On Monday I had a couple of hours spare in London, either side of a meeting, so I did some lightning research in the British Library. I’d ordered some of the Public and Judicial Records on the Hsaya San rebellion of 1930-2. For those unfamiliar with the rebellion, it was the biggest one to hit…
Tag: Cattle
Colonial Slaughterhouse Rules
A couple of weeks ago I had an article published by the Journal of Historical Geography on the history of dairy cattle in colonial Burma. The article explored how oxen were bound up with colonial geographies; in this case through the state’s policing of the movement of Indian milch cattle into British Burma. Something that…
Animals in the Asylum
Last week I presented a paper as part of a panel on the history of lunatic asylums at the European Association of Southeast Asian Studies’ annual conference, hosted by the University of Vienna. It was the first time that I had returned to the subject of colonial psychiatry since I completed the research for my…
Milking It?
I have just come back from an amazing interdisciplinary conference on food in Asia organized by the Asian Dynamics Initiative at the University of Copenhagen. It was attended by historians, anthropologists, food scientists and many others, who talked on topics that included the production of sake, the ethics of vegetarianism, the authenticity of Anglo-Indian curry-houses,…
Colonizing Animals 