Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World [1st ed.] 9783030425944, 9783030425951

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PALGRAVE SERIES IN INDIAN OCEAN WORLD STUDIES

Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World Edited by Martha Chaiklin Philip Gooding Gwyn Campbell

Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies Series Editor Gwyn Campbell Indian Ocean World Centre McGill University Montreal, QC, Canada

This is the first scholarly series devoted to the study of the Indian Ocean world from early times to the present day. Encouraging interdisciplinarity, it incorporates and contributes to key debates in a number of areas ­including history, environmental studies, anthropology, sociology, ­political science, geography, economics, law, and labor and gender studies. Because it breaks from the restrictions imposed by country/regional studies and Eurocentric periodization, the series provides new frameworks through which to interpret past events, and new insights for present-day ­policymakers in key areas from labor relations and migration to diplomacy and trade. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14661

Martha Chaiklin  •  Philip Gooding Gwyn Campbell Editors

Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World

Editors Martha Chaiklin Historian Columbia, MD, USA Gwyn Campbell Indian Ocean World Centre McGill University Montreal, QC, Canada

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

Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies ISBN 978-3-030-42594-4    ISBN 978-3-030-42595-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42595-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Archivart / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Joseph B. Chaiklin (1929–2019), devoted to dogs and good writing. And to Émilie, Adèle, and Mathis, two of whom gave us the pleasure of joining us during the writing of this book.

Contents

1 Introduction: Investigating Animals, Their Products, and Their Trades in the Indian Ocean World  1 Martha Chaiklin and Philip Gooding 2 The Dutch East India Company and the Transport of Live Exotic Animals in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 27 Ria Winters 3 Can the Oyster Speak? Pearling Empires and the Marine Environments of South India and Sri Lanka, c. 1600–1900 65 Samuel Ostroff 4 Chank Fishing in South India Under the English East India Company, 1800–40 99 Sundar Vadlamudi 5 Horses and Power in the Southern Red Sea Region Since the Seventeenth Century125 Steven Serels

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Contents

6 The Donkey Trade of the Indian Ocean World in the Long Nineteenth Century147 William Gervase Clarence-Smith 7 Commercialisation of Cattle in Imperial Madagascar, 1795–1895181 Gwyn Campbell 8 Ayutthaya’s Seventeenth-Century Deerskin Trade in the Extended Eastern Indian Ocean and South China Sea217 Ilicia J. Sprey and Kenneth R. Hall 9 The Ivory Trade and Political Power in Nineteenth-­ Century East Africa247 Philip Gooding 10 The Flight of the Peacock, or How Peacocks Became Japanese277 Martha Chaiklin Index315

Notes on Contributors

Gwyn  Campbell  is the founding Director of the Indian Ocean World Centre at McGill University, Canada, General Editor of the Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies. He holds degrees in Economic History from the universities of Birmingham and Wales; has taught in India, Madagascar, Britain, South Africa, Belgium, and France; and was an academic consultant for South Africa in inter-governmental negotiations that resulted in the formation of an Indian Ocean regional association in 1997. He held a Canada Research Chair in Indian Ocean World History from 2005 to 2019, a Humboldt Award from 2017 to 2019, and directs a major international research project entitled “Appraising Risk, Past and Present: Interrogating Historical Data to Enhance Understanding of Environmental Crises in the Indian Ocean World.” His publications include Africa and the Indian Ocean World from Early Times to 1900 (2019), David Griffiths and the Missionary “History of Madagascar” (2012), and An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750–1895 (2005). Martha  Chaiklin received her PhD from Leiden University, the Netherlands. She first became interested in animals when researching her first book, Cultural Commerce and Dutch Commercial Culture (2003) and noticed many references to birds in Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) documents. This resulted in “Exotic Bird Collecting in Early Modern Japan,” in JAPANimals, Greg Pflugfelder and Brett Walker eds. (2005). Since then she has combined her interest in material culture and animals with publications on elephants, live animal gifts, tortoiseshell, and ivory. ix

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

William  Gervase  Clarence-Smith is Emeritus Professor of History at SOAS (the School of Arts, Sciences & Education), University of London, UK. He has written on the history of various animals around the world, notably on the trade and transport of equids in the Indian Ocean, the raising of equids in Mainland Southeast Asia, and the global spread of Trypanosoma evansi (surra) as a disease of equids and camels. He is researching a global history of mules from around 1400 CE. Philip  Gooding is a postdoctoral fellow at the Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, Canada, and a course lecturer in McGill’s Department of History and Classical Studies. He holds a PhD in History (2017) from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has written articles in Slavery and Abolition and The Journal of African History, among other journals, and is broadly interested in examining the commercial, cultural, and environmental linkages between the history of the East African Great Lakes and the history of the wider Indian Ocean World. Kenneth R. Hall  is Professor of History at Ball State University, USA. He studies the history of the Indian Ocean and South China and Java Seas with a focus on India and Southeast Asia. He has written several monographs, most recently A History of Early Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and Societal Development 100–1500 (2010); and Networks of Trade, Polity, and Societal Integration in Chola-Era South India c. 875–1400 (2013). He has also written many academic journal articles and book chapters, and has edited several volumes that are focal on revisionist historiography with specific focus on transitional Asian urban and societal networking. These include The Growth of Non-Western Cities: Primary and Secondary Urban Networking in the Non-West c. 900–1900 (2011); Secondary Cities and Urban Networking in the Indian Ocean Realm c. 1400–1800 (2008); and Cross-Cultural Networking in the Eastern Indian Ocean Realm, c. 100–1800 (2019). Samuel  Ostroff  holds a joint PhD in History and South Asia Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He holds an MA in South Asia Studies from the University of Pennsylvania; an MA in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University; and a BA in History from Bucknell University. Based on primary archival research in India, England, and the Netherlands, Ostroff’s dissertation examines the intersection of the pearling economy, Dutch and British imperialism, and the marine environment in the Gulf of Mannar in the eighteenth and

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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­ ineteenth centuries. He is the Publications Officer at the Institute for n Health Metrics and Evaluation and an affiliate lecturer in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Steven Serels  is a research fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, Germany. He holds a Master’s (2007) and a PhD in History (2012), both from McGill University, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Cooper Union (2005). He is the author of Starvation and the State: Famine, Slavery and Power in Sudan 1883–1956 (2013) and The Impoverishment of the African Red Sea Littoral, c1640–1945 (2018). Ilicia J. Sprey  is Professor of History and the Dean of the School of Arts, Sciences & Education at Ivy Tech Community College, Lafayette Campus, Indiana, USA.  She focuses on fifteenth- through eighteenth-century Cochinchina, the Vietnamese littoral, and the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya, and she is particularly interested in these regions’ contributions to commerce and the political treatment of minority populations within them. Her work has been published in Southeast Asian- and European-focused journals, and she has contributed to multiple edited volumes related to maritime trade, cultural influences and exchanges, and the ecological and human impact of trade on indigenous peoples. These volumes include India and Southeast Asia: Cultural Discourses (2018), Subversive Sovereigns Across the Seas: Indian Ocean Ports-of-Trade from Early Historic Times to Late Colonialism, Asiatic Society (2017), Rethinking Connectivity: Region, Place and Space in Asia (2016), and Vanguards of Globalization: PortCities from the Classical to the Modern (2013). Sundar  Vadlamudi  is Assistant Professor of History at the American University of Sharjah, UAE. He is a historian of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World. His research areas include Islam in South Asia, Indian Ocean trade, economic history of South Asia, and socio-religious reform movements in India. His current research focuses on the participation of Tamil-speaking Muslims in the maritime trade in the Indian Ocean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Ria Winters  is a Dutch historian and artist who specialises in animal history and the culture of the Dutch Golden Age. She works at the Allard Pierson Museum and Institute of the University of Amsterdam. Her most recent subjects involve the history of South African society and l­iterature, for which she is developing a deeper understanding by attending master classes at the African Studies Center of Leiden University.

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2

Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2

Boyd Smith, ‘The Arab and the Camel.’ From Aesop’s Fables (New York: Century Company, 1911), 159. Collection of the Library of Congress3 A rare instruction written in 1624 from the central management of the VOC (Heeren XVII), with the request to bring back rare animals—‘Rare gedierten’—on the ships. The heading is captured in the rectangular outline. National Archive, The Hague. NL-HaNA, VOC, 1.04.02, inv.nr. 5001, unfoliated manuscript 33 Engraving of a cassowary by Crispijn van den Queborn, approx. 1614. The bird was a gift of shipmaster Willem Jacobsz to Prince Maurits of Orange. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, inv.nr. RP-P-OB-79.498 34 Zebu, gouache by Jan Velten, Amsterdam, approx. 1700. Artis Library of the University of Amsterdam, Collection Jan Velten, inv.nr. 17R 41 Chukar partridge, gouache by Jan Velten, Amsterdam, approx. 1700. Artis Library of the University of Amsterdam, Collection Jan Velten, inv.nr. 7R 46 Engraving of the Dutch in Mauritius, published in the travel narrative published in 1601, the ‘True report,’ by Jacob van Neck and Wybrant van Warwijck: Het tvveede boeck, iournael oft dagh-register, inhoudende een warachtich verhael ende historische vertellinghe vande reyse, gedaen door de acht schepen van Amstelredamme, gheseylt inden maent martij 159852 Oysters. De Jonville Manuscript, British Library 74 Oysters. De Jonville Manuscript, British Library 74 xiii

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List of Figures

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2

Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 8.1

Fig. 8.2

Fig. 9.1 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3

Fig. 10.4 Fig. 10.5

Cattle horns ritually displayed. From: Louis Catat, Voyage à Madagascar (Paris: Hachette, 1895), 165 Fattening cattle. From: William Ellis, History of Madagascar. Comprising also the Progress of the Christian Mission Established in 1818; and an Authentic Account of the Recent Martyrdom of Rafaravavy; and of the Persecution of the Native Christians, vol. I (London: Fisher, Son, & Co., 1838), 46 Fandroana bullock c. 1896. From: 5.3 IMP-NMS-A02-104 in: Gwyn Campbell, David Griffiths and the Missionary ‘History of Madagascar’ (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 559 Embarking cattle at the port of Tamatave, Madagascar. From: Illustrated London News (17 September 1864), Neg No: 58_2303, National Maritime Museum Eastern Indian Ocean trade, c.1600–1850, ‘Map showing the early European agencies, factories & Settlements [sic] in the Indian archipelago, to illustrate [the] Report of the India Office Records by Fered; Chas, Danvers, 1887. Collection of the British Library French map of Ayutthaya (1686) showing the various resident communities. From: ‘A Map of the City of Siam,’ in La Loubère, A New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam (London: Thomas Horne, Francis Saunders, and Thomas Bennet, 1693), 7 Sketch map of major commercial centres in nineteenthcentury East Africa Archaeopteryx. The Thermopolis specimen found in Bavaria. Jurassic Period. Photograph by Dr. Burkhard Pohl. Collection of the Wyoming Dinosaur Center Tengu with feather fan, centre. Tengu nado [Tengu and miscellaneous]. Hokusai school, mid-nineteenth century. Collection of the Library of Congress Utagawa Toyoharu. Kyo¯to Sanjūsangendo¯ no zu [Illustration of Kyoto Sanjūsangendo ¯]. Between 1764 and 1772. Collection of the Library of Congress. The archery target can be seen at the end of the veranda Kubo Shunman, Hama-Yumi, and Buriburi-Gitcho, Boy’s Toys, for the New Year Celebration, nineteenth century. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Torii Kiyotomo, Woman with Battledore and Shuttlecock, 1815–1820. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

184

189 191 202

224

235 252 280 286

287 288 290

  List of Figures 

Fig. 10.6

Fig. 10.7

Fig. 10.8 Fig. 10.9

Fig. 10.10 Fig. 10.11 Fig. 10.12

Brush with peacock feathers. Feather-brush with Doran (a kind of medicine case) with a Netsuke of a Rat. Toyota Hokkei, c. 1816. Metropolitan Museum of Art. H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929 Stage one from Ehon takara no itosuji [Picture Book of Brocades with Precious Threads] showing use of feathers. Katsukawa Shunsho and Kitao Masashige 1786. 1917 reprint owned by D.G. Wittner Detail of figured silk jinbaori with peacock feathers. c. 1700–1800. ©Victoria and Albert Museum. Given by T. B. Clarke-Thornhill Writing desk with feather brush. Peacock feathers are partially visible to the left. From the series: Yoshiwara keisei bijin awase jihitsu kagami [The actual mirror of a group of beauties from the Yoshiwara]. 1784. Collection of the Library of Congress. Gift of Crosby Stuart Noyes Kubo Shunman. Courtesan Dreaming of the New Year’s Procession. 1814. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art  Japonesque birthday cards depicting peacock feather and other fans. c. 1884. Publishers Proofs of the Publications of L. Prange & Co. Collection of the New York Public Library  James McNeill Whistler. The Peacock Room. Oil paint and gold leaf on canvas, leather, mosaic tile, and wood. Freer and Sackler Gallery of Art. Gift of Charles Lang Freer

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292

293 298

300 301 306 308

List of Tables

Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 4.4 Table 4.5 Table 4.6 Table 7.1 Table 7.2

EIC proclamation issued by the district collector of Tinnevelly announcing the fishery for fasli 1229 (July 1819–June 1820) Terms of cowle (grant) issued for chank fishing in Tinnevelly for fasli 1217 List of offers made for renting Ramnad chank fishery (1800–01) Names of renters of chank fishery in Tuticorin from 1801 to 1833 List of offers made for renting Tinnevelly chank fishery (July 1819–June 1820) Government’s revenue from chank fisheries conducted in Tinnevelly and Tanjore Mauritius: Malagasy cattle, meat and rice imports, 1824–26 Morondava: Exports in October 1879–October 1880, & 1882 ($ Malagasy) 

105 109 111 112 113 117 196 210

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Investigating Animals, Their Products, and Their Trades in the Indian Ocean World Martha Chaiklin and Philip Gooding

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 1  Martinus Scriblerus, ‘In an essay concerning the origin of sciences’ (1741) seems to be the origin of this idea that thereafter spread widely as fact. This collection of essays and parodies were written by Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and others. It was an attack on pedantry and excessive attention to detail.

