The thirteen chapters that comprise Governing Risks in Modern Britain offer a historical gloss on a phenomenon by now familiar to our own age, in which everything from terrorism to the consumption of red meat has been identified as a threat to self or society. Editors Tom Crook and Mike Esbester suggest that the volume will offer some historical perspective to these contemporary problems. But Crook and Esbester have broader ambitions. Their hope is that the volume will contribute meaningfully to historiographical debate, encouraging a re-evaluation of the role of the modern British state, while also inciting greater appreciation of how governance not only includes acts by people on people, but also implicates an assemblage of technologies, objects, machines, substances and infrastructures. Such ambitions are realized, Crook and Esbester argue, in the volume's thirteen chapters, which are grouped around four broad themes.

Ulrich Beck's ‘risk society’ casts a long shadow throughout Governing Risks in Modern Britain. This is especially true of Part One, which comprises chapters by Francis Dodsworth and Ryan Vieira, each of whom attempts to disrupt Beck-inspired histories of risk management. Dodsworth, for instance, in his study of crime prevention, accepts that policing moved away from ‘crime-fighting’ models of law enforcement in the nineteenth century, towards the prevention of harm through ‘surveillance, pre-emption and anticipation’ in the twentieth (p. 34). His contention, however, is that contra Beck, this process had an earlier genesis than first suggested, and was a product less of modernity than of the growth of the insurance industry, societal panic over crime and rapid urbanization. Vieira's chapter on press reports of accidents in the early nineteenth century strikes a similar note, accounting for the growth of accident reports in terms not of the spread of man-made, technological hazards, but of the impact of industrialization on understandings of class. Furthermore, Vieira suggests that accident reports were a means of managing the anxieties produced by technological modernity, a more nuanced position than Beck's in its stress on the specifics of historical context.

Further challenges to Beck can be found in the four chapters that comprise Part Two. Yet it is in this section that the volume's contributors begin to discuss the role of materialities in the co-construction of risk. Thus, in his study of synthetics, Chris Otter reaffirms the importance of the local over the global, in a further criticism of Beck, while simultaneously underlining the material impact of new technologies on bodies – bodies were now burned, shocked, poisoned, crushed and asphyxiated with greater regularity. Technological developments created new, more hazardous relationships between human and non-human actors, a point developed in two further chapters by Tom Crook and Rebecca Whyte. Crook draws attention to the growth of ‘sewerage gas’ from indoor plumbing, as it accumulated in the cavities of Victorian homes during the latter half of the nineteenth century. There was an irony to this, as Crook explains, for the problem of sewerage gas emerged as the middle classes installed more complex water-borne plumbing systems in lieu of indoor cesspools. It created a new risk, that is, precisely as it treated an old one. Whyte develops a similar point with respect to chemical disinfectants, showing how carbolic acid was at once regarded both as an effective domestic sanitizer, and equally as a health problem in the 1890s, as the availability of disinfectant was connected to a rise in suicides.

Yet the stress that many of the volume's contributors place on the material agency of things is achieved without recourse to actor-network theory or any related toolkit. Indeed, the chapters comprising Governing Risks in Modern Britain wear their theoretical influences lightly, where even references to Foucault on governmentality are scarce. The theoretical engagement of Timothy Cooper, therefore, makes his chapter the stand-out contribution to the volume. Adopting a Marxist approach to time and environmental politics, and privileging the spoken words of actors as opposed to archival sources, Cooper suggests that environmental risks destabilize the natural, cyclical rhythms of life, and that a temporal focus on risk can show how time joins actors together through memory, repetition and endurance. It is a novel and thought-provoking way of conceptualizing risk, and one of the few attempts in the volume to push for a new theoretical approach.

The chapters that comprise Part Three return Governing Risks in Modern Britain to what is familiar territory for historians. Here, the emphasis is on the constitution of risks, and the involvement of various actors in this process. In his chapter, Bill Luckin stresses the uselessness of the law in protecting pedestrians from drink-driving, and explores the difficulties physicians and police officers had in properly identifying the point at which a driver became too inebriated to drive. Similarly, the two chapters that follow, by Chris A. Williams and Glen O'Hara respectively, explore the role of experts and other actors in the management of risks. Williams, in a study of traffic accidents in the twentieth century, notes how the police, by collecting statistics and compiling ‘causality maps’, were able to position themselves as experts in preventing traffic collisions, and thereby to gain a unique role in town planning and road design. Meanwhile, O'Hara documents the role of policy officials and other actors in debates over the risks, especially of drowning, of swimming and other water-borne leisure activities. Here, however, his stress is less on the development of professional expertise than on the diffusion, and eventual consolidation, of advice offered to swimmers, beach-goers and parents about playing near water.

The role of political actors is elaborated in two of the chapters that comprise Part Four. Christopher Sirrs addresses the various responses from ministers and organized labour to the Robens Committee, which in 1972 recommended the establishment of the Health and Safety Executive. The following chapter, by Paul Almond and Mike Esbester, develops this further, underlining the variety of actors involved in health-and-safety legislation post-1970, which the authors connect to the changing employment landscape as well as to the growth of neoliberalism.

The final chapter, co-authored by Crook and Esbester with Arwen P. Mohun and Thomas Le Roux, testifies to the ongoing potential of the study of risk. The authors point to two growth areas – national comparisons and the role of the state – and their possible imbrication. Were these to engage more deeply with conceptual or theoretical issues, in the spirit of Cooper, future historians could well develop a subject which has thus far remained largely overlooked.