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The Bloodless Revolution reached every corner of European civilisation. It was a crucial factor in the evolving definition of animals, and a stimulant to movements as important as animal rights and environmentalism. No European country was free from its influence, and in its story every modern European can find the origins of their current practices and perceptions.

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, a new sensibility towards animals and the environment emerged in the West, one that often seemed to go hand-in-hand with broader radical politics and ideologies. One of the concrete manifestations of this new ethical perspective was abstinence from eating meat. Minds as great as Francis Bacon, René Descartes and Isaac Newton turned to the question - realising that it was the key to understanding how Mankind ought to treat Nature. The writers of the Enlightenment weren't the first to espouse what we now think of as vegetarianism however - they were preceded by centuries of mystics, philosophers, and religious thinkers from many different continents and traditions, for some of whom vegetarianism was not only a beneficial dietary regime but also a means of expressing dissent from the norms of a metaphorically rapacious, carnivorous consumer society.

The Bloodless Revolution surveys the history of vegetarianism, offering the first historical account of how Eastern philosophy merged with indigenous traditions of Christian ascetism and medical science to spawn the movement of Western vegetarianism. Stuart explores the figures and proponents of vegetarianism of the modern age, from Rousseau and Voltaire to Goethe and Lamartine. Interest in vegetarianism is at a peak in contemporary Western society for a variety of reasons, and this is a timely examination of the provenance and meaning of modern vegetarianism.

Published May 2006 by HarperCollins

About the author
Tristram Stuart graduated from Cambridge University in 1999 and has since been a freelance writer for newspapers and magazines including India Express and The Hindu and Down to Earth. The Bloodless Revolution is his first book.

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