Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvii

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2. Introduction: Investigating Animals, Their Products, and Their Trades in the Indian Ocean World

   • Martha Chaiklin, Philip Gooding

   Pages 1-25

3. The Dutch East India Company and the Transport of Live Exotic Animals in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

   • Ria Winters

   Pages 27-63

4. Can the Oyster Speak? Pearling Empires and the Marine Environments of South India and Sri Lanka, c. 1600–1900

   • Samuel Ostroff

   Pages 65-98

5. Chank Fishing in South India Under the English East India Company, 1800–40

   • Sundar Vadlamudi

   Pages 99-124

6. Horses and Power in the Southern Red Sea Region Since the Seventeenth Century

   • Steven Serels

   Pages 125-146

7. The Donkey Trade of the Indian Ocean World in the Long Nineteenth Century

   • William Gervase Clarence-Smith

   Pages 147-179

8. Commercialisation of Cattle in Imperial Madagascar, 1795–1895

   • Gwyn Campbell

   Pages 181-215

9. Ayutthaya’s Seventeenth-Century Deerskin Trade in the Extended Eastern Indian Ocean and South China Sea

   • Ilicia J. Sprey, Kenneth R. Hall

   Pages 217-246

10. The Ivory Trade and Political Power in Nineteenth-Century East Africa

    • Philip Gooding

    Pages 247-275

11. The Flight of the Peacock, or How Peacocks Became Japanese

    • Martha Chaiklin

    Pages 277-314

12. Back Matter

    Pages 315-324

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This book examines trades in animals and animal products in the history of the Indian Ocean World (IOW). An international array of established and emerging scholars investigate how the roles of equines, ungulates, sub-ungulates, mollusks, and avians expand our understandings of commerce, human societies, and world systems. Focusing primarily on the period 1500-1900, they explore how animals and their products shaped the relationships between populations in the IOW and Europeans arriving by maritime routes. By elucidating this fundamental yet under-explored aspect of encounters and exchanges in the IOW, these interdisciplinary essays further our understanding of the region, the environment, and the material, political and economic history of the world.

• Animal trade
• Commercial history
• Animal products
• Exploitation of animals
• human-animal interactions
• charismatic megafauna
• beastly diplomacy
• working animals
• Capitalocene

“This volume is the first of a series of multi-themed studies on the Indian Ocean World (Iow) … . a self-conscious ‘entry into the tent of the Iow to positively expand our understanding of the relationships between animals, human beings, commerce, and world systems’ … . The wealth of detail supporting this interpretive stance—such as how animal products turned into items as disparate as ‘hair ornaments, eye-glass frames, and dildos’ … will be enjoyable for readers to discover for themselves.” (Myfel D. Paluga, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Vol. 178, 2022)

“The numbers of animals, commodities, places, and groups of (human) agents are impres­sive, the volume is nevertheless quite coher­ent … . Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World not only greatly enhances our knowledge of the tradewith and use of animals and animal commodities, but also highlights, by using this prism, the interconnectivity, shifting agency, and resilience of polities and trading communities across the IOW in an era of increasing European influence.” (Samuël Coghe, Comparativ -Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung, Vol. 32 (3-4), 2022)

• Historian, Columbia, USA

  Martha Chaiklin

• Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

  Philip Gooding, Gwyn Campbell

Martha Chaiklin received her PhD from Leiden University, The Netherlands. She first became interested in animals when researching her book, Cultural Commerce and Dutch Commercial Culture (2003), and has since combined her interest in material culture and animals in publications on elephants, live animal gifts, tortoiseshell and ivory.

Philip Gooding is a postdoctoral fellow at the Indian Ocean World Centre, and a course lecturer in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University, Canada. He has published articles in Slavery and Abolition and The Journal of African History, among other journals.

Gwyn Campbell is the founding Director of the Indian Ocean World Centre at McGill University, Canada. His publications include Africa and the Indian Ocean World from early times to circa 1900 (2019), David Griffiths and the Missionary “History of Madagascar” (2012), and An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750-1895 (2005).

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