Daan Jansen

Thesis

‘Rats in the city: Black Rats, Brown Rats, Humans and Others in Early Modern London and Amsterdam’

Supervisors:
Mark Jenner and David Orton

Research

My research is centred on rats in urban contexts in Northwest Europe. I seek to find out how rats fit into the urban ecology of the long Eighteenth Century and how they interacted specifically with human beings and with other rats. The Eighteenth Century likely saw the introduction of the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) into Europe, gradually outcompeting the indigenous black rat (Rattus rattus) and becoming the dominant species of rat in the region. How and why this happened, and the effects of, and impacts on, human actions at this time, remain unknown. I approach a broad array of sources from ecological, social and cultural perspectives to find out what role these reviled and maligned little creatures had in our cities and in our minds. These questions engage with histories of plague, urban spaces, animal mobilities, invasive species, ecological change, maritime trade, capitalist ecologies and more.

My PhD is part of the ERC-selected and UKRI-funded RATTUS project. This interdisciplinary project draws from archaeology, history and the sciences, examining the physical and cultural remains of rats to discover the spread and dispersal of both species of rats in west Eurasia and North Africa throughout history using a variety of research methods, including zooarchaeology, ZooMS, DNA and isotope analysis.

Papers and Publications

Publications:
Daan Jansen & Ulbe Bosma, ‘Island Southeast Asia 1650, 1800, 1900’, Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations 1500-2000, IISH data publication

Conference and seminar papers:
Historic Beasts and Where to Find Them: Dogs, Rats, Humans and Other Animals in Early Modern Amsterdam – International Institute of Social History Seminar, Amsterdam, April 2024

Placing Man’s Best Friend Back in the City: Exploring Human-Canine Society and Experiences in Eighteenth Century Amsterdam – Urban Lives: Amsterdam Diaries and Other Stories of the Self, Amsterdam, October 2023

Exploring the Multispecies City: Human-canine Interactions in 18 th Century Amsterdam – International Conference on Ecocriticism and Environmental Studies, London, October 2022

The Ethics of Animal Labour: Debates on Canine Draught in the Netherlands in the 1920s – Worlds of Related Coercions in WorK Training School, Warsaw, May 2022