MARC DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES: William Cavert, The University of St. Thomas

Beginning in the late 16th and continuing into the 19th century, England witnessed a sustained war on vermin. Birds, moles, polecats, foxes, and even badgers, otters, and hedgehogs were killed, sometimes in small numbers and sometimes in truly prodigious quantities. By asking who participated in this campaign and how it changed over time, this paper considers vermin hunting as a part of the early modern process of improvement, but one that complicates the usual story of early modern agricultural development. The human-animal boundary emerges less as a topic for philosophical speculation than as a basis for mundane interspecies violence, carried out by common people in partnership with the state.