Ecologies of beef: Eighteenth-century epizootics and the environmental history of early modern Europe

Environmental History

Volumn 15, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 268-287

  Appuhn, Karl ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AGRARIAN CHANGE; ANIMAL PRODUCT; ARABLE LAND; CATTLE; DISEASE INCIDENCE; DISEASE PREVALENCE; DISEASE SEVERITY; ECONOMIC HISTORY; EIGHTEENTH CENTURY; ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE; ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY; NUTRITION; PASTORALISM; PROTEIN; SYMPTOM;

EUROPE;

ANIMALIA; BOS; BOVINAE;

EID: 77957777350     PISSN: 10845453     EISSN: 19308892     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/envhis/emq049     Document Type: Article

References (77)

1. Archivio di Stato, Venezia (herafter ASV), Provveditori e Patroni all'Arsenale, Busta. 33, carta. 78r.
2. For more on the history of Palma, see Luciano di Sopra, Palmanova (Udine: Aviani, 1993). Palma, or Palmanova, was one of a series of planned garrison towns that the Venetians intended to build on their eastern frontier. The expense of building Palma convinced the Senate to scrap plans for future fortress towns on the Palma model.
3. ASV, Provveditori e Patroni all'Arsenale, Busta. 33, carta. 78r.
4. The records of Venice's public health magistracy, the provveditori alla sanità, contain scores of published bans from other Italian states. For a representative example, see ASV, Provveditori alla Sanità, B. 701, c. n.n. (October 9, 1711)
5. ASV, Provveditori alla Sanità, B. 701, c. n.n. (October 7, 1711)
6. ASV, Provveditori alla Sanità, B. 701, c. n.n. (October 19, 1711) for bans on Venetian cattle published in Reggio Emilia, Piacenza, and Milan respectively.
7. No comprehensive treatment of epizootics in eighteenth-century Venice exists, but they are referred to in passing in Madeleine Ferrières, Sacred Cow, Mad Cow (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
8. See, for example, Virgilio Giormani and Alba Veggetti, "L'Epizoozia del 1783-84 nel Veneto Dominio," Proceedings of the 35th International Congress of the World Association for the History of Veterinary Affairs, Grugliasco (Turin), Italy, 2004, 331-40.
9. I refer, of course, to the famous Brenner debate. For an overview of the debate with contributions from all sides, see The Brenner Debate, ed. T. H. Aston, and C. H. E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). My point here is that both the Marxist scholars like Brenner-who situate the agrarian revolution within the framework of changing class relations-and their Malthusian opponents-who stress population pressures and technological changes-see the agrarian revolution as an affair entirely internal to western Europe, and pay little attention either to changes in environmental organization within the West, or to western Europe's continued dependence on food imports.
10. There are exceptions, of course. Italian scholars in particular have traditionally been more interested in agriculture and agrarian landscape than anglophone historians. See, for example, Emilio Sereni, Storia del paesaggio agrario Italiano (Rome: Laterza, 1982)
11. Mauro Ambrosoli, Scienziati, contadini, e proprietari (Turin: Einaudi, 1992)
12. Domenico Sella, Crisis and Continuity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979)
13. Antonio Lazzarini, Fra tradizione e innovazione (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1998)
14. Antonio Lazzarini, Fra terra e acqua (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1990).
15. For a northern European example, see Alix Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
16. For an environmental history of the Venetian Republic, see Karl Appuhn, A Forest on the Sea (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2009).
17. On the general history of early modern nutrition see Massimo Livi-Bacci, Population and Nutrition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
18. Alain Clemont, Nourir le peuple (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1999)
19. Ken Albala, Food in Early Modern Europe (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003).
20. On chocolate, coffee, tea, and sugar see, for example, Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008)
21. Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005)
22. and of course Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power (New York: Penguin, 1986).
23. See, for example, Venetian concerns about closures of the routes during the Thirty Years War in Relazioni di ambasciatori veneti al Senato, ed. L. Firpo, vol. 3 (Germania 1557-1654), (Turin, 1968).
24. See Orest Subtelny, Domination of Eastern Europe (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1986), 7-8. Subtelny dates the emergence of the Hungarian beef cattle market to 1548. Unfortunately, he only provides figures for the sixteenth-century trade.
25. The Venetian Libbra, or pound, was similar to a British Imperial pound of the era. See Angelo Martini, Manuale di metrologia (1883; reprint, Rome: E.R.A., 1976).
26. The system is similar to the pasture management system used for sheep in the Kingdom of Naples and in Spain. See John Marino, Pastoral Economics in the Kingdom of Naples (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 26, 49, 152.
27. The partitante was usually accused of skirting the inspections during epizootic outbreaks. The most common complaint was the partitante would hear of distant outbreaks before public officials, and react by heavily discounting the cattle rather than informing the authorities.
28. For more on the slaughterhouse at San Giobbe, see Il macello di San Giobbe, ed. Giovanni Caniato and Renato dalla Venezia (Venice: Marsilio, 2006).
29. The limit of eighty-two animals per boatload was of particular interest to the investors who bought shares of the trade from the monopoly holder. Their contracts always stipulated that any attempt to load additional animals onto a boat would transfer all the risk to the monopoly holder and void any insurance on the voyage.
30. ASV, Savio Cassier, B. 714, c. n.n. (May 10, 1792).
31. Sydney Watts, Meat Matters: Butchers, Politics, and Market Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2006), 1. Watts cites two later sources for her figure rather than tax rolls or other sources from the period in question.
32. ASV, Senato Terra, Filza 2913, c. n.n. (30 March, 1780), con allegati.
33. ASV, Senato Terra, Filza 2913, c. n.n. (30 March, 1780).
