Sir Keith ThomasMan and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800

This book is a nice overview of English understanding and perception of the nature since the early modern period. Thomas's work succinctly shows centuries of changes in the view on flora and fauna. His argument, that human has progressed from total indifference to an instrumental mindset and later more equal assessment of every creature in the ecosystem, is sound and inspiring. His call for a balance between the development of human society and the conservative of the natural landscape is still important. A lucid and precise piece that deserves at least a glance.

A remarkable analysis of man's relationship to plants and animals in Britain from the medieval to Victorian eras.

In Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800, historian Keith Thomas argued that English sentiments regarding the natural world progressed from exploitation in the sixteenth century to conservation in the nineteenth. Before 1500, the prevailing worldview in England had been that wilderness was something to be subdued and civilized. After 1800, the prevailing belief was that wilderness needed to be saved from misuse by humanity.The English view of nature prior to 1500 was theologically-based. According to scripture, God created each animal and plant to serve man and subordinate to his wishes and needs. Animals were considered to be automaton without souls, and previously wild animals had to be broken in order to use them as labor and food. Many classical scholars also taught that human beings were unique and separate from the animal kingdom. According to Aristotle, only mankind possessed reason.The common man used religion and morality to distinguish himself from animals. Evil spirits almost always took the form of an animal, and the devil appeared as a goat. Likewise, mankind’s bodily impulses were negatively equated with animals and considered things to be subdued. Englishmen also labeled outsiders as bestial. Anyone who wasn’t Christian was considered worse than a beast and in need of civilizing. The aristocracy also put the poor into this category. However, Thomas was careful to point out that this “uncompromisingly aggressive view of man’s place in the natural world… was by no means representative of all opinion in early modern England.”Many new developments gradually challenged the prevailing view. One of those developments was the scientific study of the natural world. Instead of learning about plants and animals for their usefulness, naturalists began to study them in and of themselves and categorized them accordingly. They began to see nature not as ugly, but as beautiful. According to Thomas, those naturalists, as their knowledge increased, sought to rename all of the plants and animals they studied into more useful categories. In this endeavor, Latin names replaced local ones, which changed the content of natural history. Many previously held notions about plants and animals were proven false, and naturalists returned to the belief that the human and natural world was distinct. The natural world existed for its own sake, independent of the needs of humans.Of course, human’s day-to-day experiences with animals conflicted with the theological view of nature. In reality, Thomas wrote, there was no strict separation between man and nature. Englishmen lived and worked with animals on a daily basis, not just because there were much more of them at the time, but also because they depended on them so much for food, labor, and companionship.The idea of materialism brought man and beast closer together, suggesting that the two may have had common origins. The observance of feral children and aborigines seemed to confirm that idea. As geology began to push back the timetable for the history of the earth, Thomas argued, the idea that mankind had time to evolve from animals became more plausible. The rise of racialism put civilized white men at the top of this new continuum of animals to man, but he still retained the idea that animals had no immortal soul. Gradually however, “the acceptance of evolution posed the dilemma more sharply, for if men had evolved from animals then either animals also had immortal souls or men did not.” Faced with that possibility, many Englishmen chose to extend souls to their animal companions.The eighteenth century saw new sensibilities in regards to the treatment of animals. Some Englishmen even questioned the wanton destruction of animals that were considered vermin. Sensation had been ascribed to animals themselves, and the more ‘human’ they acted, the more compassion was felt towards them. This new attitude was linked with the growth of towns and the replacement of animals as a means of production. “The industrial order first emerged in England; as a result, it was there that concern for animals was most widely expressed,” Thomas argued. This concern was most widely predominant among the upper classes who didn’t need to use animals on a daily basis. The poor sometimes lashed out at the animals that represented social privilege like hounds, horses, and deer. “Kindness to animals was a luxury which not everyone had learnt to afford.” It was at this time that human needs and human sensibilities became two distinct entities.Finally, Thomas argued that the growth of pollution and overcrowding in the cities changed the English perspective that cities were benevolent places of civilization. By 1800 it became a widespread belief that cities were unholy and the natural countryside was pure.Man and the Natural World was a meticulous examination of Englishmen’s changing attitudes in regard to the natural world. As a broad subject, Keith Thomas did an excellent job of providing specific examples to illustrate his thesis. This anecdote-driven writing style had its advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, the examples were often entertaining and they provided a broader look into society in England at the time. On the other hand, reading such a long bullet-list of examples was tiring and it kept his argument largely dependent on the opinions of a few. While having solid, specific examples to illustrate his point, he missed out on providing a concrete sense that these opinions extended to the wider society at large. In fact, Thomas often reminded the reader that not everyone felt the same way, to protect himself from criticism.Overall, Man and the Natural World is an excellent work and an interesting read. It shows how our contemporary debate over conservation and exploitation of the natural world is not unique to our time.

