A week or so ago I resolved a case of mistaken identity. I managed to separate three different men called Evans, whom I had originally thought were one man. All three had connections to elephants in Southeast Asia in the late-nineteenth century and early-twentieth century. Evans number one was Griffith H Evans. He was a…
Author: jonathansaha
What’s Colonial in a Name?
In a blog post published a few months ago, Matt Houlbrook, the historian of twentieth-century Britain, wrote about the difficulties he had deciding what name to call the man that he has been studying for over a decade. This ‘trickster prince’ went by many aliases during his life. Matt (if I may?) also discussed the…
Sun, Skin and Colonial Sensibilities
July has been a busy month. I spent the first week at two conferences at which I gave two entirely different papers. The first was on animals in colonial Burma. The second was on the history of sunstroke. But as different as these two topics may appear, there is some overlap. In the late-nineteenth century…
Fowl Play in Colonial Burma
I’ve been trying to find links between my last research project on the history of corruption and my developing interest in animals, and I think I’ve found one: chickens! Chickens appear in investigations into corruption in late nineteenth-century colonial Burma as bribes. In a case from 1907, a Resident Excise Officer accepted chickens as a…
Assessing Foucault
This year most of my third year students’ exam answers on crime in colonial South and Southeast Asia showed a sophisticated understanding of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. They demonstrated a knowledge of the underlying logics of disciplinary power that Foucault excavated, and some were also aware of the difficulties of mapping these onto a colonial…
Amok in Malaya, Murder in Burma
One of the great things about teaching is they way it can raise new research questions. This recently happened on my undergraduate unit in which I teach the history of crime in colonial South and Southeast Asia. We were discussing British representations of amok. This was where in an apparent fit of madness, often said to be brought on by a…
Musical Roads to Mandalay
Buried under dissertation marking, I have neglected my blog a little, so here is a short one before I go back to the grindstone. These are two very different musical versions of Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘Mandalay’. The first was performed in Britain in the 1930s by Robert Easton (apologies for the terrible sound quality). The…
The Dreaded Comparison
Over the weekend I attended the annual conference of the British Animal Studies Network to present a paper on human-animal interactions in colonial Burma. It was a fantastic conference, and the papers will soon be available for you to listen to on-line. When I got back home, I had a quick search through the British Pathe…
‘The Philosopher Burmese Prince’ and the Air-Pump
The other week I found a digitized archive of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, a periodical originally founded under a different name by the famed colonial Orientalist scholar William Jones. I was having a flick through looking for articles on Burma and found the following little article from early 1833. I haven’t…
Why Colonisers Look at Animals
Next week, on 7 April, the Animal History Museum will begin exhibiting an on-line collection of images and short essays on the theme of ‘Animals and Empire’ (I have an exhibit in there about working elephants in colonial Burma). Reflecting on the exhibition got me thinking about the art critic John Berger’s essay ‘Why Look at Animals?’ In…
Capturing Burma’s Ethnic Diversity
The UK National Archives have released an album on Flickr of 121 images taken in Burma in 1903. They were originally held in the Colonial Office photographic archive. Much like the imperial ethnographers who worked in the country, these photographers were attempting to capture the differences between ethnic groups – especially those in the ‘remote’…
The Albanian with the Burmese Tattoo
In the 1870s there was some discussion in British newspapers and medical journals about Georgious Constantine, or ‘the Tattooed Man from Burmah’, who had appeared in Vienna much to the interest of Europe’s anthropologists. He was covered head-to-toe with elaborate tattoos. Constantine claimed to have been of Greek descent and to have been a pirate…
Colonizing Animals 