Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World

Martha Chaiklin, Philip Gooding, Gwyn Campbell, Martha Chaiklin, Philip Gooding, Gwyn Campbell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030425944
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030425951
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

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.

© The Author(s) 2020

M. Chaiklin et al. (eds.)Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean WorldPalgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42595-1_1

Begin Abstract

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

Martha Chaiklin¹ and Philip Gooding²

(1)

Historian, Columbia, MD, USA

(2)

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

Martha Chaiklin (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Philip Gooding

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Introduction

Aesop may be as much a fable as the stories attributed to him, but some place his origins in the Indian Ocean World (IOW), in Ethiopia to be precise.¹ He was described as ugly, almost bestial, and in the early part of his life, like an animal, unable to speak, but very wise. His liminal existence made him both a suitable interlocutor for the various oral traditions about human and animal behaviour that are attributed to him and an early expression of the still common anthropomorphism of animals. In one of Aesop’s lesser-known fables, a caravan merchant loads up his camel with merchandise. The so-called ship of the desert can carry as much as a thousand pounds, depending on breed, and were vital to the transport of goods around the Indian Ocean. The merchant then asked, ‘Camel, would you prefer to take the uphill road or the downhill road?’ The animal responded sarcastically, ‘Why, is the flat one closed?’ This is generally interpreted to mean that one should not ask obvious questions. Another reading is that one should not purposely make things harder than needed. In this parable, are we the merchants or the camel?

Fig. 1.1

Boyd Smith, ‘The Arab and the Camel.’ From Aesop’s Fables (New York: Century Company, 1911), 159. Collection of the Library of Congress

At first glance, it might seem like we are the merchants, loading up a rich historiography with more baggage to carry across a road well-travelled. But we would suggest that in fact we are the irascible camel, pointing out not so much a gap in this historiography, but a way to shape it that has frequently been bypassed for different roads. Until the development of synthetics in the late nineteenth century (the first synthetic polymer was patented in 1869), nearly everything humans used, like the beginning of the game of 20 questions, was made from or dependent on animal, vegetable, or mineral. Animals, domesticated, wild, or no longer animate, therefore elucidate human history by evidencing their relationship with their environment. If we take our surly camel as an example, these animals were integral to trade throughout the IOW. They did not just provide an efficient mode of transport for commodities over rough terrain, they themselves were traded, and provided humans with meat , milk, and protection from the elements through clothing, blankets, and tents made from their hair. Camel hair was also widely traded, and put to a variety of uses, even artists brushes.² Ignoring our brethren of the animal world is like ignoring the flat road. Trade is only one of many potential avenues in which to examine this relationship but it is an important one.

This volume is focused on the IOW, a macro-region that stretches from southern and eastern Africa, through the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia and Australasia. It is the region that is affected directly or indirectly by the Indian Ocean monsoon system of winds, currents, and rains, which underpins agriculture, trade, and animal habitats in IOW history.³ Animals, especially charismatic megafauna, are central to popular imaginations of this ‘world.’ Whether they be the ‘Big Five’ (lion, elephant, rhinoceros, leopard, and buffalo) of East Africa, camels of the Middle East, tigers of South Asia, orangutans of Southeast Asia, or koalas and kangaroos of Australasia, visions of different IOW regions are intimately connected with their indigenous fauna.

Creatures of Commerce

The fauna of the IOW is as diverse as the region is capacious. They nevertheless form a cohesive field of study because they are connected beyond their natural habitat or migration patterns through their exploitation by human beings. Animals, their products, and their trades provide this volume with two key threads. Firstly, they inform historical understandings of the connections around the IOW and from the IOW to other regions over the longue-dureé. Secondly, they express how human history has been shaped by human interactions with the changing natural world. Human beings are ‘creatures of commerce,’ and animals were an important part of that commerce. Homo sapiens, as part of the natural world, have interacted with and utilized animals for their entire existence. The transition from antagonism to a more complex relationship probably began with the domestication of dogs some 15,000 years ago. Domestication is the process of adaptation to assist human needs, and is generally considered to involve physiological change. It occurs through a symbiotic relationship based on mutual benefit, a pragmatic relationship that was until modern times, the dominant relationship. Hunting is the most likely reason dogs were domesticated. Ungulates like camels were not domesticated until perhaps 6000 years ago. As Jared Diamond noted, domestication of animals as part of food production was ‘a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel.’⁴ In other words, the domestication of animals was not an abstract expression of power, but the foundation upon which population growth and technological development occurred. Thus maritime trade, which is an element of each of the chapters in this book, is partly a result of domestication of animals.

