RHN 95/2022 | Event
Organisers: Animal History Group
Online event; seminars are held monthly at 7pm UK Time.
Animal History Group Seminar Series
Term One
Past seminar
12th October 2022
Sick as a Dog: Dogs, Dog Lovers and Canine Healthcare in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Stephanie Howard-Smith, King’s College London
Upcoming seminar
9th November 2022
ECR/PhD Showcase
Carcasses at the River: Diseased Animals and Water Infrastructure in Colonial South Africa, 1850-1901
Kristin Brig-Ortiz, Johns Hopkins University
In 1897, Durban’s sanitary inspector traced a local typhoid outbreak to a household tank infected by diseased pigeon faeces. He asked the city to allow residents to shoot pigeons on sight. No matter that someone owned them—the birds constituted a threat when they flew between roofs, defecating on slates over which rain water ran into underground tanks. Drawing on local correspondence, sanitary and engineering reports, and newspaper articles, I explore how nineteenth-century South African port city residents viewed diseased and dying animals as they interacted with the cities’ already-limited water supplies. As urban non-human animals and insects moved around the city, municipal residents and administrators often blamed them for contaminating wells, drains, reservoirs, and other water infrastructure. While scholars have examined how animals regularly passed disease to humans and between each other, few have looked closely at how utility systems facilitated this transfer. Non-human animals are deeply intertwined with urban environments, to the degree that they use and affect the same utility infrastructures humans do. This presentation thus questions what “contact” between animals and humans means, complicating how we consider this often binary issue. Durban and Port Elizabeth particularly suffered from this problem, given how their water supply and management infrastructures remained uneven and unreliable into the twentieth century for lack of funding and regulation. By unpacking how dead and dying animals impacted the use and management of clean and waste water, the paper seeks to understand one of a multitude of challenges to the sanitary measures British settlers forced on the colonized landscape, especially as it appeared in nineteenth-century coastal South Africa.
Shared Journeys, Entangled Health: Across the Adriatic with the Fifteenth-century Mantuan-Ottoman Horse Trade
Marissa Smit, Harvard University
In 1540, Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, owned over 300 brood mares whose breeds – barbare, turche, zanette – pointed to origins across the Mediterranean, from North Africa and the Ottoman Empire to Iberia. Despite an extensive bibliography on horse breeding in Renaissance Mantua, however, an emphasis on cultural history has left many practical aspects of these activities under-explored.
Accordingly, in this paper, I focus on Mantuan agents’ efforts to buy horses from the Ottoman Empire during the formative reign of Federico’s father, Marquis Francesco II. During the 1490s, they made nearly annual trips across the Adriatic, offering military equipment and intelligence about Italian affairs in exchange for access to Constantinople’s markets and an exemption from the export ban on fine stock. Once obtained however, conducting these animals back to Italy in good health required expert facilitators, official goodwill, and luck. Despite political and logistical barriers, Ottoman Europe and Northern Italy were knit together by networks of bodies in motion, which facilitated not only commerce, war, and diplomacy, but also the transmission of disease. Humans contended with malaria, pox, and plague on the road, while horses too suffered not only from fatigue, but also epizootics.
Through correspondence from the Archivio di Stato in Mantua, I explore how humans and horses navigated these journeys, as well as the intersections between health (human and equine), climate and the environment, gesturing toward the place of these exchanges in the larger trans-Adriatic trade in horses during the Ottoman expansion into Southeast Europe.
An Animal History of Socialist Mongolia
Kenneth Linden, Indiana University
In 1924, the Mongolian People’s Republic officially became the second socialist country in the world. But it was not until 1956 that leaders undertook a successful campaign to collectivize the herding economy, one of the key steps in building a socialist state. By 1960, nearly all of the herders in the country herded collectively owned livestock as part of the centrally planned economy.
In this talk I will explore how I used animal and environmental historical methods to analyze archival materials of materials produced by the socialist government, from the debates in the central committee to the notes of meetings of brigades in the collective, as well as oral histories, literature, socialist era handbooks, and art. I found that leaders aimed to transform how Mongolians interacted with animals and the environment through collectivization. I show that Mongolian leaders aimed to revolutionize herding through four main methods: the professionalization of collective herding, introduction of modern global veterinary science, policies and infrastructure to address climatic disasters, and an extermination campaign against wolves. These campaigns consisted of a mix of new modern methods and technology along with traditional strategies. This transformation was seen by leaders as a foundational step to build a modern socialist state.
Although Mongolians are often represented as ahistorical wandering nomads, the socialist period shows that herding in Mongolia changed over time, and socialist Mongolians were heavily integrated in the worldwide trends in human-animal interactions. Examining the history of Mongolia through the lens of animals allows a greater understanding of both Mongolia and how humans interact with non-human animals in the rest of the world.
Sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ahg-seminar-ecrphd-showcase-tickets-422491442277
14th December 2022
Winter Social
Details are to be confirmed but likely to be a crossover of Hangouts, Book Club and Quiz Night.
Sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ahg-winter-social-tickets-422492696027
For more information and the programme of term two please visit: https://animalhistorygroup.org/seminar-series/
Source: https://animalhistorygroup.org/seminar-series/