality control. By the inter-war period, smoke abatement was still further advanced in the United States, especially in municipalities such as St. Louis and Pittsburgh, whose schemes proved so successful as to provide a model to other cities—as well as a powerful institutional legacy that would eventually prove ill suited to the era after World War II. Meanwhile, engineers and officials in Germany began to develop a more promising corporatist approach that continued throughout the Nazi years, as Walter Darré in particular took up the issue of air-quality control. Chapters four and five describe how the distinctive paths in the U.S. and Germany diverged yet further in the postwar era. Whereas the cooperative local arrangements of the American smoke inspection tradition became increasingly dependent on the goodwill of industry and therefore unable to address the new challenges on the horizon, in the German Federal Republic an assemblage of engineers, officials, and industrialists devised a highly effective set of institutions that operated on a national level and that dealt with air-quality issues beyond just “smoke.” Chapter six presents a telling juxtaposition of the Ruhr and Los Angeles: both were national forerunners in the fight against air pollution, yet whereas the new controls in the Ruhr were copied across the Federal Republic, a nationwide emulation of Los Angeles' efforts fell foul of continued uncertainty about the causes of smog as well as Detroit's hostility to reform. The final two chapters offer an intriguing interpretation of the gradual evolution of the German environmental movement compared to the more “revolutionary” upheavals in the United States. When viewed against the German backdrop, it appears that the very success of early cooperative schemes in the United States led to a degree of institutional inertia that, by eventually discrediting cooperation itself, helped to bring about the radical legislative changes of 1970. By contrast, in Germany the “strong state” that had initially hindered anti-smoke initiatives in the early 1900s eventually proved beneficial in encouraging meaningful cooperation from industry in the postwar period.

These arguments carry a number of interesting implications, and to his credit Uekoetter pulls no punches in drawing wider conclusions from his findings. The modern environmental movement, he argues, was not a grand new awakening to a previously ignored problem but merely the most recent expression of concerns that have been around for well over a century. Indeed, significant strides were made in air quality throughout the entire period under study, including the 1950s and 1960s. What led to the “environmental revolution” in the United States was not a history of industrial intransigence per se (German industrialists were scarcely more enthralled by controls than their American counterparts) or relative public indifference, but rather the continuation of a dominant regulatory tradition that gave too much power to industry and thus failed to keep up with the times. Perhaps most notable is Uekoetter's eloquent historical critique of the instinctive tendency among some environmentalists to view industry as an implacable foe rather than potential collaborator in the reduction of air pollution. Industrialists and engineers often acted as valued partners in smoke-abatement efforts; the account he presents is therefore not one that pits ecological concerns firmly against economic interests. If there is a lesson to be learned from the “age of smoke,” it is, according to Uekoetter, the importance of compromise and cooperation in achieving real environmental improvements.