ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how Darwin, among his contemporaries, came to focus on human processes of domestication as a way of studying what he saw as nonhuman processes “in Nature,” and why he chose urban pigeon breeders and their pigeons as his conceptual, methodological, and social bridge across these divisions. It focuses on how the pigeon breeders saw their circumstances, especially the house–workshops in which artisan–breeders and their birds made their common home, and the evident connections between their dwelling, weaving and breeding. Domestic pigeons had been a mainstay of rural agriculture, a legal monopoly of British nobility and gentry, beginning in the mid 1600s, manifest in large, free-standing dovecotes containing 500 to 1,000 nesting holes, built or rebuilt in the years from 1640 to 1750, some standing. From a remote period, in all parts of the world, man has subjected many animals and plants to domestication or culture.
