Eloise Moss, Night Raiders: Burglary and the Making of Modern Urban Life in London, 1860–1968. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 250pp. £27.99 hbk.

Abstract

was becoming an English grazing farm, then Dublin was becoming its barn’ (p. 106). This economic transition had major infrastructural implications, in the form of railroad lines and quays. Moreover, it fixed Dublin’s livestock-oriented spatiality for more than a century. Decades after major US cities had removed livestock from downtown cores, or from city limits altogether, ‘Dublin retained a cattle market within the city limits until 1973, complete with cattle driven across town to the port and a population of city-dwelling drovers’ (p. 113). Private slaughterhouses could still be found in Dublin in the early 1980s, and city leaders were still pushing to remove the remaining piggeries from the city in the early 1990s. In an animal history literature that tends to emphasize the gradual exclusion of livestock from urban spaces in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the longevity of large animals in Dublin is striking and suggests the need for further study of livestock economies and their urban dimensions. Civilised by Beasts offers a rich account of how Irish historical currents shaped Dublin’s animal history. As Adelman shows, even as Dubliners responded at times to animals’ presence in ways typical of other large cities, their experiences also reflected the specificities of their own urban and national settings. Readers interested in animals, urban history, the history of agriculture and food production, and even the history of colonialism, will find much of interest in this careful and discerning study.