Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times - Hardcover

by Antoinette Burton (Editor), Renisa Mawani (Editor)

From yaks and vultures to whales and platypuses, animals have played central roles in the history of British imperial control. The contributors to Animalia analyze twenty-six animals--domestic, feral, predatory, and mythical--whose relationship to imperial authorities and settler colonists reveals how the presumed racial supremacy of Europeans underwrote the history of Western imperialism. Victorian imperial authorities, adventurers, and colonists used animals as companions, military transportation, agricultural laborers, food sources, and status symbols. They also overhunted and destroyed ecosystems, laying the groundwork for what has come to be known as climate change. At the same time, animals such as lions, tigers, and mosquitoes interfered in the empire's racial, gendered, and political aspirations by challenging the imperial project's sense of inevitability. Unconventional and innovative in form and approach, Animalia invites new ways to consider the consequences of imperial power by demonstrating how the politics of empire--in its racial, gendered, and sexualized forms--played out in multispecies relations across jurisdictions under British imperial control.

Author Biography

Antoinette Burton is Professor of History and Swanlund Endowed Chair at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is the author and editor of numerous books, including Africa in the Indian Imagination and Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire, both also published by Duke University Press.