Faithful friends and filthy foes. A sensory and emotional history of human-animal interactions in Amsterdam (1840-1930)

Contemporary environmental problems require us to reconsider our relationship with animals. The same was necessary in the nineteenth century, when, as a result of industrialisation and urbanisation, the presence of animals in western cities created increasingly serious challenges, which were highly sensory and emotional in nature. By using the case-study of Amsterdam, this project aims to understand how and why sensory and emotional human-animal relationships changed between 1840-1930 in an urban context, by focusing on the sensory and emotional stimuli and competences that humans and animals developed in different types of human-animal relationships and material contexts.