M. Chaiklin (*) Historian, Columbia, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected] P. Gooding Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Chaiklin et al. (eds.), Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42595-1_1

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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? 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

2  Thomas Mortimer, A General Dictionary of Commerce, Trade and Manufacture (London: Richard Phillips, 1810), n.p.

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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

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.

3  Gwyn Campbell, Africa and the Indian Ocean World from early times to circa 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 1–21.

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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 4  Jared Diamond, Guns, Germans and Steel (New York: W.W.  Norton & Company, 1997), 86.

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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 5  See, for example, the various works in: Aaron Garrett, ed. Animal Rights and Souls in the Eighteenth Century (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2000), 6 vols. 6  Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species (London: John Murray, 1859); Charles Darwin, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John Murray, 1872). 7  Contemporary critics included Adam Sedgwick, John Herschel, and John Stewart Mill, but also included many anonymous pamphlets and articles. 8  For a summary of existing output in one IOW region, see: Sandra Swart, ‘Animals in African history,’ Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (2019), 1–16. Richard Grove also traces aspects of this ‘environmental consciousness’ to the deeper past. See: Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial expansion, tropical island Edens, and the origins of environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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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 hero.’9 History is a human construct for human knowledge. In an anthropocentric universe, animals are ‘integral to global exchange systems’ like the IOW.10 Through their exploitation, animals affected not just animal-to-animal relationships, but human-to-human ones, too. One of the most significant motives for human interference in the lives of animals, except as food, was for commerce. Moreover, excess comestibles, whether accidental or purposeful, were also traded or sold. Commerce in animals and their parts could significantly impact material cultures far from their place of origin. It showed ‘the commercial, material and symbolic networks’ created through demand in distant markets, physically shaping the contours of human activity.11 Trading patterns were influenced by where animals lived, where they could survive, and locales that lacked the proper habitat. Diplomatic gifts were often used to facilitate trade. Thus, the examination of the human-animal interactions of the IOW with a focus on commerce can help us understand the characteristics of the IOW, the human motivations for these interactions, and the way they affected the various regions and living things in the macro-IOW.

9  Inscription on the wall in Elmira observed by James Huffman. James L. Huffman, Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992), 1. 10  Susan McHugh and Garry Marvin, ‘Human-animal studies  – global perspectives,’ in Human-Animal Studies, eds. Susan McHugh and Garry Marvin, (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 1. 11  Christine Guth, ‘Towards a global history of shagreen,’ in The Global Lives of Things: The material culture of connections in the early modern world, eds. Anner Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016).

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Understanding the IOW Through Trades in Animals and Animal Products Trades in animals and animal products are a relatively understudied feature of IOW historiography. Although individual animals and animal products occasionally feature prominently, they rarely feature as a distinct category of trade. This is somewhat surprising given many animals’ intimate associations with different IOW regions and given commerce’s centrality to early and ongoing IOW historiography.12 Spices, tea, porcelain, and precious metals have received significantly more attention. This is perhaps because it reflects European demand for these products as they first entered the region at the end of the fifteenth century and the somewhat recent conceptualization of the Indian Ocean as a region. Moreover, when animals and their products have been considered an integrated feature of the IOW’s commercial history, they are often either divorced from their condition as living organisms or from living organisms, or they are ornamentation to political events like diplomacy without any centrality to the process. Yet, there are several ways in which a categoric focus on animals, their products, and their trades can elucidate additional layers of historical understanding of the IOW. With regard to trades in live animals around the IOW before the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries, most is known about exchanges of ‘charismatic megafauna’—large animals with symbolic value, such as elephants, ostriches, or giraffes, because of their singular nature.13 Important animal products, meanwhile, included ivory, pearls, rhinoceros’ horns, and tortoises’ shells, which have provided a subtext for commercial interactions in the region.14 The prominence of these animals and products is at least partly a result of the nature of the available archival material. Charismatic 12  See, for example: K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An economic history from the rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Michael N. Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003); Edward A. Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 13  Alan Mikhail, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 109–36; Thomas T. Allsen, The Royal Hunt in Eurasian History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 233–64. 14  Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A history of people and the sea (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 41; Himanshu Prabha Ray, ‘Early maritime contacts between South and Southeast Asia,’ Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 20, 1 (1989), 46; Ian C.  Glover, ‘The archaeological evidence for early trade between South and Southeast Asia’ in The Indian Ocean in Antiquity, ed. Julian Reade (London: Routledge, 2009), 368; Lionel

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megafauna were demanded most significantly by elites, who have historically been the most likely to leave archival traces of their transactions.15 Additionally, keeping charismatic megafauna alive on oceanic voyages was a significant undertaking, requiring as they did food, care, and often more space than other commodities, which could be packed closely together. The logistics involved in this process again led to the creation of documents, which have since been collected into archives. Smaller-scale trades of smaller and domesticated animals or animal products over terrestrial spaces do not feature so prominently in documentary records. Often, they were private undertakings by individuals; or they involved trades in meats or working animals—the kinds of animals and animal products that the general populace needed to survive or to complete everyday tasks. The types of animal and animal product trades we know most about in the deeper past from documentary sources, therefore, were notable for their symbolic rather than their profitable impact. The combination of elite demand and symbolic value led to the presentation of charismatic megafauna and animal products in diplomatic exchanges, in what has since been referred to by Halvard Leira and Iver B. Neumann as ‘beastly diplomacy.’16 Gifting animals could curry favour with peers or stronger regional powers, or project superiority over rivals.17 South Asians exported ivory and pearls to China and an elephant to France via the Middle East during the first millennium CE for these purposes.18 After c.1500, the earliest Europeans in the IOW also gave ‘exotic’ animals of both European and IOW origin to rulers in efforts to gain preferential Casson, The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with introduction, translation, and commentary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 61 15  Thomas R.  Trautmann, Elephants and Kings: An environmental history (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015), 107; Mikhail, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt, 109–36. 16  Halvard Leira and Iver B.  Neumann, ‘Beastly diplomacy,’ The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, 12 (2016), 347–52. 17  Mikhail, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt, 110; Leira and Neumann, ‘Beastly diplomacy,’ 346–9; Erik Ringmar, ‘Audience for a giraffe: European expansionism and the quest for the exotic,’ Journal of World History, 17, 4 (2006), 389–93; Julie E. Hughes, Animal Kingdoms: Hunting, the environment, and power in the Indian princely states (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 123–5. 18  Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The realignment of Sino-Indian relations, 600–1400 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 41, 164; Mikhail, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt, 113–4; Janet Nelson, ‘The settings of the gift in the reign of Charlemagne,’ in The Languages of Gift in the Early Middle Ages, eds. Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 133–4.

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commercial arrangements.19 The recipients of such presents sought to use them as symbols of their authority and prestige, displaying them in menageries and sparking awe from their subjects.20 On the receipt of a giraffe in Ming-dynasty China, for example, the emperor’s ‘officials prostrated themselves before [him] and the animals and offered their congratulations.’21 What is known about early exchanges of animals and animal products in the IOW shows them to be intimately connected to perceptions of and connections between political elites. In some ways, then, early animal and animal product exchanges follow similar patterns to trades in other ‘luxury’ items in which certain goods had what Pierre Bourdieu called ‘symbolic capital.’ This meant that their ownership, display, and distribution was associated with political power, and often led political leaders to seek to restrict their circulation.22 However, rulers had further reasons to limit the circulation of at least some charismatic megafauna. This was because they could be used in war. Rulers in Northeast Africa, the Middle East, and South and East Asia all sought at various times to limit the export of horses, because they could be used as cavalry.23 Also, the use of Indian elephants in war coupled with 19  Michael Gorgas, ‘Animal trade between India and western Eurasia in the sixteenth century – The role of the Fuggers in animal trading,’ in Indo-Portuguese Trade and the Fuggers of Germany, Sixteenth Century, ed. K.S. Mathew (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997), 207; Martha Chaiklin, ‘The merchants ark: Live animal gifts in early modern Dutch-Japanese relations,’ World History Connected, 9, 1 (2012); Ria Winters, ‘The Dutch East India Company and the transport of live exotic animals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,’ (this volume). 20  Ringmar, ‘Audience for a giraffe,’ 392; Mikhail, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt, 110. 21  Ringmar, ‘Audience for a giraffe,’ 392. 22  Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), Ch. 4 and later works; Jane Schneider, ‘Was there a pre-Capitalist world system?,’ Peasant Studies, 6, 1 (1977); Bernd-Stefan Grewe and Karin Hofmeester, ‘Introduction,’ in Luxury in Global Perspective: Objects and practices, 1600–2000, eds. Bernd-Stefan Grewe and Karin Hofmeester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2016), 1–26; Richard Gray and David Birmingham, ‘Some economic and political consequences of trade in central and eastern Africa in the precolonial period,’ in Pre-Colonial African Trade: Essays on trade in central and eastern Africa before 1900, eds. Richard Gray and David Birmingham (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 3; Martha Chaiklin, ‘Imports and autarky: Tortoiseshell in early modern Japan,’ in Luxury in Global Perspective: Objects and practices, 1600–2000, eds. Bernd-Stefan Grewe and Karin Hofmeester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2016), 223–6. 23  Steven Serels, ‘Horses and power in the southern Red Sea region since the seventeenth century,’ (this volume); Simon Digby, War-horse and Elephant in the Delhi Sultanate: A study of military supplies (Oxford: Orient Monographs, 1971), 48–54; R.B.  Azad Choudhary, ‘The Mughal and the trading of horses in India, 1526–1707,’ International Journal of History and Cultural Studies, 3, 1 (2017), 1–18; Trautmann, Elephants and Kings, 213–4;

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their royal symbolism in parts of South Asia probably meant that their circulation was ‘doubly’ restricted. Elephants were at one time symbols of the ‘primacy of the king’ and carriers of humans and weapons to and across the battlefield.24 Both these features meant that they were revered and highly demanded by political elites, but also protected from reaching non-elite or enemy hands. This led, in some cases, to hunts for elephants taking ‘royal’ connotations and meant that gifts of elephants had especially strong diplomatic connotations—of both the recipient’s prestige and of the urgency of gifter’s motives.25 Exchanges of charismatic megafauna, especially those that could also be used in war, were highly symbolic events, and represented power relations between elites in different parts of the IOW. Beyond the archive, work focusing on animals and animal products in the natural sciences can shed light on previously unknown or debated IOW connections. For example, archaeological evidence for animals native to South Asia in East Timor that date from the middle of the third-­ millennium BC gives a tantalizing glimpse into a potentially ancient exchange network that transcended the Bay of Bengal.26 More recently, while examining the ivory trade using a ‘multi-isotope approach,’ Coutu et  al. analysed the chemical composition of surviving ivories and ivory products that emanated from East Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.27 They were able to establish within varying degrees of certainty the provenance of much of the ivory, thereby indicating where elephants were hunted and thus also the degree of connection between those regions and the wider IOW.  They further contended that this method could be applied to older ivories and ivory products.28 Research Hedda Reindl-Kiel, ‘No horses for the enemy: Ottoman trade regulations and horse gifting,’ in Pferde in Asien: Geschichte, Handel Und Kultur, ed. Bert G.  Fragner, Ralph Kauz, Roderich Ptak, and Angela Schottenhammer (Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2009), 43–49; Jos Gommans, ‘The horse trade in eighteenth-century South Asia,’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 37, 3 (1994), 248–50; Xiang Wan, ‘The Horse in Pre-Imperial China’ (Unpublished PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2013). 24  Trautman, Elephants and Kings, 68. 25  Allsen, Royal Hunt, 14–33. 26  Glover, ‘Archaeological evidence,’ 377. 27  Ashley N. Coutu, Julia Lee-Thorp, Matthew J. Collins, and Paul J. Lane, ‘Mapping the elephants of the 19th century East African ivory trade with a multi-isotope approach,’ PLoS ONE, 11, 10 (2016), 1–23. 28  Ibid., 3.

