Breeding Profits:Animals as labour and capital in Euro-American history

This chapter provides a historical context for animal organizational studies by examining selected aspects of human/animal relationships as they evolved from the early-modern period to the present day. It explores how late eighteenth-century improvers turned animals into factories for converting sunlight into profit, and how nineteenth-century social mobility created the modern-day pet industry. It considers the exponential growth of interest in wild animals in the twentieth century, the mechanics and profitability of their display in captivity, and the strategies for their study in the field, before turning to the growth of interest in animal agency and anthropomorphism in twenty-first-century scholarship and its implications for the livestock industry. Fundamentally, this chapter charts the different contexts in which animals are regarded as raw materials, as tools, or as people—and asks what this can tell us about wider human(e) relationships in the Anthropocene.