City of Beasts - (Manchester University Press) by Thomas Almeroth-Williams (Paperback)

About the Book

This book offers a panoramic view of Georgian London, redefining the city's role in the industrial, agricultural and consumer revolutions. It does this by examining, for the first time, the huge contribution that horses, cattle, sheep, pigs and dogs made to the world's first modern metropolis, as well as the serious challenges the animals posed.

Book Synopsis

This book explores the role of animals - horses, cattle, sheep, pigs and dogs - in shaping Georgian London. Moving away from the philosophical, fictional and humanitarian sources used by previous animal studies, it focuses on evidence of tangible, dung-bespattered interactions between real people and animals, drawn from legal, parish, commercial, newspaper and private records.This approach opens up new perspectives on unfamiliar or misunderstood metropolitan spaces, activities, social types, relationships and cultural developments. Ultimately, the book challenges traditional assumptions about the industrial, agricultural and consumer revolutions, as well as key aspects of the city's culture, social relations and physical development. It will be stimulating reading for students and professional scholars of urban, social, economic, agricultural, industrial, architectural and environmental history.

From the Back Cover

By the early 1800s, an estimated 31,000 horses were at work in and around London, while around the same number of sheep and cattle were driven through the city's streets every week. No other settlement in Europe or North America had ever accommodated so many large four-legged animals, or felt their influence so profoundly. City of beasts reveals the extraordinary contribution that horses, cattle, sheep, pigs and dogs made to the world's first modern metropolis, as well as the challenges that they posed.

Following in their hoof- and paw-prints, this book reappraises London's role in the industrial, agricultural and consumer revolutions, as well as key aspects of the city's culture, social relations and physical development. In doing so, it calls for animals to be accorded agency and integrated into social and urban history. City of beasts offers new insights into the lived experiences of Georgian Londoners, as well as the workings and character of a city about which we still have much to discover.

Review Quotes

'Beautifully written, attentive and thoughtful, City of beasts is alive not only with the sights, sounds, and smells of the eighteenth-century metropolis, but also with its animal voices.'
Lucy Inglis, author of Milk of Paradise

'This widely researched, delightful work bears the hoof-stamp of excellence: facts, interest and thought-provoking discoveries.'
Country Life

'His close attention to the details of human and animal behaviours, his focus on the "dung-bespattered" reality of human-animal interactions, forces the reader to acknowledge animals ... as agents of historical change in their own right.'
TLS

'City of Beasts is an unusual, provocative urban history, which makes exciting methodological contributions and challenging arguments relevant to a range of subjects and disciplines.'
Urban History Journal

'It is very well written and includes a wealth of stories that bring "dung-spattered" Georgian London to life. City of Beasts offers a new and compelling way to look at both urban and animal history in ways that intersect closely with environmental history.'
Environmental History journal

'City of Beasts is written in an engaging style that should allow it to appeal both to specialists and to more general readers. [...] It is an enjoyable and accessible book, a useful and welcome contribution to the study of urban and social history, and required reading for scholars of early modern and modern animal studies.'
Journal of British Studies

'[...] offers a well-researched social history of tangible human-animal interactions, focusing on the close way in which lower-class men lived and worked with animals in Georgian London.'
Reviews in History

About the Author

Thomas Almeroth-Williams is Research Associate in the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York