DZIEWIĘTNASTOWIECZNY HYDROFUTURYZM, CZYLI KU ŚRODOWISKOWYM HISTORIOM POTENCJALNYM

<jats:p>In this article, I propose a reinterpretation of the beginnings of industrialization in England through the lens of environmental potential history—a conceptual framework that I develop by combining insights from environmental history, Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, Louis Althusser’s materialism of the encounter, and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s notion of potential history. Drawing on the case of the 1791 fire at the Albion Flour Mills and its contemporary iconography, I examine the emergence of industrial capitalism as a process of struggle and negotiation between human and non-human actors. I highlight the environmental dimension of nineteenth-century economic transformations—particularly the transition from water power to coal—which I interpret as a metabolic shift that reconfigured the relations between humans, nature, and society. I read the systemic abandonment of water energy, potentially linked to more communal forms of production, as a moment of lost democratic possibility. In this context, I use the term hydrofuturism to designate a materially possible yet historically suppressed visions of environmental utopia that existed as a genuine alternative in the nineteenth century. The aim of my article is to present the past as a field of continuously unfolding possibilities, where relations between the human and the more-than-human co-constitute the dynamics of historical processes. I propose environmental potential history as an analytical tool for rethinking history beyond teleological progress narratives—as a network of open, contingent relations, including those marginalized, subordinated, or erased by capitalist development.</jats:p>