Most Americans say they support "conservation," but their definitions of the word and their rationales for doing so are all over the map. Some say we need to save every species because some day it may provide the cure for cancer. Some say we need to save everything because God created it. Some say everything has an intrinsic, inalienable right to exist. (But whence cometh that right?) And so on. For most people these are contemporary issues and conservation is a very modern concept. This book, however, documents the fact that there ARE no new arguments about conservation: everything that could be said has apparently been said, in some cases back to antiquity or the days of the Church Fathers, but certainly by the 15th and 16th centuries AD. What has changed, and changed dramatically, is their degree of acceptance in society. And why?This is a very detailed, dense, scholarly history of attitudes toward nature in the British Isles (mostly England) from the Middle Ages to the 19th Century. Initially public opinion across all social classes varied from indifference to hostility to nature. Raw nature was seen as horrible, frightening and ugly. As Simon Schama wrote in "Landscape and Memory" (1995), mountains and forests were to be loathed and feared for much of human history. Nature, said the theologians, was created for man and it was man's duty to subdue and civilize it. Beasts were either to be eaten or exterminated as vermin. There were always dissenters from these views. Thomas traces the roots of an alternate sensibility that suddenly blossomed in the Romantic period in continental Europe and the British Isles. The pendulum swung rapidly. By the second half of the 19th century Britain was the world capital of nature sentimentalism. Animals, hitherto seen as virtual automata, were now perceived as individuals with feelings, personalities and even souls; the mawkishness invested in pets was transferred to wild beasts as well. Landscapes once held repugnant became objects of veneration and pilgrimage. Having assiduously removed nearly all the indigenous wilderness, the British set about to recreate a romantic simulacrum thereof. The landed gentry employed landscape architects to create islands of pseudo-primeval forest; they built "follies," imitations of ruined castles; they even hired "hermits" to inhabit their creations. Just as the abhorrence of nature had been justified on religious grounds, now its embrace was likewise justified. Vegetarianism became faddish in mostly well-off circles as early as the 18th Century. All these trends ultimately translated to America by the early 20th century, ushering in the conservation movement, the creation of National Parks, and the "nature-faker" controversies--all tied in to natural health, physical fitness (and thus to militarism and the nascent American ambition of empire--a context not all that different from Germany's), and eugenics.I teach advanced courses in Community Ecology and Tropical Ecology in the University of California. In both, I always ask the students if they consider themselves conservationists; nearly all do. But most are at a loss to explain why they are conservationists. The rationales run the usual gamut, but often boil down to "for my generation, it's the norm." Of course, in 1600s England, the opposite would have been the case (except for a few eccentric religious movements, which by and large were persecuted). In the Tropical Ecology course I find that most students "support the rights of indigenous people," but are left at a loss when explicitly challenged to consider them as people with aspirations to a "better life," even if that means embracing modernity and abandoning their folkways. In Community Ecology many students begin by embracing the notion of a "balance of nature" and its corollaries that humans are a sort of planetary disease and that non-native so-called "invasive species" are a global evil. They have never had those beliefs challenged before and are particularly stressed upon realizing that to challenge them might mean aligning oneself with the despoilers of the planet. I am toying with starting a new course on the history and philosophy of conservation--one that like this book would demonstrate that moral concepts have historical contexts and trajectories.

This book is an outstanding analysis of the trends in thought and the interplay of philosophy, technology and agriculture etc to the shaping of attitudes towards nature- land, plants and other animals. I am now looking forward to reading Sir Keith Thomas’ other books as I’m so impressed by the depth of knowledge displayed here and how it was woven into an engaging and entertaining narrative. Even if it doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, trust me on this one, it’s an absolute classic.

Having previously read and immensely enjoyed both  The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England  and  Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England (Penguin History) , I was overjoyed to discover that there was a third book published by this superb historian of the social and cultural history of early modern England. So I eagerly began reading 'Man and the natural world' as soon as the postman had delivered it on my doorstep: would it be as good as the other two?Yes it is. It's incredible, unputdownable, brilliant, informative, learned, funny and then some. In barely 289 pages Thomas condenses what must have been a vast amount of research (there's almost a 100 pages of notes referring to all primary and secondary sources) into an easily readable and hugely informative story about how (and why) the relationship between Englishmen and the natural world changed radically between 1500 and 1800. So as I sat down to write this review I pondered: was is it then that makes these history books by Keith Thomas so special to me, and makes them in my opinion superior to many, if not most, of other history books I have read? Well, I could think of several reasons.First of all, and this is entirely a matter of personal opinion of course, there's the subject matter. Even before I opened the book I was very curious about this relationship between man and the natural world, but that may be different with you (and needless to say there's no harm in that, just as I may be forgiven, I assume, for not having much of an interest in e.g. the history of China, or the Soviet Republic, and lots of other topics).Secondly, given an interest in the subject, Keith Thomas is obviously an expert on it. This is not only obvious from the (seemingly) effortless and logical way in which he describes every aspect of it, but also (as said before) from the huge amount of research done. To coin a phrase: what Thomas doesn't know about this particular topic isn't worth knowing.Thirdly, I personally very much enjoy his writing style: it's actually 'easy-to-read', often funny in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, always informative but never needlessly dense, and scattered throughout the texts are telling excerpts and quotes from contemporary sources (like the advertisement of an 18th century London goldsmith for 'silver padlocks for blacks or dogs').In a word, even if you're only remotely interested to discover why we put flowers on graves, why the English are such keen gardeners, or why the countryside was once associated with boorishness and later became associated with nothing but positive qualities, buy this book, sit down and enjoy. The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern EnglandReligion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England (Penguin History)

Excellent book. I'd love to know it was possible for Keith Thomas to :a) Read through the two-thousand or so source texts in this book.b) Note the many thousands of quotations used in the bookc) And then pull them all together into a brisk and interesting narrative.This is an astonishing piece of scholarship, both in terms of the massive scope of the work and the command that Thomas has over the the huge amounts of information that he has used here. He appears almost omniscient at times, such is his ability to quote from rare and obscure writings from every age. Although the title describes the scope of the book as being from 1500 to 1800, in reality the book often overspills a century or two on either side of this to point out some facet of his argument. This is a book that is built to be re-read multiple times - there is a vast amount to take in. I re-read portions of the book as soon as I had finished and was found a whole load of new quotes and observations that I hadn't noticed the first time I went over it. I wish all history books were as lively and as informative as this.

Good and well written book.

This is quite a disturbing book but well worth reading even if perhaps some of his conclusions are questionable. It is well written and I enjoy a book like that even if I query some of it. Stimulating.