Animals and Empire
Department of Historical Studies, University of Bristol
13 June 2013
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Schedule
Arts Faculty, University of Bristol.
8:30-9 Registration, 3-5 Woodland Road
9-10:30 Panel 1: Species (Chair: Dr Jonathan Saha, University of Bristol) [Lecture Room 8, Woodland
Road]
- Prof. Julie Hughes (Vassar College): ‘The Royal Tiger and the Ruling Prince in Colonial
India’.
- James Hall (PGR, University of Cambridge): ‘Dancing serpents: orientalism and
representations of snake-charmers in nineteenth-century Britain’.
- Prof. William G. Clarence-Smith (SOAS, University of London): ‘Mules in the English
empire, nineteenth and twentieth centuries: despised but indispensable’.
10:30-10:45 Coffee [School of Modern Languages Common Room, 17 Woodland Road]
10:45-12:15 Panel 2: Looking (Chair: Prof. Peter Coates, University of Bristol) [Lecture Room 8,
Woodland Road]
- Chelsea Medlock (PGR, Oklahoma State University): ‘Kipling’s Animals: Imperialism
and Kinship in the Writings of Rudyard Kipling’.
- Dr Helen Cowie (University of York): ‘‘Doing a Roaring Trade’: Travelling Menageries in
Nineteenth-Century Britain’.
- Ed Teversham (PGR, St. Cross College, University of Oxford): 'From Animal Life to Wild
Life: The Changing Status of Fauna in South African Field Guides, c.1899-1968’.
12:15-1 Lunch, [School of Modern Languages Common Room, 17 Woodland Road]
1-1:30 Artist’s Presentation: Michele Elliot: ‘the vanishing: tigers past and present in India’ [Lecture
Room 8, Woodland Road]
1:30-3 Panel 3: Resource (Chair: Dr Karen Jones, University of Kent), [Lecture Room 8, Woodland
Road]
- Matthew Park (PGR, Michigan State University): ‘Dead Meat: Cattle Slaughter, Islam,
and Empire in a Colonial City’.
- Dr Jonathan Saha (University of Bristol): 'The White Man's Beasts of Burden: Elephants
and Empire in Burma'.
- Dr Simon Pooley (Imperial College, London): 'No one can be cruel to a crocodile':
representations and utilisations of crocodiles in British colonial Africa, c.1890-1962’.
3-3:15 Coffee, [School of Modern Languages Common Room, 17 Woodland Road]
3:15-4:45 Panel 4: Resurrection (Chair: Andrew Flack, University of Bristol), [Lecture Room 8,
Woodland Road]
- Pandora Syperek (PGR, University College London): ‘Feathered Gems: Gould’s
Hummingbirds in the Natural History Museum’.
- Dr Karen Jones: (University of Kent): ‘Transnational Tales and Taxidermy Tales:
Necrogeography, Animal Capital and the Afterlife of Hunting’.
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Dr Merle Patchett and Kate Foster (University of Bristol and Glasgow Sculpture Studios):
‘The Object(ionable) Histories of the Blue Antelope’.
4:45-5:30: General discussion (Chair: Prof. William Beinart, St. Anthony’s College, University of
Oxford), [Lecture Room 8, Woodland Road]
Abstracts
Species
Julie Hughes, Vassar College: The royal tiger and the ruling prince in colonial India
No tigers lived within fifty miles of the princely state of Dungarpur in 1909. Although their numbers
partially rebounded to a maximum of five animals in the mid-1910s, an historically and regionally
anomalous shortage persisted through the mid-1930s. With a semi-arid climate, rugged landscape,
and tropical thorn forests similar in quality, if not in quantity, to the comparatively well-stocked
hunting grounds of the adjacent Mewar State, Dungarpur once had supported a respectable tiger
population on an ungulate prey base of sambar, wild boar, nilgai, and chital. With the translocation
of three tigers into the state at the end of his minority in 1928, Dungarpur’s ruling prince,
Maharawal Lakshman Singh (1908-1989), inaugurated a successful conservation scheme that
remained in effect until the state’s integration into the Rajasthan Union in 1948. This paper seeks to
answer why late-colonial Indian princes like Lakshman Singh framed a dearth of tigers as an
environmental problem with expansive social, cultural, and political ramifications, and as an issue
requiring immediate mitigation.
