Decolonising Elephants: Animals and the End of Empire in Myanmar

Speaker: Dr Jonathan Saha (Durham University)

Abstract

Recent calls to decolonise academia have percolated through to the field of animal studies, pushing scholars to reject colonially-derived understandings of nonhuman creatures and to engage with indigenous thought. This welcome, if nascent, shift is often divorced from the messy history of decolonisation itself. In this talk, I look at how the experience of decolonisation in Myanmar altered the lives of working elephants. I ask, how far were elephants decolonised during decolonisation?

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Speaker biography

Dr Jonathan Saha's research focuses on the history of British imperialism in Myanmar (Burma) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His first book, Law, Disorder and the Colonial State, looked at the history of corruption in the Ayeyarwady delta. He has also published on the history of imperial masculinity, crime, medicine, and colonial psychiatry---as well as an article on a murder that took place in London Zoo in the 1920s.

His second book Colonizing Animals: Interspecies Empire in Myanmar came out with Cambridge University Press in 2021. It examines the animal history of British colonialism in Myanmar. Through an "interspecies lens" it tackles the topics of commoditization, imperial ideologies, and anticolonial thought. 

Chair: Prof Michael Charney (SOAS)

Organiser: SOAS Centre of South East Asian Studies (CSEAS)

Contact email: centres@soas.ac.uk