Vermin in society

: plague, pests and poisons at the dawn of zoonosis

Abstract

This thesis elaborates a historical-ethnography of rat control as it was fractiously transposed into a critical modality of colonial counter-epidemic practice in India. Throughout the 19th century, rats scratched, scurried, gnawed and rotted throughout the colonial archive as injurious pests, naturalist enigmas and domestic ‘vermin’. However, for all the frustration and occasionally anxiety they engendered, rats were widely considered by Victorian publics and colonial officers as not only relatively ‘clean’ creatures, but indeed an advantageous facet of sanitary systems in both in India and Europe. The third plague pandemic (1898-1947), however, occasioned a profound reorganisation of epidemiological frameworks which incorporated rats in relation to this diverse suite of ‘verminous’ characteristics, elaborated, tracked and inscribed with novel pathogenic meanings. Alongside the surge of scientific literature mobilised by the confounding behaviours of plague as proliferated across India, claiming upwards of 12million lives in India, the third plague pandemic galvanised an unprecedent explosion in lethal practices pivoting around rats. Whilst historians have tended to collapse ‘rat destruction’ as unitary practice, often established in a narrative of teleological progress to the ‘rat-flea’ theory affirmed in 1905, the colonial authorities expressed continual ambivalence about the possibility and advisability of such measures within India. This thesis follows the development of counter-rat activities as they emerged across shifting epistemic environments, economic interests and roiling bio-political concerns of imperial governance in India. In particular, the dissertation centres the programs of ‘poisoning’ on terra firma, exploring the enmeshment of inter-imperial networks, colonial governmental priorities and economic rationalities which cooperated to institute rat poisoning as a vital facet of both counter-epidemic practice and mercantile commerce. Focusing on the period between 1896-1910, it engages follows the material and discursive entanglements between plague, indigenous peoples, rats and poisons instituted through the novel counter-epidemic modality of chemical rat extermination.

Date of Award	3 Dec 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	Christos Lynteris (Supervisor) & Adam Reed (Supervisor)