Major past impacts on local and regional environments and biodiversity, with ongoing relevance to
the ways South Asian wildlife and wilderness areas are perceived today, emerged from the
widespread conviction that princely attempts to govern ecosystems and game demographics were
natural and necessary functions of the state. In particular, the Indian princes of Rajputana correlated
the preservation and use of well-maintained hunting grounds rich in desirable flora and fauna with
the enjoyment of higher status, stronger defenses against foreign interference, and more compliant
subjects. The historical importance of these princely constructions calls into question exactly how
and even if wildlife and wilderness have existed in South Asia in separation from human beings and
their specific concerns. Indeed, the roles played by tigers and ungulate prey inform new
understandings of princely identity, the nature of these ruling elites’ European connections, and the
behaviors they demanded from state subjects in an era of British paramountcy.
James Hall, PGR, University of Cambridge: Dancing serpents: orientalism and representations of
snake-charmers in nineteenth-century Britain
This paper will explore the development of an enduring trope – the snake-charmer – during the first
half of the nineteenth-century. The imagery of snake-charmers remains today shorthand for a
constructed ‘East’, imbued with notions of mystery, timelessness, and primitiveness. Their
significance here is indicated by the fact that Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting, The Snake-Charmer,
c.1870, adorns the cover of the original edition of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978).
Though there has been growing attention paid to human-animal relationships in the nineteenth
century in Britain, with much success, often there has been a focus upon dogs or other domestic
animals, or alternatively, on dramatic and exotic animals, like tigers and elephants. Snakes, however,
have been overlooked in spite of their considerable cultural significance. Snake-charmers themselves
have not received much historical consideration as exhibitors of animals.
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This paper will historicize, in particular, how Europeans discussed, represented, and appropriated
snake-charmers in a variety of media, and will culminate with an examination of reactions to the
arrival of two Arab snake-charmers at London Zoo in 1850 (at the same time as a much more famous
resident – Obaysch the hippopotamus). The first half of the nineteenth century saw an explosion in
the availability of cheap printed material and the creation of mass audiences for periodicals.
Simultaneously, British attention moved towards Asia and the ‘Orient’. Descriptions of encounters
with snake-charmers were popular constituents of contemporary discussions of Indian life and
society. Often premised on an idea of removing a miraculous explanation of the human-snake bond,
authors implicitly or explicitly passed comment on the ‘irrationality’ and susceptibility of various
non-Europeans to being duped, whilst, appropriately enough, being fascinated themselves. The
apparent possibility of being ‘tamed’ and responsive to human command became a defining
characteristic of the cobra.
William G. Clarence-Smith, SOAS, University of London: Mules in the English empire, 19th and 20th
centuries: despised but indispensable
The English harboured strong prejudices against mules, but these sturdy hybrids proved
indispensable for the construction and maintenance of empire, both in the Celtic zones of the home
islands and overseas.
The English dislike of the mule rested on a prior prejudice against its donkey father, which had been
introduced by the Romans. The ‘ass’ was associated with poor costermongers, Jewish peddlers,
‘Gypsy’ vagrants, the obdurate Irish, and various ‘untouchable’ castes of India. That said, a minority
of English people, more Christian in their orientation, favoured the humble ‘moke.’ Jesus had been
attended by a donkey at his birth, and had ridden ‘the colt of an ass’ on his triumphal entry into
Jerusalem. The crossed stripe on a donkey’s coat was even seen as the mark of Christ.
As a sterile hybrid of a jack (male donkey) and a mare (female horse), the mule was associated with
its asinine father, which was seen as ‘polluting’ the mare in intercourse. The mule was further
despised as being ‘without posterity,’ and rejected as contra naturam. Nevertheless, the mule was
sometimes classed with its mother, and enjoyed a higher status than the donkey in pre-Reformation
England. The rise of Protestantism caused new divisions, for Catholic clerics traditionally rode mules,
or were drawn by them, and Catholic noblemen often preferred mules to horses for their carriages.
Mules thus became tainted with the ‘popery’ of southern Europe and its overseas empires.
Furthermore, after the American Revolution, George Washington defiantly championed the mule of
his Latin American neighbours.
If the mule could be relegated at home to southeastern Ireland, Cornwall, and the New Forest, it was
another matter in the empire. There were manifest economic advantages to the mule in semitropical areas, ranging from the Caribbean, through South Africa and Mauritius, and on to Fiji.
Amongst others, sugar planters, miners, and transport riders relied on the hardy, frugal and longlived mule. Moreover, the animal became indispensable to British military power in the Indian
Ocean, as the dismantled guns of mountain batteries prevailed in ‘small wars’, and as the baggage
train was standardised around the rapid mule.
For all that, ‘cultural cringe’ prevented Australian breeders from taking over the Indian Ocean mule
market, as they did so successfully with the Indian Ocean horse market. The English were forced into
an uncertain reliance on non-English colonial breeders, such as the Punjabi or the Afrikaners. As this
supply proved inadequate, it had to be supplemented by foreign countries, such Ethiopia, Persia,
China, Argentina, Venezuela, and the USA. Prejudice triumphed over economic and military selfinterest.
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Looking
Chelsea Medlock, PGR, Oklahoma State University: Kipling’s Animals: Imperialism and Kinship in
the Writings of Rudyard Kipling
The writings of Rudyard Kipling are best known for extolling the virtues and mystique of British New
Imperialism; however, a few of his prose and poetry also discuss man’s empathy for and even
kinship with imperial animals. Kipling’s empathy with animals began with his father, John Lockwood
Kipling, who wrote a detailed treatise on the state of animal welfare in India during the late
nineteenth century. During his time in India, Kipling’s father discussed the numerous animal welfare
abuses he encountered on a daily basis; this family concern for the welfare of animals deeply
influenced Kipling’s writings, leading him to focus much of his writing on animal subjects. While his
most famous works tend to anthropomorphize animals to provide morality for children, many of
Kipling’s lesser known works, such as “The Beast and Man in India,” “Parade-Song of Camp Animals,”
and “Her Majesty’s Servants,” invoke examples of human empathy and kinship toward imperial
animals. Kipling goes so far as to encourage his readers to view animals less as specimens of
Descartes’s soulless machines and more as sentient beings, deserving of compassionate and animal
welfare. This paper explores the social and cultural connections between Kipling’s imperialism and
his writings on empathy for and kinship with imperial animals while discussing Kipling’s major
influences on the British animal welfare movement during the Age of New Imperialism.
Helen Cowie, University of York: ‘Doing a Roaring Trade’: Travelling Menageries in 19th-Century
Britain
Travelling menageries were a popular form of entertainment in 19th-century Britain. They toured
widely, making exotic animals accessible to a wide spectrum of the population. They appealed to
people of all classes, often admitting charity children and workhouse inmates for free. Menageries
appeared at fairs, where they constituted one of the main attractions. They also visited towns and
villages across the country as part of their itinerary, bringing rare beasts to social groups who would
not otherwise have got a chance to see them; as the Bristol Mercury remarked in 1858, ‘there are
scores of communities, many of them large communities, who would never see a lion, an elephant
or a rhinoceros if these menageries were driven off the road’. My paper explores the development
of menageries in the 19th century and considers their multiple roles as sources of leisure, sites for
education and tangible symbols of imperial expansion. Building on recent studies of the relationship
between science, showmanship and consumer culture, I examine how menageries marketed
themselves and the extent to which they fitted within a wider culture of ‘rational recreation’. I draw
upon a variety of sources, including newspaper reports and advertisements, visitor accounts and a
surviving menagerie logbook kept by George Wombwell’s elephant keeper.
Edward Teversham, PGR, St Cross College, University of Oxford: From Animal Life to Wild Life: The
Changing Status of Fauna in South African Field Guides, c.1899-1968
The field guide has been an essential tool for tourists visiting southern Africa’s game reserves and
national parks for several decades. It has acted as a crucial intermediary between the visitor and the
environment beyond the car window: instructing its readers on what to look for. Its power to inform
ways of seeing, within spaces designated and understood to be ‘natural’, has helped influence public
attitudes to wildlife and to nature more generally. Yet the field guide has attracted very little
scholarship. This paper addresses the changes that took place within the genre from its days as a
hunting manual through the transitional period of preservationism and into the age of
conservationism. Its principal argument is that tameness, and the capacity for domestication, were
important components of these guides in the years before the Second World War. Only in the 1950s,
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under the influence of a more scientific approach to conservation, were animals represented in
these field guides as separate and unrelated to the activities of man. In many respects, it was only
then that they became truly ‘wild’ in the public imagination.
Artist’s Presentation
Michele Elliot: the vanishing: tigers past and present in India
The plight of the tiger’s survival in the wild has been widely reported, particularly the efforts of
conservation groups in India, where it is estimated that half of the world’s population of wild tigers
live. Prior to colonisation by the British, India’s aristocracy had engaged in the practice of hunting.
However the escalating slaughter of tigers during the British occupation was phenomenal. Joseph
Sramek (2004) explores ‘a new picture of colonial tiger hunting’ in the late 19th century where three
events coincided – the inauguration of Queen Victoria as Empress of India in 1876, the introduction
of the Forest Act in 1878 and a shift in weapons technology - that changed the tiger’s fate forever.
The consequence of this colonial legacy is a species hovering on the brink. While conservation
projects operate across a number of countries including India, their population remains at risk from
poaching and deforestation. In the exhibition the vanishing, the tiger past and present is the
protagonist, its tale told through the interweaving of material and process, memory and metaphor.
Hanging sheaths embroidered with words, a reflective pool of glass bullets, the tigers shrouded in
white, in red velvet, sit like ghosts, a haunting presence that echoes the violence of the past.
Resource
Matthew Park, PGR, Michigan State: Dead Meat: Cattle Slaughter, Islam, and Empire in a Colonial
City
In this paper I will examine the history of cattle slaughter in the city of Bathurst (Banjul) from 18801965. In the literature on animals and empire urban spaces are a serious lacuna. In African history
there are numerous accounts of imperialism in rural areas, game preserves, and national parks, but
urban animals are virtually nonexistent in the literature. We now know about donkey massacres,
lion hunts, elephant poachers, “dog histories of South Africa”, and even a “horsestory”, but all this
literature is situated comfortably in rural areas. The urban history of animals takes the insights from
these studies and goes further to explode the dyads (man/nature, urban/rural, nature/culture)
which place “the animal” in the countryside and modern, promethean man in the city.
Prior to the arrival of the British in The Gambia beef was available primarily during important
feast and celebration days. As a class of civil servants, clerks, and traders grew in Bathurst grew,
however, so did the demand for meat. As the consumption of meat became inextricably linked to
modern personhood so too did cattle increasingly became commoditized. A meat industry sprang up
supported by cattle sellers, merchants, traders, butchers, veterinarians, and health inspectors. As
with any other colonial industry conflicts between British imperial authorities and Gambians flared
over the treatment of cattle, “humane” versus Islamic methods of slaughter, destocking and
vaccination, and profiteering. Gambians not only contested the will of imperial authorities, but more
often than not they won. Cattle sellers refused to destock their herds in the way that veterinary
officials wanted, “human slaughter” with a stun gun was refused as contrary to Islamic prescriptions,
and cattle traders routinely avoided British price controls. My paper will explore these power
dynamics and the consequences of the meat industry for the cattle of The Gambia.
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Jonathan Saha, University of Bristol: The White Man’s Beasts of Burden: Elephants and Empire in
Burma
Since the earliest European encounters with the various pre-colonial kingdoms that ruled in the land
that is today Myanmar, the material and symbolic role of Burmese elephants had been a source of
imperial curiosity. The size of the Burmese military’s elephant units and the reverence in which
auspicious white elephants were held, were a matter of much comment into the nineteenth century.
