ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Delicious Victuals: Rats & Race in Hans Sloane’s Theory of Digestion

• In Event: The Science and Medicine of Habits I: Habits, the Body and Space

English Abstract

In the 1707 volume of Voyage, Hans Sloane lists provisions unique to Jamaica, including a remark that rats are “sold by the dozen, and when they have been bred amongst the Sugar-canes, are thought by some discerning people very delicious Victuals.” Rat-eating was a cultural taboo in early-modern Britain, and in the ensuing twenty-page extrapolation, Sloane rationalized the practice to assuage concerns about local food. Ironically, his remarks acknowledging white colonizers dined on cane-rat would be furiously rebutted by future enslavers who sought racialized food distinctions and painted rat-eating as exclusively a slave cuisine – a belief still held by many historians today. In this presentation, I explore how late-seventeenth-century Jamaican rat-eating was not yet codified by the island’s racial hierarchies. Linking Sloane with other early Jamaican sources, I follow how the cane-rat was a vexed symbol of Jamaica’s early subsistence crises and later boom. Joining critical eating studies and the history of colonial medicine, I argue that Sloane proposed an imperial theory of “discernment” to vouch for the dish’s health by linking Jamaica’s food with ancient Rome’s cuisine. The rat, in Sloane’s view, was an odd but beneficial by-product of sugar production, and its digestion attested to how both European and African bodies successfully adapted to the colonial environment. While his universalist defense of rat-eating was ultimately rejected by his successors, Sloane provides a glimpse into how the realities of early colonial cuisine forced the British to negotiate racial ideologies and narratives of imperial progress.

Author

• Jacob Myers, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science