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along these lines could help to resolve a debate about the degree of connection between East Africa’s interior and the wider IOW in the deeper past. In this context, some Africanist scholars have recently contested prevailing trends of IOW historiography that only consider East Africa’s coastal and island regions as integrated parts of the IOW.29 They contend that interior regions of East Africa have had significant connections to East Africa’s Indian Ocean littoral, potentially since antiquity. While there is significant archaeological and linguistic evidence for this, chemical analysis of ivories may—or may not—support their assessments. From c.1700, working animals and ‘bulk’ animal products enter the archive more frequently for some parts of the IOW. Again, this is partly a symptom of the nature of written sources. This process is associated with the increasing prominence of Europeans in the region, who left extensive archival traces in forms such as inventories, letters, missives, and journals. However, it is also a result of a gradual change to the nature of trade across much of the IOW. Plantations on East Africa’s coast and Indian Ocean islands, for example, increased demand for food to feed enslaved people and other workers. This necessitated the exchange of cattle and meat on larger scales than previously.30 Additionally, increased global connectivity gave non-elites access to goods that had previously been reserved for elites. Tortoiseshell in Edo-period Japan, for example, ceased being a rare commodity with an unreliable supply, and became a ‘necessity’ in the eyes of the Japanese consumer through its use in hair ornaments, eye-glass frames, and dildos.31 Similarly, products made of East African ivory, such as piano keys and billiard balls, became widely sought after amongst North America’s and Europe’s middle classes.32 This came hot on the heels of a 29  Felix Chami, ‘Graeco-Roman trade link and the Bantu migration theory,’ Anthropos, 94, 1/3 (1999), 205–15; Chapurukha Kusimba and Jonathan R. Walz, ‘When did the Swahili become maritime?: A reply to Fleisher et al. (2015), and to the resurgence of maritime myopia in the archaeology of the East African coast,’ American Anthropologist, 120, 3 (2018), 429–43; Gwyn Campbell, ‘Africa, the Indian Ocean world, and the ‘early modern’: Historiographical conventions and problems,’ Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies, 1, 1 (2017), 24–37. 30  Gwyn Campbell, ‘Commercialisation of cattle in Imperial Madagascar, 1795–1895,’ (this volume); Helge Kjekshus, Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History: The case of Tanganyika 1850–1950, Second Edition (London: James Currey, 1996), 118–9. 31  Chaiklin, ‘Imports and autarky,’ 218–41. 32  John Frederick Walker, Ivory’s Ghosts: The white gold of history and the fate of elephants (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2009), Ch. 4.

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similar process that occurred in South Asia, in which bangles made from East African ivory were increasingly worn by women of all religious denominations during marriage ceremonies.33 Thus, commerce in certain IOW animals and animal products became increasingly linked to general demand, rather than the demand by political elites. This process has conventionally been associated with the increasing prominence of Europeans and the rise of Capitalism. Indeed, these associations have been given renewed energy in recent years through the conceptualization of the ‘Capitalocene’ in world history. According to Jason W.  Moore, its central proponent, the Capitalocene literally translates as ‘Age of Capital.’ As a framework, it contests theories of the Anthropocene, which trace the beginnings of the current climate crisis to human activities from the mid-eighteenth century, or to the beginning of the industrial revolution in Britain. Capitalocene scholars argue that Anthropocene theories are wrong on two counts. Firstly, they argue that it is not humanity that has instituted the current climate crisis, but a particular set of humans—namely European Capitalists. Secondly, they argue that the structures that underpinned the current climate crisis can be observed through changes in human–environment interaction during the late fifteenth century—namely, an agricultural revolution in Northern Europe and Europeans’ exploitation of resources (human, animal, and other natural) in the wider Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds. In this latter process, they provocatively argue that European Capitalists put distant peoples, environments, and animals to ‘work,’ which denied them their humanity, which thus blurred the human/nature binary. In short, the Capitalocene describes the process through which humans, landscapes, and animals were exploited for European Capitalist expansion from c.1500.34 Although revolutionary for its centring of environmental change in world history over the longue-durée, the Capitalocene builds most notably 33  Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African commercial empire into the world economy, 1770–1873 (Oxford: James Currey, 1987), 78. 34  Jason W. Moore, ‘The Capitalocene Part I: On the nature and origins of our ecological crisis,’ The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44, 3 (2017); Jason W. Moore, ‘The Capitalocene Part II: Accumulation by appropriation and the centrality of unpaid work/energy,’ The Journal of Peasant Studies, 45, 2 (2018); Jason W. Moore, ed. Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, history, and the crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016); Jason W.  Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the accumulation of capital (London: Verso, 2015); Donna Haraway, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making kin,’ Environmental Humanities, 6 (2015), 159-65.

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on Immanuel Wallerstein’s concept of world-systems.35 Both the Capitalocene and world-systems begin in the late fifteenth century, they centre Europe and Capitalism in world history, and they seek to use the past to understand the present. For Wallerstein, the ‘present’ meant the Capitalist world system; for Moore, it is the current climate crisis. Nevertheless, these parallels mean that the Capitalocene can be criticised on similar grounds to world-systems. World historians, particularly of the IOW, were uneasy with world-systems for its centring of Europeans, especially in the early modern period.36 For example, scholars critiqued Wallerstein’s view of Portuguese influence as ‘uncontested hegemons’ in the IOW as being neither historically accurate nor representative of wider European experiences in the IOW.37 One can make similar critiques about Moore’s analysis of the early modern Euro-Capitalist influence on IOW environments. He bases his analysis on the Maluku Islands in southeast Asia, where the Dutch ‘organised the large-scale removal of “unauthorized” clove trees’ to secure a monopoly on the global clove trade.38 This represented a transformation of the environment and human relations for the purposes of European Capitalist exploitation. However, this impact – significant as it was within its locale  – is neither representative of Dutch nor broader European experiences in the wider IOW.  Although they certainly tried, the Dutch were unable (due to production and commercial complexities)  to secure a monopoly on pepper, which was around 25-30 times more valuable than the clove trade.39 Meanwhile, tropical diseases limited the European imprint 35  Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 4 Vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974-2011). 36  Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 327. Wallerstein cites: Vitorino Magalhães-Godhino, L’économie de l’Empire portugais aux XVe et XVIe siècles (Paris : Centre de recherches historiques, 1969). For a summary of the critique, see: Sanjay Subramanyam, ‘Introduction,’ in The Cambridge World History Volume 6, Part 1: The construction of the global world, 1400-1800CE, eds. Jerry H.  Bentley, Sanjay Subramanyam, and Merry E.  Wiesner-Hanks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 11-13. 37  The work of Michael Pearson is key here. See, especially: Michael N.  Pearson, Before Colonialism: Theories on Asian-European relations, 1500-1750 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988); Michael N. Pearson, ‘Introduction: Maritime history and the Indian Ocean World,’ in Trade, Circulation and Flow in the Indian Ocean World, ed. Michael Pearson (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 38  Jason W. Moore, ‘The rise of cheap nature,’ in Anthropocene or Capitalocene, 108. 39  Pearson, Indian Ocean, 146.

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in inland regions.40 European Capitalistic ideas may have spread to the IOW in the early modern period, but their impact was uneven. Centring animals allows for further critiques of the Capitalocene framework in the context of the IOW. This is notable because several examples in the Atlantic world, through the broader structures of the ‘Columbian exchange,’ suggest a degree of cogency.41 The European introduction of livestock to the Americas, for example, is associated with the degradation of arable land, the exploitation of indigenous populations, and the establishment of colonial rule in physical and ideological form.42 This was the animals’ ‘work’ in the construction of broader European-Capitalist structures.43  Similar patterns, however, did not pervade the IOW.  Here, Europeans encountered diverse animals already put to ‘work’ in various capacities and in various conditions. Many IOW populations had been using animal labour in agriculture for centuries before the European arrival, for example – a divergence from the Atlantic world.44 Additionally, in the IOW, when Europeans introduced new animals, they usually did so to supplement or replace the roles of indigenous breeds.45 When they attempted to exploit animals for new purposes in the IOW, they often failed due to the macro-region’s distinct micro-environments and disease profiles, such as with the introduction of elephant, ox-cart, and camel transport in late-nineteenth-century East Africa.46  Instead of a sharp  David Arnold, ‘The Indian Ocean as disease zone, 1500–1950,’ South Asia, 14, 2 (1991).  Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and cultural consequences of 1492, 30th anniversary ed. (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2003). 42  Elinor G.K.  Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental consequences of the conquest of Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How domestic animals transformed early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 43  Erica Fudge, ‘What was it like to be a cow?: History and animal studies,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies, ed. Linda Kalof (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 270-1. 44  For a classic summary of some important innovations, see: Andrew Watson, ‘The Arab agricultural revolution and its diffusion, 700-1100,’ The Journal of Economic History, 34, 1 (1974). 45  William G. Clarence-Smith, ‘The donkey trade of the Indian Ocean world in the long nineteenth century’ (this volume). 46  Karin Pallaver, ‘Donkeys, oxen and elephants: In search for an alternative to human porters in nineteenth-century Tanzania,’ Africa: Rivista trimestrale di studi e documentazione dell’Istituto italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 65, 1-4, (2010); Philip Gooding, ‘Tsetse flies, ENSO, and murder: The Church Missionary Society’s failed East African ox-cart experiment of 1876-78,’ Africa: Rivista semestrale di studi e ricerche, N.S. 1, 2 (2019). 40

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r­upture, analyses of animals in the early modern IOW suggests the creation of ‘hybrid knowledges’  – an intermeshing of European Capitalist and indigenous IOW ideologies, practices, and environments, which moreover occasionally influenced the structures of Capitalism in Europe.47 The sense of IOW resilience versus an expanding Capitalocene further pervades analyses of trades in animals and animal products. The focus on spices and metals in the historiography has led to an overemphasis on European demand as a driver of IOW commercial networks. Animals and animal products, meanwhile, were mostly traded within the IOW, thus necessitating deeper recognition of IOW demand. In this context, Ria Winters sees the Europeans not as the principal agents of animal trades in the IOW, but the ‘couriers’ who helped to facilitate meeting IOW demand.48 Even later in the nineteenth century, when the European presence in most IOW regions was much more established, there was a pervasive reliance of IOW structures. For example, even though industrial America and Europe drove increased global demand for East African ivory during this century, IOW structures were crucial to the trade’s functioning. It was reliant on African hunters and porters, African and Omani traders, and Gujarati financiers—to the extent that Britain mostly chose to import African ivory from India instead of from Africa itself.49 Additionally, natural fluctuations in the Indian Ocean monsoon underpinned human– animal relationships in the IOW.  Droughts are broadly associated with expansions in bushmeat trades, and have at various times decimated pastoralists’ herds, contributing to an expansion in ivory trading in Northeast Africa, and increased demand for war-animals, such as horses, to secure scarce resources.50 IOW populations and environments remained central 47  Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘Trading knowledge: The East India Company’s elephants in India and Britain,’ The Historical Journal, 48, 1 (2005); Anna Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Vijaya Ramadas Mandala, Shooting a Tiger: Big-game hunting and conservation in colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019); John M.  MacKenzie,  The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 169. 48  Ria Winters, ‘The Dutch East India Company.’ 49  Philip Gooding, ‘The ivory trade and political power in nineteenth-century East Africa,’ (this volume). 50  Gufu Oba, Climate Change Adaptation in Africa: An historical ecology (London: Routledge, 2014), Ch. 4; Angela Nyaki, Steven A.  Gray, Christopher A.  Lepczyk, Jeffrey C. Skibins, and Dennis Rentsch, ‘Local-scaledynamics and local drivers of bushmeat trade,’ Conservation Biology, 28, 5 (2014), 1403-14; Marianne Mosberg and Siri H.  Eriksen, ‘Responding to climate variability and change in dryland Kenya: The role of illicit coping

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to animal trades even as European Capitalist influences began to reach their zenith. The result is that applications of the Capitalocene to the IOW and interpretations of its animal and animal product trades appear rather presentist. There is a tone that suggests that developments to the human– nature (or European/Capitalist-nature) relationship in the context of increased European influence post-c.1500 (but especially post-c.1700) inevitably contributed to the current climate crisis. However, this was far from inevitable at the time, especially in the IOW, where European– Capitalist influence was so uneven. Acknowledging this necessitates stressing the vitality of IOW structures in the face of European–Capitalist competition, at least until c.1900. Thus, the increased circulation of ‘bulk’ animals and animal products post-c.1700 should not only be interpreted to be tied to the influence of Europeans and/or Capitalism. There was a deeper history of IOW networks, belief systems, and environments that also influenced animal and animal product trades, which intersected with European Capitalism’s growing influence in the IOW.  Thus, analysis of trades in animals and their products questions the applicability of the Capitalocene, as the latest longue durée interpretation of world history, in the IOW. The human–animal relationship (and by extension the human-­ environment relationship) in the IOW took on distinct forms, underpinning distinct animal trades around and across the macro-region.

