"Magnificently detailed and wide-ranging."--Steven Shapin,The New Yorker Hailed by critics on both sides of the Atlantic,The Bloodless Revolutionis a pioneering history of puritanical revolutionaries, European Hinduphiles, and visionary scientists who embraced radical ideas from the East and conspired to overthrow Western society's voracious hunger for meat. At the heart of this compelling history are the stories of John Zephaniah Holwell, survivor of the Black Hole of Calcutta, and John Stewart and John Oswald, who traveled to India in the eighteenth century, converted to the animal-friendly tenets of Hinduism, and returned to Europe to spread the word. Leading figures of the Enlightenment--among them Rousseau, Voltaire, and Benjamin Franklin--gave intellectual backing to the vegetarians, sowing the seeds for everything from Victorian soup kitchens to contemporary animal rights and environmentalism. Spanning across three centuries with reverberations to our current world,The Bloodless Revolutionis a stunning debut from a young historian with enormous talent and promise, "draw[ing] the different strands of the subject together in a way that has never been done before" (Keith Thomas, author ofMan and the Natural World). 24 pages of illustrations.