Over the last year I’ve been compiling an annotated bibliography. Originally I maintained it as a memory aid for my writing and in September I reworked it for my students. I’m now sharing it on this blog for anyone interested in the colonial history of animals: ‘Beastly Bibliography’. Recommendations for additional readings are encouraged! Hope…
Translating Titles
During the colonial period a series of white men published books about elephants based on their experiences of working with them in Burma. By independence in 1948, there was a clear canon of texts about elephants. Authors cited certain writers who were deemed to be ‘authorities’ in the subject: Mitchell, Pfaff, Hepburn, Ferrier, Evans, Sanderson…
Getting the Wasp into the Cyanide Jar
In his address to the Bombay Natural History Society in 1893, Colonel Charles Thomas Bingham regaled the audience with stories from his recent trip along the Myawaddy Road that ran between British Burma and Siam collecting rare specimens of bird, butterfly and wasp. Using cliched imagery, he wrote of the region’s “unbroken forests” where “no…
Popular Natureculture
As well as attending the History of Medicine in Southeast Asia Conference, whilst I was in Siem Reap I did a little sightseeing. I visited some of the temples around Angkor Wat, including Ta Prohm. Built in the 12th and 13th centuries, it is best known today for its cameo in the Tomb Raider film….
The Health of the History of Medicine in Southeast Asia
I’ve been lucky enough to squeeze in a short trip to Cambodia before the teaching term begins in earnest. I was attending the sixth History of Medicine in Southeast Asia (HOMSEA) conference, that this year was hosted in the tranquil surroundings of the Center for Khmer Studies in Siem Reap. This was my first time…
The Call of the Tame
In the introduction to their edited collection, the geographers Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert drew a distinction between ‘animal spaces’ and ‘beastly places’. Animal spaces were the material and imaginative geographies that nonhuman species were put by humans. So, dogs belong in a kennel, monkeys in a zoo or the wild, goldfish in a goldfish…
Foucauldians for Corbyn
This week I taught my class introducing students to the work of Michel Foucault. As I do every year, in preparation I went back to some of his writings to refresh my memory and to re-engage myself with the ideas. Every time I do this, something different stands out. This time around, I was more…
Paratextual Pachyderms
This week I read Sainthill Eardley-Wilmot’s 1912 book The Life of an Elephant. It was one of a number of fictional accounts of animal lives written in the early-twentieth century that attempted to capture what it might be like to be another species. Eardley-Wilmot himself had previously published a popular volume on the life of…
Decolonising Democracy
This week Myanmar has held its most important election in a generation. For all of the flaws in the process, this is a huge moment in the country’s history, as well as in the lives of many Burmese people. It means a lot. My Facebook feed has been inundated with pictures of the inky fingers…
Where’s the Cow in the Condensed Milk?
I’ve recently been doing some research into milk production in colonial Burma and going through the pages of the anti-colonial daily newspaper Thuriya for the interwar years. Despite trying to encourage domestic production of commodities through articulating a form of economic nationalism, the paper was mostly full of adverts for foreign products—including both powdered and…
Smells Like Empire (to an Elephant)
About a year ago I wrote a blog post about British colonizers’ sense of smell in Burma. I suggested that what they thought smelt bad revealed their prejudices about Burmese society. In addition, I wrote that they believed their nasal experience of Empire led them to have more refined sensibilities than their compatriots back home….
Hunting Humans
The British did not only hunt animals in Burma, they hunted humans too. At times of widespread rebellion, colonial counter-insurgency strategies involved identifying, tracking and killing particular rebels. Although the ends were different, the methods were similar. So were their narratives about these different chases. Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The Ballad of Boh Da Thone’, about…
Colonizing Animals 