The Creatures Depending on one’s definition, taxonomy can be dated back as early as the formation of spoken language, or as deriving from the work of sixteenthand seventeenth-century scientists, most notably Carl Linnaeus. This book has been organized roughly following the principles of modern taxonomy established by those early researchers because they represent both the state of knowledge at the time when most of the material focuses, and they are the basis for contemporary systems of classification. The next guiding principle was environment. All creatures are shaped by their environment. strategies in the politics of adaptation,’ Global Environmental Change, 35 (2015), 545-57; Serels, ‘Horses and power’; Steven Serels, ‘Food insecurity and political instability in the southern Red Sea region during the ‘Little Ice Age,’ 1650-1840,’ in Famines During the ‘Little Ice Age’ (1300-1800), eds. Dominik Collett and Maximilian Schuh (Cham, CH: Springer, 2018), 115-129.

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Moreover, environment impacts many facets of interaction; hunting or farming is quite different on land than in water. The final principle in chapter organization is that domestic animals are followed by wild animals. Wild and domestic forms are usually given different taxonomic designations. While these divisions and differences are not always absolute, domestic animals and wild animals exist in different environments, even within the same physical space. The lives of mules and goats have more in common than either would with an antelope, even though they are all ungulates. Domesticated animals are generally affected more significantly by their contact with humans than wild ones, so they were placed first. In Chap. 2, Ria Winters prefaces this taxonomy with a broad-ranging chapter that examines the role of live wild animals in the Dutch maritime empire. She details exchanges between IOW populations and the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company, VOC), and between VOC officials and Dutch stadholders in the Netherlands. In so doing, she shows not just how important ‘exotic’ animals were for diplomatic purposes and for currying favour among elites, but also how their castoffs exposed non-elites in Europe to the IOW.  Using Mauritius and the dodo as a case study, Winters demonstrates the profound impacts of maritime trade on the environment and displays how European trade resulted in momentous impacts on indigenous fauna and its environment. Samuel Ostroff and Sundar Vadlamudi provide insight into aquatic interactions in the IOW.  They focus on South Asia—specifically to the Gulf of Mannar between present-day southeastern India and northwestern Sri Lanka—to address the contradictions and limits of European power in the region. Ostroff’s analysis (Chap. 3) of pearl fisheries in this region demonstrates that even the rather passive oyster was difficult for humans to conquer for pearl production. At the same time, the obstacles to successful harvesting were used by the British Crown and English East India Company (EIC) to take control of indigenous populations in the guise of caretaking. Territorialization over pearl fisheries was problematic due to the long-held mantra of ‘free sea’ in European circles. Issues of territory, marine resources, and the environment intersected to produce contradictory discourses and a degree of attention in imperial circles that far exceeded potential profitability to be made from the pearl trade. Chapter 4 by Vadlamudi explores chanks (Turbinella pyrum or Xancus pyrum) as the root of some of the frictions caused by the EIC’s attempts to exert authority over indigenous practices. While chank fishers and

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traders used their pre-existing networks and practices to evade colonial regulations, declines in output were used to justify increasing British control. This exploration of chanks speaks to the resilience of IOW productive and commercial practices in the context of the ostensibly regulated, European, imperial world. At the same time, Vadlamudi shows the failure of either system to control the natural world of the wild chanks. The second set of chapters focuses on quadrupeds and their products. Given that quadrupeds are terrestrial animals, it is perhaps unsurprising that terrestrial spaces are given more attention in this portion of the book. Inland and upstream regions feature prominently, thus stressing the importance of such regions to IOW history, which has, up to now, tended to focus on littoral and coastal regions.51 Just like studies of littoral regions, though, ecology and the environment are often key in these histories. But, where wind and currents have bound IOW commercial histories of maritime and littoral spaces, animal diseases, rain, and terrain feature more prominently in upstream and inland histories. These themes are integral factors to each of the histories described, often more so than the arrival of European capitalist influences. It is only from the eighteenth century in eastern and southeastern parts of the IOW and the late nineteenth century in western parts that such influences began to significantly re-shape trades in animals and their products, and human-animal relationships in the IOW therein. Steven Serels in Chap. 5 analyses the trade in horses in the southern Red Sea region (SRSR) in the context of a state/horsepower complex. He argues that until the end of the nineteenth century, horses employed as cavalry were crucial on the battlefield, and were therefore essential for the exertion of political authority. In this context, he builds on the work of Simon Digby and Jos Gommans for South Asia, by noting political restrictions on the horse trade, lest horses fall into enemy hands.52 However, he also explores the limits of this paradigm: firstly by identifying what he refers to as a Pax Equistris between the Sudanese Funj Sultanate and the Ethiopian Empire that enabled relatively peaceful relations and a steady trade of horses; and secondly by exploring the collapse of the s­ tate/horsepower complex and its consequences for human-horse relations in the late 51  Michael N.  Pearson, ‘Littoral society: The case for the coast,’ The Great Circle, 8, 1 (1985), 1-8; Michael N. Pearson, ‘Littoral society: The concept and the problems,’ Journal of World History, 17, 4 (2006), 354; Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 44. 52  Digby, War-Horse and Elephant; Gommans, ‘The horse trade.’

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nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By this stage, centuries of political instability and adverse environmental conditions had contributed to the decimation of horse populations in much of the SRSR.  Meanwhile, European imperial expansion in this period was accompanied by an increased circulation of cheap firearms, which replaced horses as the principal weapon in battle. Since then, horses have taken a more symbolic than practical value amongst ruling elites, though free trade has not resulted in horses being circulated more widely. Chapter 6 by William Gervase Clarence-Smith highlights ecological, practical, and cultural factors that affected donkey trades in the IOW during the long nineteenth century. Donkeys, associated with low-caste status in South Asia and religious distaste in parts of southeast and east Asia, had limited circulation in vast swathes of the IOW. Limited exceptions apply to ‘large whites’ (often referred to as Muscat asses), which were used as mounts by Omani rulers and prominent traders in the Middle East and eastern Africa, and to ‘dark jacks’ imported by Europeans into the IOW from the end of the nineteenth century. These breeds were excepted from social and religious taboos amongst certain populations in the IOW and could be associated with prestige. It is partly for this reason that there are more records referring to trades in these breeds than to trades in common donkeys. This source disparity reflects broader trends in which larger, more prestigious animals are more prominent in the source material than working animals. Nevertheless, Clarence-Smith argues that the circulation of common donkeys likely increased during the nineteenth century. They were highly sought-after as carrying animals by planters in the Mascarenes and East Africa from the beginning of the century, and by European military forces at the end. Increased demand for working animals, itself associated with the spread of Capitalistic influences, necessitated their increased circulation over both maritime and terrestrial spaces. Like Clarence-Smith, Gwyn Campbell in Chap. 7 primarily deals with the nineteenth century in his analysis of cattle in the Merina Empire on the island of Madagascar. He explores a transition in which cattle were at the beginning of the century valued for their ritual importance, to, by the end of the century, being valued for their commercial importance as live cattle, meat, and hides. The crucial human aspects of this history are the rise of the Merina Empire and increased European-driven demand caused firstly by the need to feed plantation slaves in the Mascarenes, and secondly by demand for hides in southeastern and southern mainland Africa and Europe. Campbell situates cattle and their products as integral

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to these broader histories of indigenous and European imperial expansion, and in so doing, demonstrates the importance of animals and animal products to broader IOW histories. Moreover, he notes cattle’s experiences of this transition, noting the cramped conditions and deaths aboard small, condemned trade ships referred to as ‘bullockers.’ The cattle’s protestations on being loaded on these ships speak to the increasingly exploitative and conflictual human-animal relationship as European Capitalistic forces became gradually more established in the region during the nineteenth century. Chapter 8 by Ilicia J. Sprey and Kenneth R. Hall, in examining the deerskin trade from Ayutthaya (in present-day Thailand) and Japan during the seventeenth century, is the first to deal exclusively with the trade of an animal product. They build on several studies of contemporaneous times on, for example, Taiwan and some outer Japanese islands, where the expanded deerskin trade is associated with severe ecological decline. They argue that Ayutthaya offers somewhat of a counterpoint to these studies, as similar levels of habitat destruction and reduction in deer populations do not appear to have occurred there. This is attributable to both the diversity of Ayutthaya’s export economy during the period under review and the robustness of indigenous political structures in the face of European imperial aggression, primarily, in this case, from the VOC. However, during the early-mid eighteenth century, a decline in the value of deerskins on eastern IOW maritime trade routes undermined Ayutthaya’s monarchy, while Europeans significantly diversified their commercial economies, allowing the latter to adapt and to take a more prominent role in the broader region’s economic and political affairs. Nevertheless, in this instance at least, this did not mean increased exploitation of deer in mainland Southeast Asia, as the maritime trade of their skins was no longer profitable. Examination of the impact and consumption of animal parts is continued by Philip Gooding (Chap. 9) in his exploration of the ivory trade in East Africa. He similarly argues that the acquisition and sale of ivory was a key component of political power in nineteenth-century East and Central Africa. In part, by shifting his emphasis from the littoral to the hinterland, Gooding is able to demonstrate how increased consumption in the West was instrumental in re-shaping local power structures by privileging those with access to ivory trade and the economic benefits that it engendered. Commerce in ivory was an adjuvant of human interaction in the IOW, but also brought destruction to indigenous life, both human and pachydermal in a way that has had long-term effects on the IOW.

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Chapter 10 by Martha Chaiklin on peacock feathers in Japan, the only one to focus solely on a bird, acts as the natural conclusion to this volume. While centred on the early modern period, it also charts the longue durée history and contexts of peacocks, their feathers, and their trade in Japanese history. Chaiklin firstly adds to historians’ growing knowledge that questions the extent of Japanese isolation in the early modern period. Flightless and originating in mainland and island South Asia, the presence of peacocks and peacock feathers in Japan at this time necessarily shows that they were there by human agency. Moreover, use of peacock feathers in elite fashions, objects, and activities shows the importance of IOW commercial connections for the construction of Japanese elite materiality. The importance of these connections continued even into the mid-nineteenth century after the opening of treaty ports, consequent expansion of trade, and wider circulation of peacock feathers. The profusion of images of peacock feathers imprinted on a variety of everyday Japanese objects led to peacock feathers forming western images of Japan. Thus, the import of an IOW animal to Japan was integral for wider understandings of Japanese society at a time of increased global interaction. Chaiklin refers to this process as a ‘cycle of import, absorption, appropriation, and re-appropriation.’ This speaks to the centrality of animals to images of the IOW and to the importance of the IOW’s commercial networks therein. To conclude, there is an Arabian proverb that states, ‘once a camel gets his nose in the tent, his body will soon follow.’ While this proverb is usually used with a negative cast, to suggest, something along the lines of ‘give an inch and they’ll take a mile,’ it is the editors hope that this collection will serve as a sort of entry into the tent of the IOW to positively expand our understanding of the relationships between animals, human beings, commerce, and world systems.

Bibliography Anderson, Virginia DeJohn. Creatures of Empire: How domestic animals transformed early America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Allsen, Thomas T. The Royal Hunt in Eurasian History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Alpers, Edward A. The Indian Ocean in World History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Arnold, David. ‘The Indian Ocean as disease zone, 1500–1950.’ South Asia, 14, 2 (1991).

