Republican Animals: Politics, Science and the Birth of Ecology

This article argues that in the years following American independence the combination of republican ideology and a nationalist vision of science created a new, ecological way of thinking about the relationship between humans and animals. The political imperative of promoting republican virtues overlapped with the scientific defence of the flora and fauna of North America from their European detractors, and produced a way of thinking about humans and animals that placed both within a complicated natural system, a way of thinking that laid the foundations for modern ecological thought.