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….
Tag: Animal History
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…
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…
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…
Shape-shifters in Colonial Burma
I’m currently reading a novel by a British judge called Arthur Edgar titled The Hatanee: A Tale of Burman Superstition published in 1906. According to Edgar, the Hatanee is a terrifying, shape-shifting, half-tiger-half-human creature that hunts people when they are alone in the jungle. The novel was inspired by the apparently ‘real life’ murder of…
Do Elephants Dream of Bulldozers?
I have just finished reading the brilliant The Shock of the Old by David Edgerton. If you haven’t read it, the book argues persuasively that despite the widespread celebration of new technologies, old technologies have become increasingly important in the twentieth century. Edgerton provides many, occasionally surprising, examples demonstrating this. They range from the continued…
A Dog’s Life in Colonial Burma
I have just finished reading a traveller’s account of Burma published in 1909 and purportedly written by a dog. The dog, called ‘John’, travelled the northern-most reaches of the colony with his master, ‘the Colonel’, the Colonel’s wife, the ‘Mem Sahib’, their female friend, referred to only as ‘Missy Sahib’, and their entourage of Indian…
Colonizing Animals 