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Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Campbell, Gwyn. ‘Africa, the Indian Ocean world, and the ‘early modern’: Historiographical conventions and problems.’ Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies, 1, 1 (2017). Campbell, Gwyn. Africa and the Indian Ocean World from early times to circa 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Casson, Lionel. The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with introduction, translation, and commentary. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Chaiklin, Martha. ‘The merchants ark: Live animal gifts in early modern Dutch-­ Japanese relations.’ World History Connected, 9, 1 (2012). Chaiklin, Martha. ‘Imports and autarky: Tortoiseshell in early modern Japan,’ in Luxury in Global Perspective: Objects and practices, 1600–2000, eds. Bernd-­Stefan Grewe and Karin Hofmeester. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2016. Chami, Felix. ‘Graeco-Roman trade link and the Bantu migration theory.’ Anthropos, 94, 1/3 (1999). Chaudhuri, K.N. Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An economic history from the rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Choudhary, R.B.  Azad. ‘The Mughal and the trading of horses in India, 1526–1707.’ International Journal of History and Cultural Studies, 3, 1 (2017). Coutu, Ashley N., Julia Lee-Thorp, Matthew J.  Collins, and Paul J.  Lane. ‘Mapping the elephants of the 19th century East African ivory trade with a multi-isotope approach.’ PLoS ONE, 11, 10 (2016). Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and cultural consequences of 1492, 30th anniversary ed. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2003. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of the Species. London: John Murray, 1859. Darwin, Charles. The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. London: John Murray, 1872. Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germans and Steel. New  York: W.W.  Norton & Company, 1997. Digby, Simon. War-horse and Elephant in the Delhi Sultanate: A study of military supplies. Oxford: Orient Monographs, 1971. Fudge, Erica. ‘What was it like to be a cow?: History and animal studies,’ in The Oxford handbook of Animal Studies, ed. Linda Kalof. New  York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Garrett, Aaron ed. Animal Rights and Souls in the Eighteenth Century. 6 vols. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2000. Glover, Ian C. ‘The archaeological evidence for early trade between South and Southeast Asia’ in The Indian Ocean in Antiquity, ed. Julian Reade. London: Routledge, 2009. Gorgas, Michael. ‘Animal trade between India and western Eurasia in the sixteenth century—The role of the Fuggers in animal trading,’ in Indo-Portuguese Trade and the Fuggers of Germany, Sixteenth Century, ed. K.S. Mathew. New Delhi: Manohar, 1997.

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Gray, Richard and David Birmingham. ‘Some economic and political consequences of trade in central and eastern Africa in the pre-colonial period’ in Pre-Colonial African Trade: Essays on trade in central and eastern Africa before 1900, eds. Richard Gray and David Birmingham. London: Oxford University Press, 1970. Grewe, Bernd-Stefan and Karin Hofmeester. ‘Introduction,’ in Luxury in Global Perspective: Objects and practices, 1600–2000, eds. Bernd-Stefan Grewe and Karin Hofmeester. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2016. Gommans, Jos. ‘The horse trade in eighteenth-century South Asia.’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 37, 3 (1994). Gooding, Philip. ‘Tsetse flies, ENSO, and murder: The Church Missionary Society’s failed East African ox-cart experiment of 1876–78.’ Africa: Rivista semestrale di studi e ricerche, N.S. 1, 2 (2019). Grove, Richard. Green Imperialism: Colonial expansion, tropical island Edens, and the origins of environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Guth, Christine. ‘Towards a global history of shagreen,’ in The Global Lives of Things: The material culture of connections in the early modern world, eds. Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Haraway, Donna. ‘Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: Making kin,’ Environmental Humanities, 6 (2015). Huffman, James L. Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2018. Hughes, Julie E. Animal Kingdoms: Hunting, the environment, and power in the Indian princely states. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Kjekshus, Helge. Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History: The case of Tanganyika 1850-1950, Second Edition. London: James Currey, 1996. Kusimba, Chapurukha and Jonathan R. Walz. ‘When did the Swahili become maritime?: A reply to Fleisher et  al. (2015), and to the resurgence of maritime myopia in the archaeology of the East African coast.’ American Anthropologist, 120, 3 (2018). Leira, Halvard and Iver B. Neumann. ‘Beastly diplomacy.’ The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, 12 (2016). Mandala, Vijaya Ramadas. Shooting a Tiger: Big-game hunting and conservation in colonial India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019. MacKenzie, John M. The Empire of Nature: Hunting, conservation and British Imperialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. Magalhães-Godhino, Vitorino. L’économie de l’empire Portugais aux XVe et XVIe siècles. Paris: Centre de recherches historiques, 1969. McHugh, Susan and Garry Marvin. ‘Human-animal studies—global perspectives,’ in Human-Animal Studies, eds. Susan McHugh and Garry Marvin. London and New York: Routledge, 2018.

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McPherson, Kenneth. The Indian Ocean: A history of people and the sea. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993. Melville, Elinor G.K. A Plague of Sheep: Environmental consequences of the conquest of Mexico. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Mikhail, Alan. The Animal in Ottoman Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the accumulation of capital. London: Verso, 2015. Moore, Jason W., ed. Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, history, and the crisis of Capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016. Moore, Jason W. ‘The rise of cheap nature,’ in Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, history, and the crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason W. Moore. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016. Moore, Jason W. ‘The Capitalocene, Part 1: On the nature and origins of our ecological crisis.’ The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44, 3 (2017). Moore, Jason W. ‘The Capitalocene Part II: Accumulation by appropriation and the centrality of unpaid work/energy.’ The Journal of Peasant Studies, 45, 2 (2018). Mortimer, Thomas. A General Dictionary of Commerce, Trade and Manufacture. London: Richard Phillips, 1810. Mosberg, Marianne and Siri H.  Eriksen. ‘Responding to climate variability and change in dryland Kenya: The role of illicit coping strategies in the politics of adaptation.’ Global Environmental Change, 35 (2015). Nelson, Janet. ‘The settings of the gift in the reign of Charlemagne,’ in The Languages of Gift in the Early Middle Ages, eds. Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Nyaki, Angela, Steven A. Gray, Christopher A. Lepczyk, Jeffrey C. Skibins, and Dennis Rentsch, ‘Local-scale dynamics and local drivers of bushmeat trade.’ Conservation Biology, 28, 5 (2014). Oba, Gufu. Climate Change Adaptation in Africa: An historical ecology. London: Routledge, 2014. Pallaver, Karin. ‘Donkeys, oxen and elephants: In search for an alternative to human porters in nineteenth-century Tanzania.’ Africa: Rivista trimestrale di studi e documentazione dell’Istituto italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 65, 1–4, (2010). Pearson, Michael N. ‘Littoral society: The case for the coast.’ The Great Circle, 8, 1 (1985). Pearson, Michael N. Before Colonialism: Theories on Asian-European relations, 1500-1750. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988. Pearson, Michael N. The Indian Ocean. London: Routledge, 2003. Pearson, Michael N. ‘Littoral society: The concept and the problems.’ Journal of World History, 17, 4 (2006). Pearson, Michael N. ‘Introduction: Maritime history and the Indian Ocean world,’ in Trade, Circulation and Flow in the Indian Ocean World, ed. Michael Pearson. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

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Ray, Himanshu Prabha. ‘Early maritime contacts between South and Southeast Asia,’ Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 20, 1 (1989). Reindl-Kiel, Hedda. ‘No horses for the enemy: Ottoman trade regulations and horse gifting,’ in Pferde in Asien: Geschichte, Handel Und Kultur, ed. Bert G. Fragner, Ralph Kauz, Roderich Ptak, and Angela Schottenhammer (Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2009). Ringmar, Erik. ‘Audience for a giraffe: European expansionism and the quest for the exotic.’ Journal of World History, 17, 4 (2006). Schneider, Jane. ‘Was there a pre-Capitalist world system?,’ Peasant Studies, 6, 1 (1977). Scriblerus, Martinus. ‘In an essay concerning the origin of sciences’ (1741). Sen, Tansen. Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The realignment of Sino-Indian relations, 600–1400. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003. Serels, Steven. ‘Food insecurity and political instability in the southern Red Sea region during the ‘Little Ice Age,’ 1650–1840,’ in Famines During the ‘Little Ice Age’ (1300-1800), eds. Dominik Collett and Maximilian Schuh. Cham, CH: Springer, 2018. Sheriff, Abdul. Slaves, Spices & Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African commercial empire into the world economy, 1770–1873. Oxford: James Currey, 1987. Sivasundaram, Sujit. ‘Trading knowledge: The East India Company’s elephants in India and Britain,’ The Historical Journal, 48, 1 (2005). Subramanyam, Sanjay. ‘Introduction,’ in The Cambridge World History Volume 6, Part 1: The construction of the global world, 1400-1800CE, eds. Jerry H. Bentley, Sanjay Subramanyam, and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Swart, Sandra. ‘Animals in African history.’ Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (2019). Trautmann, Thomas R. Elephants and Kings: An environmental history. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015. Walker, John Frederick. Ivory’s Ghosts: The white gold of history and the fate of elephants. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2009. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System, 4 Vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974–2011. Wan, Xiang. ‘The Horse in Pre-Imperial China.’ Unpublished PhD dissertation: University of Pennsylvania, 2013. Watson, Andrew. ‘The Arab agricultural revolution and its diffusion, 700-1100.’ The Journal of Economic History, 34, 1 (1974). Winterbottom, Anna. Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

CHAPTER 2

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

Introduction The geological framework of the Indian Ocean provided the Dutch East India Company (VOC) with two opportunities. On the one hand, it enabled them to introduce natural wonders to society at home, and on the other, they could utilise the resources of the Asian coastal areas as a means for trade. Although commerce, discovery, and the transformation of

I would like to thank Philip Gooding, Martha Chaiklin, and two anonymous reviewers, whose comments improved the manuscript. I thank James C. Armstrong for bringing the conference ‘Trade in Animals and Animal Products in the Indian Ocean World’ held in October 2014 to my attention; the Amsterdam Universiteitsfonds for making my attendance to the conference possible; David Coppoolse for the use of his Natural History Library; Gijs Boink, archivaris, for his assistance; Hans Mulder, curator of the Artis Library of the University of Amsterdam, for the permission to include the images of Jan Velten, Ruud Vlek; Michiel Roscam Abbing, Menno Leenstra, and Dirk J. Tang for details on cargos and ships; and Karel Schoeman (1939–2017) for information on the VOC station at the Cape of Good Hope. © The Author(s) 2020 M. Chaiklin et al. (eds.), Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42595-1_2

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science have proven to be closely intertwined, this chapter focuses on the VOC’s entrepreneurship and what this meant for the animals of the Indian Ocean World (IOW) that they transported.1 In 1596, the crew of the first Dutch fleet experienced what it was like to receive a large exotic bird as a gift. The people of Java had noticed the ships anchored close to their shore and decided to bring them food, fruits, and a live cassowary. This was the first Dutch encounter in the East with an existing tradition of using live animals as diplomatic gifts.2 The bird survived the long journey back to the Dutch Republic. It was displayed in Amsterdam, and eventually ended up in the possession of members of the social upper class.3 When the ventures of the VOC into the IOW became regular, they not only brought back huge cargos of spices but also desirable objects like tropical shells, colourful feathers, elephant teeth (ivory), and more live exotic animals.4 The animals were initially given as gifts to the Princes of Orange, but subsequently received a wider commercial and political interest. To own live exotic animals became a sign of status because they embodied wealth and power that extended to distant lands.5 Animals were a desirable commodity made possible by the Dutch as globalizers in the Indian Ocean.6

1  Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange. Commerce, medicine and science in the Dutch golden age. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 2  Martha Chaiklin, ‘The merchant’s ark: Live animal gifts in early modern Dutch-Japanese relations,’ World History Connected, 9, 1 (2012), 2. 3  Johannes I.  Pontanus, Beschrijvingh der wijdt-vermaarde Koop-stadt Amstelredam (Amsterdam: Jodocus Hondius, 1614), 223, 226–7. 4  Ellinoor Bergvelt, Renée Kistemaker, Roelof van Gelder, K. van Berkel and Hinke Wiggers, De wereld binnen handbereik: Nederlandse kunst- en rariteitenverzamelingen, 1585–1735. (Zwolle: Waanders, 1992), 40–50. 5  Erik Ringmar. ‘The European expansion,’ History of International Relations Cambridge (Open Book Publishers, 2018), 4. 6  Robert Ross, ‘The Dutch as globalizers in the western basin of the Indian Ocean?,’ in Globalisation and the South-West Indian Ocean, eds. Sandra J.T.  Evers and Vinesh Y. Hookoomsing. (Leiden: International Institute for Asian Studies and Réduit: University of Mauritius, 2000), 7.

