Meet the Team - Daan
Hello! I’m Daan, the resident historian (and only PhD-student) on the RATTUS project. I studied history at the VU in Amsterdam, focusing on ancient history during my BA, and on environmental and animal history during my MA. My thesis for the latter was about how dogs and humans interacted in early modern Amsterdam.
Researching at the National Archives (TNA) in London.
My RATTUS research
My research in the project is concerned with how humans reacted to the arrival of the brown rat and the slow disappearance of the black rat; how this featured in our culture(s) and in our practices. I’m looking at a tumultuous era in history known as the long eighteenth-century. This started shortly after the last outbreaks of the Plague ravaged Northwest Europe and ended when the Industrial Revolution was well on its way and global society was being shaken to its core by intensified imperialism, globalisation, and capitalism. Because it’s not unlikely that both rat species spread around quite a bit on ships, I’m focusing my research on two of Europe’s most important maritime trading centres at this time: London and Amsterdam.
I’m trying to find out what it meant that a new species of rat was introduced to Europe, and whether people thought about them differently in the Netherlands than in England. An obvious difference is in the name of the rats: the brown rat in English is sometimes called the Hanover rat. This is because the brown rat was introduced in England around the time that George I of Hanover took the English throne after Queen Anne died in 1714. The English, seeing an unpopular foreign king coming to rule their country, associated his arrival with the similarly unpopular new brown rat. They blamed the Hanoverian king for this invasive species and the species has been associated with them ever since. In Amsterdam, where the house of Hanover did not take over power, this association did not exist at all, and the brown rat is known simply as the brown rat, ground rat, or several other names.
This is a rather simple difference, but I expect to find many others, and you may see blog posts in the future about things like the rat economy or how cultural representations of rats differed and evolved over this period.
On adventure with Abī-Ešuḫ!
Why rats?
Rats are smart, friendly, incomprehensibly cute, and they helped me get through the COVID pandemic and my master’s programme with some semblance of sanity! Studying the history of rats is something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and I’m unbelievably lucky that I get to make my dream come true. Aside from a personal love for the critters, the fact that they’ve been all around us and yet have barely been researched really draws me to them. Wherever humans are, rats are there, too. They’re such an important part of our environment, but we barely think of them!
Team rattus or team norvegicus?
This is a tough question. I have a romantic admiration for that which is lost (what historian doesn’t?) and since black rats barely live in Northwest Europe anymore, they speak to me. Nevertheless, I must pick the brown rat. It always makes me happy to see one scurrying across the street, going about its ratty business. Support local rats, I say!
One of the letters I found in TNA. It reads: "My servant John Howland being still detained at Portsmouth in destroying rats onboard his Majesty's ships, I beg the favour your Hon. will please to order him to be supplied with five Guineas. By his last letter he informs me he has done seventy three ships."
Favourite rat in fiction?
My heart goes out to that one rat in season 4, episode 8 of the BBC series Merlin, where, in a tense scene, the knight Gwain is exploring a dark castle. There’s a loud bang and a horrifying, bestial screech! Tension rises as the camera pans to a rat… casually sauntering through a cheap-looking skeleton. I’m a big fan of any relaxed rat on screen whose “horrifying” squeaks have been added in post-production, but this one has a special place in my heart. Some notable exceptions off the top of my head are the shapeshifter-rat in season 1, episode 3 of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 (who does a pretty neat hop on camera) and a rat in the very first episode of The Expanse, whose squeaks sound like it may have a respiratory infection – quite thematic for a series where poor access to basic resources like oxygen plays such a large role!
Comments
Post a Comment