THE BLOODLESS REVOLUTION
Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India
TRISTRAM STUART
To my father
SIMON STUART
(1930–2002)
CONTENTS
1 Bushell’s Bushel, Bacon’s Bacon and The Great Instauration
2 John Robins: The Shakers’ God
3 Roger Crab: Levelling the Food Chain
4 Pythagoras and the Sages of India
5 ‘This proud and troublesome Thing, called Man’: Thomas Tryon, the Brahmin of Britain
6 John Evelyn: Salvation in a Salad
8 Men Should be Friends even to Brute Beasts: Isaac Newton and the Origins of Pagan Theology
9 Atheists, Deists and the Turkish Spy
11 Tooth and Nail: Pierre Gassendi and the Human Appendix
12 The Mitre and the Microscope: Philippe Hecquet’s Catholic Fast Food
15 Rousseau and the Bosoms of Nature
16 The Counter-Vegetarian Mascot: Pope’s Happy Lamb
17 Antonio Cocchi and the Cure for Scurvy
18 The Sparing Diet: Scotland’s Vegetarian Dynasty
19 Diet and Diplomacy: Eating Beef in the Land of the Holy Cow
20 John Zephaniah Holwell: Voltaire’s Hindu Prophet
21 The Cry of Nature: Killing in the Name of Animal Rights in the French Revolution
22 The Marquis de Valady faces the Guillotine
24 John ‘Walking’ Stewart and the Utility of Death
25 To Kill a Cat: Joseph Ritson’s Politics of Atheism
26 Shelley and the Return to Nature
27 The Malthusian Tragedy: Feeding the World
PLATES
SECTION ONE
Jan Brueghel the Elder & Peter Paul Rubens, ‘Adam and Eve in Paradise’, c.1615. Mauritshuis,