R. Winters (*) University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

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The VOC not only transported animals to the Dutch Republic but also within their entire Asian trading network. They brought horses from Persia and Arabia to Japan, and Persian chukar partridges and elephants from Ceylon and Siam to Batavia, to name a few. Martha Chaiklin has published extensively about the otherwise little-known subject of the role of the VOC in the transport of live exotic animals.7 Also, in 1999, Roelof van Gelder touched on the subject with his essay ‘Arken van Noach’ (Arks of Noah).8 I will expand on both Chaiklin and van Gelder’s work. Louise Robbins’ Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots with France as her focal point, and Hannah Velten’s book on the English animal merchandise in London, Beastly London, are also of relevance. A comparative study of transportation of live exotic animals by the various European merchant companies has yet to be undertaken. A focus on the VOC and animals offers an understanding of the IOW’s faunal diversity and its meaning as seen by contemporary Dutch culture. For the relation between the ‘East and West Indies’ I have drawn on the philosophical interpretative work of Natalie Lawrence to conceptualize the symbolic views of these animals.9 In the first section of this chapter, I elaborate on the VOC’s logistical system to detail how the trading voyages from the Dutch Republic to the Spice Islands evolved into a simultaneous trade between IOW regions, forming an imaginary transport network. The movement of goods was paralleled by the movement of animals. The second section analyses how the shipping of exotic animals was stimulated by the demand of the Dutch stadholders and how the influx of animals into the Dutch Republic created a commercial demand there for exotic animals. This touches on the specific form of Dutch mercantilism, which was characterised by a civic, republican pride and a society that was generally not very empathetic with the suffering of animals. The third section 7  Martha Chaiklin, ‘Exotic-bird collecting in early-modern Japan,’ in JAPANimals, History and culture in Japan’s animal life, eds. G.M.  Pflugfelder and B.L.  Walker (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, 2005), 125–151; Martha Chaiklin, ‘Ivory in early-modern Ceylon. A case study in what documents don’t reveal,’ International Journal of Asian Studies, 6, 1 (2009), 37–63; Martha Chaiklin, ‘The Merchant’s Ark: Live Animal Gifts in Early Modern Dutch-Japanese Relations,’ World History Connected, 9, 1 (2012). 8  Roelof van Gelder, ‘Arken van Noach,’ in Kometen, monsters en muilezels: het veranderende natuurbeeld en de natuurwetenschap in de zeventiende eeuw, ed. Florieke Egmond (Haarlem: Arcadia, 1999), 35–51. 9  Natalie Lawrence, ‘Assembling the dodo in early modern natural history,’ British Society for the History of Science 48, 3 (2015), 387–408; Natalie Lawrence, ‘Exotic origins: The emblematic biogeographies of early modern scaly mammals,’ Itinerario 39, 1 (2015), 17–43.

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names the various animals that were transported within the VOC’s Indian Ocean network. The fourth and last section focuses on the case of Mauritius. This section explains the fate of an island that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and the impacts on and meanings of the animals that lived on it.

The VOC System The VOC was a joint-stock company formed in 1602 between commercial organizations in six cities of the coastal provinces of Holland and Zeeland. The VOC copied and eventually replaced many of the Portuguese and Spanish operations in the Indian Ocean, who, in the first half of the seventeenth century, were the company’s greatest European rivals. The central board of directors, the Heeren XVII, were seated in Amsterdam. Unlike modern shareholder corporations, the VOC enjoyed certain key powers normally reserved for states. These powers included engaging in diplomatic negotiations with foreign courts, establishing structures of government, claiming territory, and defending and administering that territory as a colony.10 Although the joint venture did not have imperial ambitions, to achieve its main goal—making a profit—the company maintained several bases of operations.11 They had posts in Batavia (now Jakarta), which was its Asian headquarters, the Spice Islands (including Ambon, the Moluccas, and the Banda Islands), and areas towards the north-east at the coasts of the South and East China Seas, as far as the island of Deshima in Nagasaki Harbor. West of Batavia, the VOC maintained trading posts in Ceylon, and the east and west coasts of India, Persia, and Arabia. Until the mid-seventeenth century, the fleets on their way to and from Asia halted at the island of Mauritius to take in fresh supplies. After 1652, when the VOC built a fort and a vegetable garden at the Cape of Good Hope, the ships made mandatory stops there.12 At least 1821 Dutch ships, built or hired in the Dutch Republic, sailed the Atlantic and Indian Ocean between 1595 and the dissolution of the  Femme S.  Gaastra, Geschiedenis van de VOC.  Opkomst, bloei en ondergang (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2012), 17–22. 11  See also: Benjamin Schmidt. ‘Inventing exoticism. The project of Dutch geography and the marketing of the world, circa 1700,’ in Merchants and Marvels, eds. Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen (London: Routledge, 2002) 356. 12  Robert Parthesius, Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters. The development of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) shipping network in Asia 1595–1660 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 33–41. 10

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VOC in 1798.13 Hundreds of these ships and additional ones built at their Asian stations or captured from rivals operated in the intra-Asian trade.14 At the time of their founding, the VOC had based their trading activities on European products, but soon found out there was little interest in Asia for many of these items. As a solution, the VOC adopted and adapted existing local trading patterns, which was called country trade. The Dutch ships moved Indian Ocean products between East and West Asian countries, making efficient use of the monsoons and exploiting the differentiation of ships in their fleet that allowed them to trade all year round.15 They became the European couriers of the IOW. The Indian Ocean network provided the VOC with cargo for the European market. The system for the organization of the return fleets and the intra-Asian system met in Batavia. The VOC traded in hundreds of products, but some of the most profitable ones were spices: pepper, nutmeg, coffee, sugar, cloves, mace, and cinnamon. Other culturally significant products included saltpetre, silk, indigo, aloe, diamonds, silver, copper, gold, animal skins, and other animal products.16 Exotic objects 13  Jaap R.  Bruijn, Dutch-Asiatic shipping in the 17th and 18th centuries, I (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 54. The number of 1821 consists of 1461 ships that were built in VOC shipyards, another 120 that were probably built in VOC shipyards, 87 ships that were purchased from another company, 95 hired, 6 that were either hired or purchased, and 52 ships owned by the Voorcompagnieën. 14  Erik Odegard, ‘Timmeren te Cochin. Scheepsbouw op de VOC-scheepstimmerwerf in Cochin,’ Tijdschrift voor zeegeschiedenis 36, 2 (2017), 22–39; Parthesius, Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters, 2–3; Van Gelder, ‘Arken van Noach,’ 38; Gaastra, Geschiedenis van de VOC, 46; Els M. Jacobs, Koopman in Azië. De handel van de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie tijdens de achttiende eeuw (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2000), 209; Matthias van Rossum, ‘Sampans, hout en slaven. De overzeese infrastructuur voor scheepsbouw en –onderhoud van de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie in Zuid en Zuidoost-Azië,’ Tijdschrift voor zeegeschiedenis 36, 2 (2017), 5. 15  Parthesius, Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters, 80, 162–3, 168. Parthesius counted 11,507 ship movements made by 1058 ships that took part in the VOC’s Asian trading network from 1595 until 1660. In contrast, he counted only 1368 ship movements from Asia to the Netherlands in the same period (3, 162). Some of the ships, like the Tienhoven, just stayed in Asia and never sailed back to the Netherlands (Van Rossum, ‘Sampans, hout en slaven,’ 5). 16  Wim Wennekes, Gouden handel, de eerste Nederlanders overzee, en wat zij daar haalden (Amsterdam: Olympus pockets, 2007). Many examples of animal skins and products can be found in the Deshima daghregisters. For example, the VOC office in Japan ordered, in 1646, 35 rhinoceros horns, in 1647, 22 elephants teeth, in 1652, elephant fat and spleen, and in 1672, 500 cow and buffalo hides and 1000 big buffalo horns. See: L. P. Blussé and C. Viallé. The Deshima dagregisters: their original tables of contents Vol. XII (Leiden: Centre for the History of European Expansion, 2005).

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such as Chinese porcelain, Japanese lacquerware, Indian bows and arrows, ostrich eggs, bezoar stones, turtle shields, and shells supplemented the main cargo.17 Additionally, VOC soldiers and sailors brought parrots and monkeys as pets or to sell or give away.18 Each year, all VOC stations submitted to the central offices a list of ‘eischen’ (requisitions) for products that they wished to import into their local market, either to sell, to use for domestic activities, or to exploit as gifts.19 In 1623 the Heeren XVII issued a list of products they wanted the VOC to bring back to Holland (Fig. 2.1). One item stands out on this list: the board’s request to bring back ‘rare gedierten’ rare animals. Although they listed rare animals, the request specified birds. The VOC servants were summoned to diligently go and find some beautiful, rare birds in the Moluccas, Ambon, and Banda that were not well-known in Holland. All expeditions were supposed to transport rare birds and to keep them in good condition.20 The request for rare birds is listed in a series of other precious objects, like diamonds and ivory. It is probable that, at the time, the VOC’s interest in them was for their commercial or diplomatic value, rather than any interest in exoticism within the company. That interest came from the rich and powerful at home. Evidence for this comes from a gift of a rare bird to Prince Maurits of Orange (1667–1625), who held the position of stadholder (see below). In 1614 Maurits was given a live cassowary by shipmaster Willem Jacobsz (Fig. 2.2).21 Not much is known about the history of this bird, but its presence in the seventeenth century has left a longer-­ term imprint on The Hague, Maurits’ home town. At the corner of what

17  Ellinoor Bergvelt et al., De wereld binnen handbereik: Nederlandse kunst- en rariteitenverzamelingen, 1585–1735 (Zwolle: Waanders, 1992), 39–40. 18  Van Gelder, ‘Arken van Noach,’ 38–39; Videke Roeper and Roelof van Gelder, In dienst van de compagnie. Leven bij de VOC in honderd getuigenissen [1602–1799] (Amsterdam: Athenaeum – Polak & Van Gennep, 2002), 264. 19  Florike Egmond. ‘Precious nature: Rare naturalia as collector’s items and gifts in early modern Europe,’ in Luxury in the Low Countries. Miscellaneous reflections on Netherlandish material culture, 1500 to the present, ed. Rengenier C. Rittersma (Brussels: Pharo Publishing, 2010), 51. 20  NL-HaNA, VOC, 1.04.02, inv.nr. 5001, unfoliated. My translation. 21  Crispijn van den Queborn made an engraving of this bird: Casuaris, meegebracht door Willem Jacobsz. uit Oost-Indië en geschonken aan prins Maurits, engraving, printed on paper (Amsterdam: Claes Jansz. Visscher, 1614 or 1615).

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Fig. 2.1  A rare instruction written in 1624 from the central management of the VOC (Heeren XVII), with the request to bring back rare animals—‘Rare gedierten’—on the ships. The heading is captured in the rectangular outline. National Archive, The Hague. NL-HaNA, VOC, 1.04.02, inv.nr. 5001, unfoliated manuscript

today is Museum Mauritshuis, there is a street named Casuariestraat.22 The Indian Ocean bird has been commemorated on an indigenous walkway in Holland.

IOW Animals for the Stadholders and the Citizens of the Dutch Republic The function of stadholder originates from the Middle Ages, when the French ruling aristocrats needed local governors to exercise power and to negotiate with the urban patriciate. They were called stadhouders, or 22  Ria Winters, Exotische dieren in historisch Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), 123.

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Fig. 2.2  Engraving of a cassowary by Crispijn van den Queborn, approx. 1614. The bird was a gift of shipmaster Willem Jacobsz to Prince Maurits of Orange. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, inv.nr. RP-P-OB-79.498

keepers of the city (in English: stadholders, also spelled as stadtholders). During the Spanish Habsburg Empire, the Spanish King maintained the function of stadholders as mediators. After Dutch independence at the end of the sixteenth century, the young republic eschewed a king but did need a role that resembled one, especially when the ships of the VOC arrived in the IOW, where many of the nations they encountered had kings. The States-­General kept the function of stadholder as a civil appointment. The Holland stadholders were traditionally men of the House of Orange, who carried the title of Prince, owing to their estates elsewhere. Officially, the stadholder had little influence over state matters and could in theory be dismissed. Unofficially, he had, depending on his personality, the power of kings. The stadholders behaved like royals and built palaces in and near The Hague, inspired by the residence in Versailles of Louis XIV. Some of them, like Maurits (1567–1625) and Frederik Hendrik (1584–1647), were commanders of the army and naval fleet. The VOC, being a mix of private

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and state enterprise, made the stadholders the supreme commanders of the Company.23 The stadholders were in the position to request that the shipmasters bring them exotic animals, who were expensive to keep on the ships and competed with the crew for drinking water. On the other hand, shipmasters who wished to maintain a good relationship with the stadholders were in the position to decide that exotic animals had to get a place on the ship, so they could be given as gifts. When Maurits was stadholder, the Dutch were politically divided in two camps: those for the House of Orange, and those against. Maurits had his civil counterpart, the Grand Pensionary Johan van Oldenbarneveldt, who was loyal to the stadholder but had different political and religious views, executed.24 You were either Maurits’ friend or not. The giving of gifts in this political environment could help maintain good relations and demonstrate loyalty. Little is known about the menagerie that stadholder Maurits may have had, though documents show glimpses of his interest in exotic animals. Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the VOC’s first governor general in Batavia, brought him a leopard in 1623. In December of that same year, Coen reported in a letter to the office of Batavia that Maurits had requested an elephant and a cockatoo. Maurits died in 1625. It is unknown if the latter order was completed.25 Maurits’ successor and half-brother Frederik Hendrik also took an interest in collecting exotic animals. He kept them in a menagerie at his castle Huis ter Nieuburgh, not far from The Hague. In 1629, the VOC took several Asian animals on board for him: speckled deer, a wild goat, two cockatoos, a young elephant, and two Suytlantse catten (cats of the South land).26 Historian Michiel Roscam Abbing has proposed these cats were tiger quolls (Dasyurus maculates) from Australia. Unfortunately, the animals of 1629 perished during a fire on the ship Dordrecht, and so there is no way to know for certain.27 In July 1633, a new batch of IOW animals—an elephant, a leopard, a deer, and a cassowary—arrived in Amsterdam. The VOC may have had 23  Maarten Prak, The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century. The golden age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 29, 33, 78. 24  Ibid., 61–3. 25  Michiel Roscam Abbing, Rembrandts olifant. In het spoor van Hansken (Amsterdam: Leporello Uitgevers, 2016), 14, 17. 26  Willem Ph. Coolhaas, Generale Missiven van gouverneurs-generaal en raden aan heren XVII der verenigde oostindische compagnie, deel 1, 1610–1638 (’s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1960), 277. 27  Roscam Abbing, Rembrandts olifant, 15.

