Edmund Russell. Greyhound Nation: A Coevolutionary History, 1200–1900.

Abstract

Professor Russell pitches his new as a novel way of understanding the history of animals’ relationships with human beings, with the potential to revolutionize not just animal history but social, labour, and environmental history as well. This can only be done, argues Russell, through a reconciliation of history with evolutionary science. Evolution should no longer be restricted to ‘deep history’, nor in the guise of ‘cultural evolution’. Instead, we need to understand how groups of humans and animals, their traits and behaviors, ‘coevolved’, even in relatively short periods of time. Russell considers the history of greyhounds in this book, but these animals are an illustration of his wider thesis. They are chosen because of the copious source material and their relatively long history, not as a breed, understood as genetically and historically distinct, but as a population labelled ‘greyhounds’, numbered together because of the changing uses to which they could be put.