Intellectually, one significant way of understanding animals was through classification, principally as a way to deal with human health. Animals are found in many early texts because many of them were partially written about medicinal practice. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) in the West and The Classic of Mountain and Seas from China (third- to second-century BCE) show the age and universality of classification. From the late Renaissance, most intellectual engagement with animals was focused on their classification, as exemplified perhaps by Konrad Gessner’s (1516–1565) De historia animalium (1551–1558). At the same time, there was a developing discourse on the existence or lack of animal souls and what that ethical concern would imply towards their treatment.⁵ Modern taxonomy is usually considered to date from Linnaeus. Nevertheless, it was Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species (1859) that bridged the philosophical gap to create a wider public discussion about what is human and what is animal. The idea that humans were related to apes was considered demeaning and conflicted with biblical dogma. Darwin expanded on his position in later, lesser-known works such The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), where he argued that expressions of emotion are universal across humanity and in the animal kingdom.⁶ The outrage that Darwin’s contemporaries felt at being related to the animal kingdom in general and apes in particular led to a deeper consideration of just what defined humanity.⁷

Modern approaches to animal studies derive largely from the philosophical approaches that evolved from Enlightenment thinkers, spread through the work of Darwin, and accelerated through the environmental consciousness and animal rights activism of the last half century.⁸ These works often focus on moral or ethical perspectives, opposing the ‘speciesism’ that places human beings above other sentient beings to focus on the emotional lives of animals, their agency, and the ‘anthropomorphisation’ of animal existence. This book was neither conceived nor executed to advance these particular debates, although they will nonetheless contribute to them. Rather, it is a book about the IOW framed around animals. This collection had its origins in a conference in October 2014, entitled ‘Trade in Animals and Animal Products in the Indian Ocean World from Early Times to c.1900,’ organized by Omri Bassewich-Frenkel as part of the Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University. It lies more firmly in trends in world history through its environmental elements, chronological span, and transnational and transregional nature than in animal studies, despite its subject matter. Nevertheless, as the following chapters show, the intersection of humans and animals is a distinctive way to examine the world. As the 2014 conference announcement phrased it, ‘By exploring the long-distance trade in animals and animal products as economic, cultural, and ecological phenomenon, this [work] … will seek to interrogate the concept of the Indian Ocean as a “world.”’ In other words, the study of animals is fundamental to the conceptualization of the IOW.

Animals are the concatenation of much human activity based on their perceived value or threat. As historical subjects, animals provide insight into many important historical processes like capitalism, imperialism, religious and cultural practices, and power dynamics: it has been said that, ‘Until the lion has his historian, the hunters will always be her...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Investigating Animals, Their Products, and Their Trades in the Indian Ocean World
• 2. The Dutch East India Company and the Transport of Live Exotic Animals in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
• 3. Can the Oyster Speak? Pearling Empires and the Marine Environments of South India and Sri Lanka, c. 1600–1900
• 4. Chank Fishing in South India Under the English East India Company, 1800–40
• 5. Horses and Power in the Southern Red Sea Region Since the Seventeenth Century
• 6. The Donkey Trade of the Indian Ocean World in the Long Nineteenth Century
• 7. Commercialisation of Cattle in Imperial Madagascar, 1795–1895
• 8. Ayutthaya’s Seventeenth-Century Deerskin Trade in the Extended Eastern Indian Ocean and South China Sea
• 9. The Ivory Trade and Political Power in Nineteenth-Century East Africa
• 10. The Flight of the Peacock, or How Peacocks Became Japanese
• Back Matter