When I was last in Yangon I bought a copy of Colonel M. L. Treston’s Health Notes Medical and Sanitary. It was printed by the Government of Burma and was intended to advise future British officials. Although not dated, since Treston is described as the Inspector-General of Civil Hospitals, a post that he took up…
Category: Research
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…
Rebellion in Burma, Indian Nationalism and the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation Ltd.
This week I visited the London Metropolitan Archives to consult the records of the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation, Ltd. From the late-nineteenth century, this company was the biggest and most influential timber company operating out of Burma. Throughout the colonial period and into the mid-twentieth century, Burma was widely recognised as the world’s principal source…
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…
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’…
Colonizing Animals 