Abstract
ABSTRACT A considerable literature places the emergence of occupational health discourses and institutions in the second half of the nineteenth century. This article uses the records of the Chatham Chest, a pension fund for maritime workers that existed from 1590 to 1803, as well as the records of the Sick and Hurt Boards and the Seamen’s Registry for the Greenwich Hospital, to argue for the existence of an early modern system of occupational health. Over two centuries, these institutions collected contributions and paid out pensions and healthcare costs to and from tens of thousands of workers on hundreds of ships and in dozens of hospitals, prisons and shipyards. They used customary estimates of the costs of avoiding poverty to price the loss of body parts and other injuries, and created systems of inspection and registration that grew increasingly stringent through episodes of post-war austerity. Managing occupational injury and death focused on poverty alleviation and subsistence, through a discursive field based on concepts of custom, deservedness and service rather than prices, income replacement and risk factors.
Published Version
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