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animal sheds at its harbour, but there was no room for the animals that arrived that year.28 The city council had them placed in an empty glass factory on the Kloveniersburgwal in Amsterdam. The animals were exhibited to the public for a while, before being moved to the stadholder’s estate. The deer did not survive because the elephant, a three-year-old female from Ceylon, crushed it. The leopard, meanwhile, killed the cassowary. Obviously, the caretakers had little experience with looking after wild animals. Three years later Frederik Hendrik gave the elephant to his cousin Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, who took a deep interest in the natural world. Johan Maurits was sent as governor to the Dutch colony in Brazil and had the Brazilian flora and fauna depicted by several artists.29 When he departed to Brazil, he sold the elephant for 8000 guilders to a man who travelled with her through Europe for twenty years. The elephant was known as ‘Hansken.’ Thousands of people came to see her performing tricks. Hansken was a much-loved animal, but paintings and sketches show her outgrown toenails and bloated belly, caused by living in unnatural surroundings and by consuming too much hay fodder. She died of a fever caused by an infection in her feet.30 Hansken represents the way the animals suffered due to the ignorance of the humans who possessed them. In the following decades, several shipments of animals were transported to Holland to stock the menageries of stadholders Willem III, IV, and V.31 An example of a large ‘animal ship’ was the Westvriesland, one of the VOC’s largest Indiamen, that set sail in 1651 from Batavia. Besides a huge cargo of spices and textiles, it carried two young rhinoceroses from Siam, four deer, three young eagles, fifty monkeys, and several parakeets and parrots. There was also livestock for consumption on board: 200 pigs, 8 cows, 80 sheep, 50 goats, 600 chickens, 300 ducks, 60 geese, 25 Indian fowl, and 200 small Indian chickens. The two young rhinoceroses died

28  Eric Baratay and Elizabeth Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo: A history of zoological gardens in the West (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 33. 29  Mariana de Campos Françozo. De Olinda a Holanda. O gabinette de curiosidades de Nassau. Campinas: Unicamp. 2014. 30  Roscam Abbing, Rembrandts olifant, 7–12, 117. 31  Willem III was stadholder from 1672 until 1702. From 1701 until 1747 the StatesGeneral did not appoint a stadholder. Willem IV was stadholder from 1747–1751; Willem V was stadholder from 1766–1795 (from 1751 until 1766 appointed governors ruled in Willem’s V name because of his young age).

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halfway through the journey.32 In 1677, another homeward-bound fleet brought a new rhino, but he also died on the way, and the preserved skin was donated to Leiden University.33 Nevertheless, in the 1680s, stadholder Willem III started a menagerie near the estate ‘Oude Loo’ in the province of Gelderland, in the east of the country.34 The collection initially consisted mainly of pheasants and other birds. Willem IV continued the menageries of previous stadholders and kept mammals at his castle, The Loo, in Voorburg near The Hague; recorded in 1749 are several South African animals, such as quaggas (Equus quagga) and two eland antelopes (Taurotragus oryx). They were shipped to Holland by the governors of the Cape of Good Hope.35 Princess Anna, mother of Willem V, erected a larger menagerie in 1756, at their smaller estate, the Kleine Loo, also in Voorburg. This private zoo became an important animal collection. Travellers, like the French ornithologist François Levaillant, who occasionally gained access to the zoo, praised its size and diversity.36 No detailed catalogue of the zoo’s inhabitants remains, but from the publications of the director of the menagerie, Arnout Vosmaer, we know what type of animals they were.37 Between 1758 and 1780, the following African animals were shipped from the Cape of Good Hope and made it alive to Vosmaer’s menagerie: a cape hyrax (Procavia capensis), a Cape genet (Genetta tigrina), a southern bald ibis (Geronticus calvus), a Secretary bird (Sagittarius serpentarius), a greater kudu (Tragelaphus strepsiceros), a male and female white-tailed gnu (Connochaetes gnou), a springbok (Springbok Antidorcas marsupialis), 32  Jean Guidon de Chambelle and Dirk van der Cruysse, eds. Mercenaires français de la VOC: la route des Indes hollandaises au XVIIe siècle. Le journal de Jean Guidon de Chambelle, 1644–1651, suivi en annexe de la relation d’un voyage aux Indes orientales par un gentilhomme français, 1630–1636 (Paris: Chandeigne, 2003), 171. 33  NL-HaNA, VOC, 1.04.02, inv.nr. 240. Resolutions of the VOC Chamber Amsterdam on July 13 and 29, 1677. 34  Kees Rookmaaker, The Zoological Exploration of Southern Africa, 1650–1790 (Rotterdam: Balkema, 1989), 120. 35  Arnout Vosmaer, Beschryving van eene fraaije Oost-indische papegaay-soort, de groote purper-roode loeri genaamd (Amsterdam: Pieter Meijer, 1769), 5, 6, 10; Hendrik Engel en Pieter Smit, Hendrik Engel’s alphabetical list of Dutch zoological cabinets and menagerie (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986), 163; Karel Schoeman, Hoogty: die opbloei van ’n koloniale kultuur aan die Kaap, 1751–1779 (Pretoria: Protea Boekhuis, 2014), 32–34. 36  Bert C. Sliggers and A.A. Wertheim, eds., Een vorstelijke dierentuin. De menagerie van Willem V (Haarlem: Teylers Museum, 1994), 50. 37  Rookmaaker, The Zoological Exploration of Southern Africa, 120.

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an eland antelope, two quaggas, and a warthog.38 The warthog was accompanied by a dried skin and skull of the same species. Based on the live specimen and the remains, zoologist Peter Simon Pallas made the first scientific description of the species known as the desert warthog (Phacochoerus aethiopicus) in 1766.39 The menagerie also housed several other IOW animals: an Indian antelope (Antilope cervicapra), a greater slow loris (Nycticebus coucang), two Asian elephants, a young female orangutan from Borneo (the first recorded living specimen imported into Europe), two Seychelles blue pigeons (Alectroenas pulcherrimus), and a parrot.40 The parrot’s species was later named after his caretaker, Vosmaer: Eclectus roratus vosmaeri. The watercolour that Vosmaer made of this bird became the iconotype for the Eclectus parrot species.41 The orangutan did not survive long. Vosmaer bought parsley and strawberries for her to eat, but it was to no avail: she died within a year after her arrival. Willem V had her portrait painted at least twice by his court painter Tethart Philipp Christian Haag (1737–1812).42 One of them, large, realistic, and captivating because of the anthropomorphic imagery in it, is now in the collection of the Museum

38  Arnout Vosmaer, Natuurkundige beschryving eener uitmuntende verzameling van zeldsaame gedierten, bestaande in Oost- en Westindische viervoetige dieren, vogelen en slangen, weleer leevend voorhanden geweest zynde, buiten den Haag, op het Kleine Loo van Z.D.H. den prins van Oranje-Nassau (Amsterdam: J.R. Elwe, 1804). For the Latin binominal names, see: Rookmaker, The Zoological Exploration of Southern Africa, 120–7. 39  Florence F.J.M.  Pieters, Wonderen der natuur. In de menagerie van Blauw Jan te Amsterdam, zoals gezien door Jan Velten rond 1700 (Amsterdam: Artis Library of the University of Amsterdam, 1998). 40  Sliggers and Wertheim, eds. Een vorstelijke dierentuin, 70, 83, 95; Vosmaer, Beschryving van eene fraaije Oost-indische papegaay-soort, 1–10. Concerning the two pigeons: It was formerly believed that the depicted birds in the menagerie of stadholder Willem V were Mauritius Blue Pigeons (Tuijn 1969; Winters 2011, 12–15) but a recently discovered source necessitates changing this interpretation: The pigeons were in fact Seychelles Blue Pigeons. See: Paul Knolle and Ruud Vlek. ‘Aquarellen van vogels, andere dieren en planten,’ in Een koninklijk paradijs. Aert Schouman en de verbeelding van de natuur, eds. Charles Dumas and Sander Paarlberg (Dordrecht: Dordrechts Museum and WBooks, 2017), 271. 41  Florence Pieters, ‘The menagerie of the white elephant in Amsterdam, with some notes on other 17th and 18th century menageries in The Netherlands,’ in Die Kulturgeschichte des Zoos, eds. Ed. Hg. v. Lothar Dittrich, D. v. Engelhardt and A. Rieke-Müller (Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2001), 60. 42   The other, showing the ape eating strawberries, is in the Braunschweigisches Landesmuseum.

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Mauritshuis.43 The young hominid is pictured upright, near another exotic Asian animal, a golden pheasant, pulling down a branch to reach an apple while she stares straight at us, from behind a shining layer of varnish, with a questioning gaze. The artist may have intended to portray the orangutan offering the apple of sin to us humans. Little is known of the caretaking techniques used to keep IOW exotic animals alive in the frosty Dutch winters of the ‘little ice age,’ though they were almost certainly inadequate.44 Still, Hansken lived for another twenty years after her arrival.45 Sara, an Indian rhino that arrived in 1704  in Amsterdam, lived for eighteen years while being shown in towns throughout Europe.46 Very few sources reveal details about the care given to animals in transport—the few that do show good intentions. For example, in 1628, Austrian Christopher Fernberger sailed to Holland, after having lived in Batavia for several years with the VOC with a leopard, a cockatoo, a lory, three other parrots, and three monkeys.47 He paid the ship’s cook hundred rijksdaalders to look after the animals and fifty rijksdaalders to a sailor who specifically looked after the leopard. A servant and a slave cared for the other animals. The leopard made it alive and well to Holland but was promptly confiscated on arrival in the name of stadholder Frederik Hendrik.48 Fernberger offered the lory, the only other survivor, as a gift to the Queen of Austria.49 According to Vernon N. Kisling, 50 per cent of the animals died while being transported to Europe, but the actual percentage may have been higher.50 The causes of mortality were diverse. One was ignorance: people did not know how to feed the animals properly. Other causes were inherent to the nature of the animal species, or to the character of individual 43  Adriaan van der Burg, ‘Een Orang oetan uit de menagerie van stadhouder Willem V’ (1777), oil on canvas 174 x 110.5 cm: Koninklijk Kabinet van Schilderijen Mauritshuis, Den Haag, inv.nr. 813. 44  Jan Buisman and A.F.V. van Engelen, Duizend jaar weer, wind en water in de Lage Landen, Vol. 4, 1575–1675 (Franeker: Van Wijnen, 2000), 314–30. 45  Roscam Abbing, Rembrandts olifant, 15. 46  Winters, Exotische dieren in historisch Amsterdam, 148–51. 47   Roelof van Gelder, Het Oost-Indische avontuur. Duitsers in dienst van de VOC (1600–1800) (Nijmegen: SUN, 1997), 20, 290. 48  Karl R.  Wernhart, Christoph Carl Fernberger. Der erste Österreichische Weltreisende (1621–1628) (Münster: Lit Verlag Dr. W. Hopf, 2011), 134. 49  Ibid., 75. 50  Vernon N. Kisling, Zoo and Aquarium History. Ancient animal collections to zoological gardens (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2001), 32.

