An interdisciplinary look at the rise of the slaughterhouse in nineteenth-century Europe and the Americas
Over the course of the nineteenth century, factory slaughterhouses replaced the hand-slaughter of livestock by individual butchers, who often performed this task in back rooms, letting blood run through streets. A wholly modern invention, the centralized municipal slaughterhouse was a political response to the public’s increasing lack of tolerance for “dirty” butchering practices, corresponding to changing norms of social hygiene and fear of meat-borne disease. The slaughterhouse, in Europe and the Americas, rationalized animal slaughter according to capitalist imperatives. What is lost and what is gained when meat becomes a commodity? What do the sites of animal slaughter reveal about our relationship to animals and nature? Essays by the best international scholars come together in this cutting-edge interdisciplinary volume to examine the cultural significance of the slaughterhouse and its impact on modernity.
Contributors include: Dorothee Brantz, Kyri Claflin, Jared Day, Roger Horowitz, Lindgren Johnson, Ian MacLachlan, Christopher Otter, Dominic Pacyga, Richard Perren, Jeffrey Pilcher, and Sydney Watts.
“This collection presents a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary exploration of the emergence of industrialized animal slaughter, a disturbing and evocative subject that also reveals a great deal about less-hidden aspects of modern societies.”—Harriet Ritvo, Arthur J. Conner Professor of History, MIT
“Where’s the beef? This fascinating collection of essays gives some surprising and troubling answers. In its struggles to regulate animal slaughter, to make meat safer and its slaughter more sanitary, the 19th-century city sought desperately to create a modern metropolis. These scrupulously documented studies remind us that blood, guts, and entrails also figure in the civilizing process."—Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Columbia University
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PAULA YOUNG LEE teaches Art and Architectural History at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, and is the author of a number of scholarly articles.
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