“Such Confusion As I Never Dreamt”

This chapter explores how the the combination of animal domestication and widespread urbanization across Europe, Asia, and Africa had led to the development of epidemic diseases against which Indigenous peoples in the Americas and elsewhere had little or no natural resistance. It was this urban reality that had likely cost the lives of the Algonquian people who disappeared into the city and that had prevented four of the five Inuit from making it home. Meanwhile, in London, for all the improvements of the Enlightenment—new understandings of disease, inoculation, and advances in urban design—disease remained one of the most intractable and threatening of urban realities. What scholars have called ecological imperialism, the means by which biology facilitated Europe's imperial and colonial incursions, had its roots in the city.

Archaeology · Biology · Colonialism · Confusion · Development economics · Domestication · Enlightenment · Environmental ethics · Ethnology · Geography · Indigenous · Natural (archaeology) · Political science · Resistance (ecology) · Sociology · Urbanization · Ecology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Psychology