Domestic Animals and Economic Transformation in Ottoman Egypt
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Domestic Animals and Economic Transformation in Ottoman Egypt Alan Mikhail Department of History Yale University Resources: Endowment or Curse, Better or Worse? Yale University February 24-45, 2012 ***Working Draft. Please do not cite, distribute, or copy.*** We humans are not alone. For the vast majority of human history until at least the turn of the nineteenth century, the chief concern of human communities was their multiple relationships with animals—how to use them, eat them, avoid them, and wear them. Animals are indeed so ubiquitous in human history that they have remained largely invisible to historians.1 In conjunction with scholarly work in fields such as anthropology, literary studies, and geography, many historians are now turning their attention to this most significant of historical relationships between humans and animals. The results of this research have taken many forms. For example, one of the primary areas of interest in the current literature on the history of human-animal interactions is the cultural, symbolic, and political roles and uses of animals in various human societies. Thus, cultural historians interested in subjects like the history of petkeeping have made important contributions to the historiography of human affect and the study of class and 2 domesticity. For their part, political, intellectual, and environmental historians have considered 1 I am well aware of the inadequacy of the terms human and animal. While human refers to just one species, animal is far too vague since it obliterates the complex distinctions between millions of species. Moreover, imprecise use of these words risks reifying the human-animal divide as infinitely separate and impossible of transgression. That said, I nevertheless follow the scholarly convention of using both words in their general meaning. I also avoid repeated use of the qualifier nonhuman before animal. 2 See for example: Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Erica Fudge, Pets (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008); Katherine C. Grier, Pets in America: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Yi-Fu Tuan, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 1 the history of animals in the service of fleshing out genealogies of concepts like brutality, animality, wildness, the exotic, tameness, humanity, and human and animal rights.3 Some environmental historians have focused on the implications of animal husbandry, migration, and species depletion for landscapes and human communities alike.4 And institutions like the zoo, its antecedent the zoological park, and schools of veterinary medicine have also received some attention from historians.5 Taking its cues from much of this literature but also departing from it in significant ways, this article attempts to understand the historically significant causes and consequences of a 3 For some of this work, see: Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); idem., The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); idem., Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Nancy J. Jacobs, “The Great Bophuthatswana Donkey Massacre: Discourse on the Ass and the Politics of Class and Grass,” American Historical Review 106 (2001): 485-507; Londa Schiebinger, “Why Mammals are Called Mammals: Gender Politics in Eighteenth-Century Natural History,” American Historical Review 98 (1993): 382-411; Keith Tester, Animals and Society: The Humanity of Animal Rights (London: Routledge, 1991); H. Peter Steeves, ed., Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 1994); Richard W. Bulliet, Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relationships (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Anita Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Louise E. Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). See also the relevant chapters in the following very important volumes: Gregory M. Pflugfelder and Brett L. Walker, eds., JAPANimals: History and Culture in Japan’s Animal Life (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan, 2005); Nigel Rothfels, ed., Representing Animals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Erica Fudge, ed., Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Angela N.H. Creager and William Chester Jordan, eds., The Animal/Human Boundary: Historical Perspectives (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002); Mary J. Henninger-Voss, ed., Animals in Human Histories: The Mirror of Nature and Culture (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002). 4 Brett L. Walker, The Lost Wolves of Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005); Elinor G.K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 171-94; Joseph E. Taylor III, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999). 5 On zoos and zoological parks, see: Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); R.J. Hoage and William A. Deiss, eds., New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936,” Social Text 11 (1984): 19-64; Ian Jared Miller, “The Nature of the Beast: The Ueno Zoological Gardens and Imperial Modernity in Japan, 1882-1945,” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2004); Randy Malamud, Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (New York: New York University Press, 1998). On veterinary medicine, see: Karen Brown and Daniel Gilfoyle, eds., Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock Economies, and the Globalization of Veterinary Medicine (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010); Susan D. Jones, Valuing Animals: Veterinarians and Their Patients in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 2 transition from a world characterized primarily by intense human-animal interactions to one in which this relationship was no longer fundamental to economic and social life. Between roughly 1750 and 1850, all early modern agrarian societies experienced some form of intense transformation involving the commercialization and modernization of their economies. In the vast historical literature on these transitions from subsistence agricultural economies to market- driven commercial agriculture, land, human labor, and capital accumulation are the usual protagonists and subjects of these histories. Few would disagree with John F. Richards’ early twenty-first-century summary of this transition: “human management of land everywhere has become more centralized, more intrusive, and more instrumentally effective. Large-scale capitalist forms of agriculture and resource extraction are prominent throughout the world.”6 Two of the most recent and productive attempts to tackle the problem of this particular economic transformation are the group of publications that emerged from what came to be known as the Brenner debate and newer scholarship on the question of divergence between China and Europe.7 Much of the work that has come out of these two historiographical literatures revolves around questions of natural resources and human labor. Brenner understood the early modern agrarian revolution in Western Europe to be a result of shifts in labor and class relations, while his critics stressed the role of population increases and improved agricultural technology and cultivation techniques. Similarly, in Kenneth Pomeranz’s study of divergence, natural resources 6 John F. Richards, “Toward a Global System of Property Rights in Land,” in The Environment and World History, eds. Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 71. On these points, see also: idem., The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 617-22. 7 The Brenner debate is usefully summarized, with contributions by many of the scholars involved in these discussions, in the following volume: T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). The literature on divergence of course began with the following: Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton