Department of Historical Studies, University of Bristol

Animals and Empire

Department of Historical Studies, University of Bristol

13 June 2013

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’.

-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, MaharawalLakshman 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.

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 semi-tropical 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 long-lived 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 self-interest.

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, 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 1880-1965. 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.

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?