ABSTRACT

Arguing that historical analysis is an important, yet heretofore largely underexplored dimension of scholarship in animal geographies, this book seeks to define historical animal geography as the exploration of how spatially situated human–animal relations have changed through time. This volume centers on the changing relationships among people, animals, and the landscapes they inhabit, taking a spatio-temporal approach to animal studies. Foregrounding the assertion that geography matters as much as history in terms of how humans relate to animals, this collection offers unique insight into the lives of animals past, how interrelationships were co-constructed amongst and between animals and humans, and how nonhuman actors came to make their own worlds. This collection of chapters explores the rich value of work at the contact points between three sub-disciplines, demonstrating how geographical analyses enrich work in historical animal studies, that historical work is important to animal geography, and that recognition of animals as actors can further enrich historical geographic research.

chapter 1|7 pages

Introduction

A meeting place

part I|41 pages

The home – shared spaces of cohabitation

part II|68 pages

The city – historical animals in and out of sight

chapter 5|20 pages

Zoöpolis

chapter 6|13 pages

Kansas City

The morphology of an American zoöpolis through film

chapter 8|12 pages

The pigs are back again

Urban pig keeping in wartime Britain, 1939–45

part III|49 pages

The nation – historical animal bodies and human identities

chapter 9|11 pages

Rebel elephants

Resistance through human–elephant partnerships

chapter 10|17 pages

Western horizons, animal becomings

Race, species, and the troubled boundaries of the human in the era of American expansionism

chapter 11|19 pages

For the love of life

Coal mining and pit bull fighting in early 19th-century Britain

part IV|30 pages

The global – imperial networks and the movements of animals

chapter 13|14 pages

Runaways and strays

Rethinking (non)human agency in Caribbean slave societies

part |7 pages

Epilogue