ABSTRACT
While the history of veganism as a term has a relatively short history dating back to the 1940s in Britain, the choice to abstain from consuming nonhuman animals reaches back many centuries and into many different areas of the world. This chapter orients the reader within the several extant histories of vegan and vegetarian history (veg-history), providing an overview of established points of fact, primary figures, debates, and areas of geographic focus in the historical record and addressing leading researchers of such historical research. The chapter concludes with a section noting some of the various avenues for future scholarship in historically inflected work—studies of vegans and vegetarians of color, the internationalization and translation of the field, and pointed case studies—thereby summarizing the ways that veg-history has the power to engage in cultural studies from an activist perspective.