Yet despite this discourse emphasising the exoticism of Asian societies, elephants were also
materially and symbolically important to British rule in Burma, in an echo of those antecedent
monarchical regimes. The British too used elephants in warfare, and the lucrative timber trade was
reliant upon elephant labour. Elephants were also symbolically important in the constitution of a
colonial culture in Burma: as highly prized trophies in big game hunting; as objects of scientific study;
as much photographed and romanticised tourist attractions; and even as literary characters, such as
in George Orwell’s famous critique of imperialism. However, there was an intrinsic tension between
the material and the symbolic uses of elephants under British imperialism. Symbolically elephants
were used to reinforce racial and gender hierarchies, as well, of course, as a hierarchy of human over
non-human animals. But in material practices these hierarchies were often compromised as the
British were dependent on both the elephants themselves and their Burmese riders the oozies. In
this paper I explore this tension to examine a much broader historiographic question: what can a
focus on animal history contribute to the established canon of postcolonial critiques of empire?
Simon Pooley, Imperial College, London: ‘No one can be cruel to a crocodile': representations and
utilisations of crocodiles in British colonial Africa, c.1890-1962
Both popular and scientific representations of crocodiles in the literatures of the British Empire
almost exclusively portrayed them as incarnations of sudden death in unfamiliar, treacherous
environments, of alterity, and unbridled rapacity. Fables from the time of Herodotus were recycled
well into the twentieth century, and ‘expert knowledge’ of hunters passed for scientific knowledge
until the 1960s. Crocodile hunters showed skill and showmanship in playing on popular and scientific
prejudices in order to hunt ‘man-eating’ and ‘rapacious’ crocodiles in the post-war period, several
writing self-justifying accounts of their exploits. It was in the end the soaring prices for and growing
trade in crocodilian skins in the 1950s and 1960s that raised serious conservation concerns and led
to the first sustained scientific investigations of crocodiles and their ecological role and impacts. In
this paper I will survey popular and expert representations of crocodiles in British-controlled Africa,
how they were utilised by hunters in the post-war period, and the motivations and findings of early
conservationists. As a coda I will examine the way in which, in some countries, sustainable use was
mobilised for crocodile conservation in the postcolonial period.
Resurrection
Pandora Syperek, PGR, UCL: Feathered Gems: Gould’s Hummingbirds in the Natural History
Museum
Following John Gould’s death in 1881, the British Museum purchased the famous ornithologist’s
collection of 62 cases full of brightly coloured taxidermised hummingbirds. This paper traces this
impressive display from its initial presentation at the Great Exhibition in 1851 to its eventual home in
the Natural History Museum in South Kensington in the 1880s. I examine the idiosyncratic display
strategy applied to hummingbirds, which were commonly compared to jewels, and the gender
implications of this unique treatment. Hummingbirds were at the centre of heated evolutionary
debates, specifically regarding Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. Gould and others
maintained a theological explanation for the brilliant beauty of male hummingbirds, while Darwin
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argued that their colourful plumage had evolved in response to female preference, a notion that
upset Victorian gender norms. Meanwhile, female humans appropriated the birds’ jewel-like
feathers, wings and entire bodies for the purposes of fashion. Here I consider this transgender and
trans-species problem suffered by the ‘feathered gems’ in the context of their display in the Natural
History Museum. Compared with the naturalistic British ‘bird groups’ – dioramas that reflected
bourgeois Victorian family values – the hummingbirds in Gould’s cases were arranged with an
emphasis on individualism, exoticism and aestheticism. Rhetoric within natural theology and
evolutionary theory alike extolled the ethereal beauty and near-mythical character of the elusive
creatures. By considering Gould’s cases in the context of Darwin’s challenging theory (sexual
selection was rejected even by some of Darwin’s closest supporters) and the ubiquity of ‘feather
fashions’ in the later decades of the nineteenth century, I argue hummingbirds’ metaphorical
associations of excess and pleasure present an alternative gender model within Victorian natural
history and display culture.