34. ASV, Provveditori alle Beccarie, B. 61, c. 156r.
35. On the grain trade see, for example, Stephan R. Epstein, An Island for Itself (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
36. Ida Fazio, La politica del grano (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1993)
37. Edwin S. Hunt, The Medieval Super-Companies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
38. See Marino, The Pastoral Economy
39. Julius Klein, The Mesta (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920)
40. Marie-Claude Gerber, L'élevage sous les rois catholiques dans le royaume de Castille (1454-1516) (Madrid: Casa de Velásquez, 1991).
41. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1972), 80-110. Braudel mentions cattle a total of eight times, never in the context of longdistance trade.
42. The state was obviously interested in using the remnants of the carcass to generate tax income, but it also took a share of the tallow to make candles for use by the city's poor during important feast days on the religious and civic calendars.
43. Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 188-89.
44. Albala notes elsewhere that commentators expressed concerns about the digestibility of beef, but that as long as the meat did not come from an old animal, it was considered suitable to all. Piero Camporesi notes that it is very difficult to reconstruct with any accuracy exactly how much meat workers and other lower class people consumed in premodern Italy. See Camporanesi, The Magic Harvest (London: Polity, 1993), 103.
45. For an account of eighteenth-century French attitudes toward beef, see Watts, Meat Matters, 27-42.
46. Albala, Eating Right, 168, n. 4.
47. Albala, Eating Right, 70.
48. See also Claudine Fabre-Vassas, The Singular Beast (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), which examines in great detail the cultural significance of pork in the Pyrenées region, including the way pork flesh stands in for human flesh at particular ritual moments.
49. Although it is hard to picture it today, most of Venice was unpaved prior to the nineteenth century. The only paved space was Saint Mark's Square, which is why it is the only open space in the city that is called a "piazza." The campi were chaotic commons, full of pigs, chickens, and vegetable gardens, all tended by residents of the parish-which is still the fundamental unit of social and spatial organization in Venice today.
50. For more on Venetian markets and market regulations, see James Shaw, The Justice of Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
51. Similarly, Watts argues that beef was a status food in eighteenth-century Paris. See Watts, Meat Matters, 7-25.
52. The audits conducted by the Savio Cassier divided the monopoly holder's animals into beef cattle-mostly steers and bulls-and cows-mostly spent dairy animals. Interestingly, Hungarian cattle were sold only in Venice, while the outlying islands of Murano and Burano consumed mainly Dalmatian and local cattle. The per capita figure is drawn from ASV, Savio Cassier, B. 410, Fascicolo 12, which records that between Holy Week of 1489 and Holy Week of 1490, the residents of the city of Venice consumed nearly 2,500,000 kilograms of beef.
53. See Daniela Perco, La pastorizia transumante del Feltrino (Feltre: Centro per la Documentazione della Cultura Popolare, 1982).
54. See, for example, ASV, Provveditori e Patroni all'Arsenale, B. 14, c. 113v-114v.
55. See Robert Brenner, "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe," in The Brenner Debate, ed. Aston and Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
56. Giornale D'Italia XLIV, (4 May 1765): 351-52.
57. For more on the agrarian academies, see Marcello Simonetto, I lumi nelle campagne (Treviso: Edizioni Canova, 2001).
58. For more on mezzadria in the Veneto, see James Grubb, Provincial Families of the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 137, passim.
59. Subtelny makes a similar argument about the deep roots of central European underdevelopment. For that and the sixteenth-century figures, see Subtelny, Domination of Eastern Europe, 7-9
60. For more on the types of cattle involved, see László Bartosiewicz, "Are 'Autochtonous' Animal Breeds Living Monuments?" in Archaeological and Cultural Heritage Preservation within the Light of New Technologies, ed. E. Jerem, Zs. Mester, and R. Benczes, 33-47 (Budapest: Archaeolingua).
61. Watts mentions that France imported 100,000 head of beef cattle from Augsburg and the Palatinate in 1713, the same year a major epizootic devastated local herds. She argues that the purchase of foreign cattle was a response to the disease, but given the movement of zoonotic diseases in the period, it is far more likely that the purchase of foreign livestock introduced the disease in the first place. See Watts, Meat Matters, 14.
62. ASV, Provveditori alla Sanità, B. 701, c. 107.
63. Provveditori alla Sanità, 701, 107, Ibid.
64. See, for example, the recipes contained in ASV, Provveditori alla Sanità, B. 701, c. 98.
65. ASV, Provveditori alla Sanità, B. 701, c. 106.
66. See, for example, ASV, Provveditori alla Sanità, B. 701, c. 195-6.
67. See, for example, Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
68. Karl W. Butzer, "Cattle and Sheep from Old to New Spain," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 78 (1988): 29-56
69. Elinor Melville, A Plague of Sheep (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
70. Virginia Anderson, Creatures of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
71. See, for example, Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987)
72. Margaret E. Derry, Bred for Perfection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
73. On horses, see, for example, Donna Landry, Noble Brutes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)
74. Jacques Muliez, Les checaux du royaume (Paris: Montalba, 1983)
75. Susan D. Jones, Valuing Animals (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), ch. 1.
76. Thinking of the problem in terms of energy flows would build on the model Paul Warde developed for thinking about the firewood trade in early modern Germany. See Paul Warde, Ecology, Economy, and State Formation in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 14-26.
77. Matthew Klingle has recently argued that environmental historians can make a meaningful contribution by showing how even the seemingly most familiar places have a hidden environmental history. See Matthew Klingle, Emerald City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).