In 1936 the imperial government sanctioned the abolition of the elephant establishments used by several colonial officials serving in the Southern Shan States—the more accessible part of the hilly regions of northeast colonial Burma. Most of the elephants were sold off. But two elderly female elephants did not attract any buyers. They were both around…
Category: Animals
Hunting White Elephants Across Archives
It’s a miserably wet day in Delhi, so I’m using this as an opportunity to catch up on my blog, which has been neglected for the past few weeks. I’m in Delhi, instead of Yangon, in order to use the National Archive of India. This is the first time that I have used this archive….
Prisoners and Pariah Dogs
Many things have changed in Yangon since I first visited as a wide-eyed PhD student back in 2008, but the city’s street dogs remain a ubiquitous presence. Although, they have had their own share of difficulties since then. In 2013 the city’s authorities were accused of poisoning them in order to beautify the streets in…
Political Animals
I have just finished reading a story in which a community of pigs stage a revolution. No, not George Orwell’s Animal Farm, but a play called Sukra written by the Burmese nationalist U Nu in 1937. The play was published by the Nagani Book Club, a leftist nationalist publisher in the colony, and has been…
Marx’s Animal Other, Part 2
A few weeks ago I wrote a post exploring how animals appeared in Marx’s Capital, Volume 1. I drew attention to how Marx claimed that there was a fundamental difference between human and animal labour, and then suggested that other aspects of his argument could be used to historicise the division between humans and animals….
How to Post a Tiger
Over the last couple of weeks I have stayed in Bristol, London, Durham, Sheffield, Grimsby and Cambridge. Arranging places to stay and booking train tickets has been both tiring and expensive. I have had to rely on the kindness and generosity of friends and family. But then yesterday, whilst I was researching in the Centre…
Marx’s Animal Other
As well as doing research during my research leave, I have been reading Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 alongside David Harvey’s free online course (which I strongly recommend) – because this is what I count as fun these days. I’m only up to chapter seven, but I am already finding new angles on my own work….
An Elephant’s View of Empire
A few months ago I wrote a blog post about a travel book on Burma purporting to have been written by a dog. Yesterday, whilst I was researching in the British Library, I read a similar book written from the perspective of an elephant from Burma. It was published in 1930 as part of a…
Learning About Elephants in Empire
The primary reason for my recent research trip to the London Metropolitan Archive was to learn about the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation’s employment of elephants. The largest file that I went through dealt with attempts to improve the health of these animal workers during the inter-war years. These were collaborative efforts between the colonial state…
Evans, Evans, Evans and Elephants
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…
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…
Colonizing Animals 