Karen Jones, University of Kent: Transnational Tales and Taxidermy Tales: Necrogeography,
Animal Capital and the Afterlife of Hunting
This paper considers the ‘after-life’ of the hunting trail during the latter years of the nineteenth
century, with particular reference to ideas of memory, imperial conquest and the visualization of the
animal as it played out in the American West. Of particular interest are hunting tales and the visual
architecture of trophy taking via taxidermy, both of which elevated game species for the purposes of
entertainment, masculine adventuring and natural history education. As I argue here, these public
(and performative) displays created a powerful necrogeography (a landscape of death) that
communicated ideas of the West as a place of savagery, abundance, and masculine imperial
prowess. Themes of preservation and immortalization, the representation of particular species and
the corollary elevation of the ‘hunter hero’, as well as the relevance of storytelling and taxidermy to
the imagined landscape of the frontier will also be discussed.
Kate Foster and Merle Patchett, University of Bristol and Glasgow Sculpture Studio: The
Obect(ionable) Histories of the Blue Antelope
How does a culture reflect the animals it eradicates? An antler and horn collection sits in storage in
the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow. Having been gathered across continents, these specimens have
been arranged and dispersed repeatedly to facilitate the study of modern biology. One particular
specimen achieves paradoxical value in the hierarchy of scarcity: the skull and horn cores of a “Blue
Antelope”. The Blue Antelope is an extinct South African animal. Once found in the Cape of Good
Hope, it was extinct by 1800. Only two skulls are thought to exist, one in Glasgow and the other in
Amsterdam. Four mounted skins survive within old European collections, and – closer to where it
last lived – less complete paleontological remains have been found. In these forms the Blue
Antelope endures, concentrated in the collections and annals of zoological sciences.
This paper narrates our collaborative Bio/Geo/Graphical project to re-map, re-label and re-present
the blue antelope and its museological remains. Such a project introduces diverse possibilities to reframe and re-tell zoological collections - where the status of object may not contain all that the
animal still has to offer. For example, through the creation of a ‘web-archive’ –
www.blueantelope.info – we generated further ways for people to encounter the “Glasgow Skull”
and offered an expanded repertoire of interpretation and engagement with diverse lives of the
animal in life and death. This collaboration between artist and geographers is an exploration in
different ways of looking, doing and knowing. For us, at least, the steady accumulation of knowledge
about the extinct animal and the process of re-presentation opened up a dialogic space whereby
awkward but more pressing geographical questions could be asked: ‘By which world should the blue
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antelope be known? By what territorial arrangement should we place it? And according to whose
voice, language, values? But perhaps we will start our presentation more playfully by asking: How
was it Blue?
Contacts
ANDREW.HANLEY@dwp.gsi.gov.uk; Beagle.2011@my.bristol.ac.uk; chelsm@okstate.edu;
edward.teversham@stx.ox.ac.uk; Eleanor.Larsson.2010@live.rhul.ac.uk; e.m.lloyd@warwick.ac.uk;
fm7225@bristol.ac.uk; Helen.cowie@york.ac.uk; jh567@cam.ac.uk; : jm8648@bris.ac.uk;
Jennifer.eadie@anu.edu.au; j.saha@bris.ac.uk; juHughes@vassar.edu; k.r.jones@kent.ac.uk;
art@meansealevel.net; srinivasan.krithika@gmail.com; l.l.tucker@warwick.ac.uk;
lk12811@bris.ac.uk; parkmat@gmail.com; merle.patchett@bris.ac.uk; malay.michael@gmail.com;
info@micheleelliot.com; pandora.syperek.09@ucl.ac.uk; p.a.coates@bris.ac.uk;
reuben.a.loffman@gmail.com; Robert.skinner@bris.ac.uk; s.pooley@imperial.ac.uk;
Simon.potter@bris.ac.uk; tim.cole@bris.ac.uk; William.beinart@sant.ox.ac.uk; wc2@soas.ac.uk
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