27 June - 23 July 2022
Biography
Dr Cavert is a historian of Britain during the early modern period, c. 1500-1800, with research interests in urban and environmental history. He is based at the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota, USA), before which he was a Junior Research Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge (2011-14) and received a Ph.D. from Northwestern University.
His book The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016, paperback 2017 and Chinese translation in 2019. It was awarded prizes for environmental history and British history, including The Turku Book Award from the European Society for Environmental History and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society; The Whitfield Prize from the Royal Historical Society; and the John Ben Snow Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies. Related research has been published in The Journal of British Studies, Urban History, The Global Environment, and History Compass. His study on the politics of cold winters during the Little Ice Age appeared in Governing the Environment in the Early Modern World, edited by Bristol’s John Morgan.
His current project examines the people who killed millions of animals considered “vermin” in England from the 16th into the 19th centuries, asking how such killing fit into evolving human-animal relations, programs of agricultural improvement, and the politics of local society. It tracks national trends across the early modern period, attempting to quantify how many thousands of foxes, polecats, moles, hedgehogs, bullfinches, sparrows (and more) were killed during the period. Additionally, it investigates a few communities in detail, focusing in particular on parishes in Somerset and Gloucestershire, to reconstruct who joined in the the killing and why.
After his time at Bristol, in the 2022-23 academic year he will be a fellow of Princeton’s Davis Center for Historical Studies, a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Sheffield, and a fellow of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Summary of research project
The visit will enable new fundamental research to be undertaken in UK archives, particularly those in Bristol and neighbouring counties in the southwest of England. The proposed programme of research is a detailed investigation of vermin bounties in early modern England (c. 1500-1800), the process by which common people across rural England and Wales received payments from their parish for the dead bodies – or even the severed heads – of one of the animal species considered ‘vermin’ under a 16th-century statute. The work will be carried out in the Bristol Archives, the Gloucestershire Archives, and the Somerset Archives and Local Studies, which each hold extensive churchwardens accounts recording these payments. Additional records such as parish registers, tax assessments, criminal records, and records of the parish poor, will allow for the reconstruction of the people and communities participating in this process.
The project aims to connect, and thereby to transform, three subfields whose early modern trajectories should be in conversation but have remained isolated: human/animal relations, the social history of governance and state formation, and agrarian improvement. First, the scope and scale of this animal killing (with some parishes killing scores of polecats or hedgehogs, or many hundreds of birds every year) can revise scholarly conversations regarding animals, which currently focus on humanitarian concern and care. Second, careful reconstruction of the age, sex, wealth, and status of those carrying out the killings can extend existing scholarship on the participatory nature of the early modern state and the social depth of political engagement. Lastly, the place of animal killing in 17th-18th century treatises on agricultural “improvement” shows that these bounties were part of a concerted campaign to develop England’s agricultural capacity, but in ways that make it appear more governmental and less elitist than often thought.
Dr Cavert is hosted by Dr Adrian Howkins, Department of History
Planned activity includes:
Dates and times tbc
Open Seminar
Urban Pollution: Lessons from History
Departmental seminar
Vermin Eradication and Early Modern Agrarian Improvement
Postgraduate seminar
Environmental History, Publishing, and Job Markets
Conference presentation, part of the European Society for Environmental History Conference in Bristol, 4-8 July 2022,
"The Great Fire of London (1666) in the Age of Fossil Fuels"
panel on 'Cities on Fire: Environmental History of Urban Conflagrations'.
