ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Rat Catchers: A Political Ecology of British Jamaica, 1771-1880

• In Event: (Mis)Understanding Animals? Biology, Epistemic Uncertainty, and Non-Human Animal Management in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

English Abstract

In October 1865, Baptist deacon and revolutionary Paul Bogle led Jamaican freedmen to the Morant Bay courthouse demanding recognition of their political and economic rights. The decades after the emancipation of slavery (1833/4) and the abolition of apprenticeship (1838) had not brought economic freedom but only crushing poverty, made worse by widespread disease and persistent crop failures. Even as revolutionary movements convulsed the Jamaican status quo throughout the nineteenth century, colonial officials noted the remarkable endurance of the rat problem. The Indigenous rice rat (now extinct) had been joined by the destructive European brown and black rats upon the arrival of British ships in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their adaptive capacity allowed them to proliferate, giving rise to the impression that Jamaica was teeming with vermin. By the end of the nineteenth century, British ecologists had introduced the Indian mongoose in a bid to check the rats, spawning a tick crisis instead.

While historians have examined the history of mongoose and the animal acclimatization movement, very few have considered the introduction and omnipresence of the European black and brown rat in British Jamaica. This paper examines scientific debates about the introduction of European rats alongside the problems these species posed for the new Jamaican peasantry, focusing on the period from emancipation to the introduction of the mongoose in the 1870s. In doing so, it connects scientific knowledge about invasive species to the practical manifestation of rat control and economic rationalization across the island. This framework reveals how colonial ecological knowledge, forged by plantation economics and racialized assumptions about the free peasantry, reorganized local ecosystems and created crises on the ground in empire. The argument draws on published material from the Jamaica Gleaner, Colonial Office records (CO 137), and London’s Royal and Zoological societies.

Author

• Alice Louise Gorton, Columbia University