The Plastic Age

Harvard FAS

Synthetic materials—plastics, polyester, synthetic rubber—represent both technological marvels and environmental evils of the modern age. This course takes a global view of the rise of synthetics from the mid-nineteenth through the twenty-first century. Moving beyond a simple narrative of transition from natural to synthetic materials, we will explore how distinctions between “natural” and “synthetic” tell broader stories of empires and colonies, extraction and political economy, the business…