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animals. Some could handle the stress of being confined in a small space on an ever-moving ship for six to eight months; others could not. Cassowaries survived quite well; ostriches did not. Primary sources show little evidence that VOC servants on sea or land and Dutch civilians in towns had much sympathy with animals that suffered and died at their hands. They appreciated animals for their economic value and showed interest and admiration for their exoticness, but there was no engagement in the animal as a being that could feel pain. This general lack of empathy is embedded in the perception that originates from the theological point of view that animals are created by God for the use of humankind.51 The seventeenth-century Dutch lived according to the dogma that man had the full right to exploit animals any way they wanted.52 Over the course of the seventeenth century, the Dutch demand for exotic animals began to include the Amsterdam bourgeoisie. The arrivals of exotic animals in Dutch harbours and their gifting to stadholders stimulated a commercial demand.53 The wonders of nature were part of the Dutch craving for conspicuous consumption. Rich merchants built estates on reclaimed land outside Amsterdam and alongside the river Vecht. An aviary with exotic birds became a sign of status. From c.1675 onwards, Amsterdam had a famous establishment for animal trade within its walls. The menagerie in the backyard of the inn Blauw Jan at the Kloveniersburgwal (a hundred meters from the empty glass factory) was an important source of supply for exotic animals until 1784. The archives unfortunately contain little evidence as to where the innkeepers acquired their animals, but taking into account that the VOC maintained a trade monopoly in the East (which left little room for other traders), the VOC or its servants are likely to have played a central role. There is no evidence yet of other seafarers delivering  Peter Singer. Animal liberation. A new ethics for our treatment of animals (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), 202–214; Karl A.E. Enenkel and Paul J. Smith, ‘Introduction,’ in Early Modern Zoology. The construction of animals in science, literature and the visual arts, 7.1, eds. Karl A.E. Enenkel and Paul J. Smith (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 2; Susanne Hehenberger, ‘Dehumanised sinners and their instruments of sin. Men and animals in early modern bestiality cases, Austria 1500–1800,’ in Early Modern Zoology. The construction of animals in science, literature and the visual arts, 7.1, eds. Enenkel and Smith (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 383; Louise Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic animals in eighteenth-century Paris (Baltimore, London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2002), 187–188. 52  Karel Davids, Dieren en Nederlanders. Zeven eeuwen lief en leed (Utrecht: Matrijs, 1989), 24, 27, 47–8. 53  Simon Schama. The Embarrassment of Riches. An interpretation of Dutch culture in the golden age (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 297. 51

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Fig. 2.3  Zebu, gouache by Jan Velten, Amsterdam, approx. 1700. Artis Library of the University of Amsterdam, Collection Jan Velten, inv.nr. 17R

IOW animals, straight from the Indian Ocean, to the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries.54 Visitors to the Kloveniersburgwal inn could watch the animals if they bought something to drink or paid a small entrance fee. One of the regular visitors was Amsterdam citizen Jan Velten, who drew and painted the animals he saw there (Fig. 2.3). The likely goal of his album, kept as a collection of separate leaves in the Artis Library of the University of Amsterdam, was to show it for money.55 Velten’s art is an important source for research on the presence of exotic animals in historic Amsterdam, like the zebu (Bos 54  Occasionally animals arrived over land, such as in the instance of the African elephant of 1594 that was observed in Holland. See: Gisbert Brom and L.A. van Langeraad, eds. Arend van Buchel, Diarium (Amsterdam: Werken van het Historisch Genootschap 3, 21, 1907), 358. Also, there is the well-known story of Zarafa, the giraffe, who made it in 1827 after a journey of almost 3000 miles, via the Nile and the Mediterranean Sea and partly over land, to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. See: Michael Allin, A Giraffe’s true story, from deep in Africa to the heart of Paris (London: Headline, 1999). 55  A similar manuscript about fish, written and illustrated by the son of a Dutch fisherman, Adriaen Coenen (1514–87), has also survived and testifies to the wide social range of early modern interest in nature. Egmond, ‘Precious Nature,’ 55–56. The Dutch interest was generally inspired by an admiration for the diversity of God’s creation.

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taurus indicus), a subspecies of domestic cattle originating in South Asia depicted here.56 Velten may have been a sailor before he settled in Amsterdam and was apparently self-taught, but his album, which he worked on from at least 1695 to 1709, was drawn with sufficient detail to make it possible for modern researchers to identify many of the animals.57 In between Jan Velten’s drawings, two pamphlets with woodcut illustrations have been preserved. They are advertisements for contemporary ‘pop-up’ animal exhibits. One is of a live lowland tapir exhibited in 1704 at the White Elephant Inn, at the present-day Rembrandtplein in Amsterdam. The other pamphlet dates from the same period and advertises a live Asian water monitor Varanus salvator and a stuffed Indian pangolin Manis crassicaudata. The pangolin had been killed by its captor, a VOC employee en route to Amsterdam, because of its wrathful nature: After it was chained, it dug through the stone floor of a building.58 Lawrence has offered the interpretation that the pangolin, with its almost indestructible scales and fearsome digging claws, represented the dangers and threats of the potentially defiant colonised indigenous people.59 However, the pamphlet’s author states, ‘The meat is like the meat of a pig, it is very good to eat, is sweet and medicinal.’60 The word ‘medicinal’ indicates a transmission from Eastern knowledge, but above all this line points to a dominant attitude towards the pangolin. Rather than the dichotomy of ferocity by the colonisers and their fear of the colonised that Lawrence noted, it

56  Sálim Ali Prater, The book of Indian animals (Bombay: Bombay Natural History Society, 1965), 240. 57  Classification has been done in the beginning of the 1990s by zoologist Dr. Peter J.H. van Bree (1927–2011) and biologist Huub Veldhuijzen van Zanten. 58  Collection ‘Album van Jan Velten,’ Artis Library. Inv.nrs. Jan Velten 254R, 149R; Florence F.J.M. Pieters, ‘De dieren in de menagerie ‘De Witte Oliphant’ te Amsterdam zoals gezien door Jan Velten rond 1700,’ in Over beesten en boeken. Opstellen over de geschiedenis van de diergeneeskunde en de boekwetenschap, eds. Koert van der Horst et  al. (Rotterdam: Erasmus Publishing, 1995). 188–190, 192–193. 59  Lawrence, ‘Exotic origins: The emblematic biogeographies,’ 24, 27–28. 60  Collection ‘Album van Jan Velten,’ Artis Library. Inv.nrs. Jan Velten 149R.  My translation.

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represents the view that an animal, especially at a time of food shortage,61 was primarily for consumption.

The VOC’s Animal Transport Within the Indian Ocean Trading Network The VOC and some of its servants also transported animals around the IOW. Letters of VOC servants have left traces of terrestrial animals that made maritime crossings aboard VOC ships. In the 1680s German baker Martin Wintergerst reported that the parrot he acquired at the bird market in Batavia refused to learn how to speak. He did, however, manage to sell it in Surat for a profit.62 Wintergerst was an example of an individual who took one or two single animals for personal gain aboard their ships. Similarly, the company carried horses, birds, and dogs around various IOW regions. For example, while the VOC exported silk from Persia, they also took indigenous animals. When the company imported products to Persia, they brought animals from other IOW regions. Batavia served as a way-station. According to François Valentijn, the VOC maintained shelters for exotic animals near the Batavian fort for this purpose.63 The largest animals that the VOC transported were elephants. In addition to the established trade of tuskers from Bengal in exchange for rice, local directors had them shipped occasionally from Siam and Ceylon to Batavia, using converted Indiamen that had already done their service on the longdistance voyages and were over the top of their value.64 These elephants  See also: Robbins, Elephant Slaves, 11.  Van Gelder, ‘Arken van Noach,’ 38. 63  François Valentijn, Oud en nieuw Oost-Indiën, vervattende een naaukeurige en Uitvoerige Verhandelinge van Nederlands Mogentheyd in die Gewesten, benevens eene wydluftige Beschryvinge der Moluccos, Amboina, Banda, Timor, en Solor, Java, en alle de Eylanden onder dezelve Landbestieringen behoorende, IV (Dordrecht: Johannes van Braam, 1726), 238. The VOC also kept exotic animals in their menagerie in Cape Town and other locations (Schoeman, Here & boere, 71). 64  G.J.  Engelsman, De olifantenhandel op Ceylon. De invloed van de bevelhebbers op de verkoop en prijzen in de periode 1658–1710 (Leiden: Leiden University, 1996), 32–4, 38. See also Chandra R. De Silva, ‘Peddling trade, elephants and gems: Some aspects of Sri Lanka’s trading connections in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century,’ in Asian Panorama, eds. K.M.  De Silvia and C.R.  Desilva (Colombo, Vikas Publications, 1990). The VOC also shipped elephants over water when the animals had to be transported from Galle to the elephant market in Jaffna. On those occasions the VOC used Asian, flat bottomed boats. 61 62

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were meant as gifts, not as trade. Elephant cargos varied from one to twelve, but mostly it was just one, two, or three. In April 1644, nine elephants were shipped from Ceylon to Paliacatta on the large Indiamen the Nieuw Amsterdam.65 In April 1650, the largest number of elephants carried on a VOC ship, twelve in all, was recorded on the flute the Gekroonde Liefde. The King of Siam, Prasat Thong (d. 1656), had bestowed the animals as a gift to the VOC governor in Batavia. This was done with a political motive, which becomes clear from the King’s request of a return gift: Besides several diamond rings, he asked for military assistance to fight domestic rebellion, a request that the VOC did not cede to.66 Nevertheless, in contrast to Sujit Sivasundaram’s view that the British adopted local Indian customs and beliefs to form an anthropomorphic, respectful view of elephants, the Dutch held an objective, commercial attitude towards the animals. Where employees of the English East India Company, for instance, gave a one-tusked elephant the name that suited his appearance among natives, like Ek-danti or Ganesh, after the Hindu god of wisdom,67 the VOC simply listed such an animal for half or a quarter of the price of a ‘whole’ specimen.68 The VOC settled in Persia during the first quarter of the seventeenth century. They erected offices in the coastal town of Bandar Abbas and inland, in the capital of Isfahan. Bandar Abbas was a strategic port for the export of silk. Persia was, and still is, also the home of the equines that are known as Persian horses. Persian horses were much in demand by rulers in 65  Herman T. Colenbrander, Dagh-Register gehonden int Casteel Batavia vant passerende daer ter plaetse als over geheel Nederlandts-India: Anno 1643–1644 (’s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1902), 291. 66  Alfons van der Kraan. ‘On company business: The Rijckloff van Goens mission to Siam 1650,’ Itinerario 22, 2 (1998), 42. 67  Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘Trading knowledge: The East India Company’s elephants in India and Britain,’ The Historical Journal, 48, 1 (2005), 50. Chaiklin, however, disagrees with Sivadsundaram, noting that in general British attitudes were equally pragmatic. Martha Chaiklin, ‘Elephants in the making of early modern India,’ in The Indian Ocean in the Making of Early Modern India, ed. Pius Malekandathil (Delhi: Manohar, 2016) 68  Engelsman, De olifantenhandel op Ceylon, 53. Prices for elephants could fluctuate, for instance depending on economic circumstances on the mainland. Also, larger elephants had a higher commercial value than smaller ones. Elephants with defects like a missing tooth, a damaged ear, or a bent leg were devalued with more than half or three quarters of the price. The local caretakers seem to have named the elephants with Sinhalese names, but the meanings of the names had no significance for the VOC, other than that they listed them phonetically in their sales book. An average price was 340 ryksdaalders.

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the IOW. The VOC used them as diplomatic gifts and shipped them to the King of Kandy in Ceylon and to the Japanese shogun. The Persians were aware of the exceptional qualities of their horses and restrained their export. We know this because in 1647 the Persians imposed a restriction on the VOC of a maximum of four horses per ship. Almost fifty years later, in 1695, they were more lenient, allowing eight horses per ship. This number stayed unchanged until at least 1730.69 From the record of an inventory of June 19, 1682, it appears that for young horses an exception could have been made because on that day twelve Persian colts were shipped on the flute de Meere to Ceylon. Their total cost was 2690 guilders, an average of 224.16 guilders a piece. The fodder, including some other costs for the journey, cost 475 guilders.70 Considering that a VOC captain earned sixty to eighty guilders a month, this was a significant price.71 Nevertheless, Persian restrictions on the horse trade were felt by VOC governors elsewhere in the IOW. In the Deshima office in Japan, the governor was frequently unable to fulfil the wishes of the Shogun and his officials, who asked for Persian horses regularly.72 The VOC also exported partridges, another indigenous Persian species, from Bandar Abbas. Chukar partridges (Alectoris chukka) were and still are popular as a pet and game species. One or more specimens ended up in Amsterdam. We know this because Jan Velten depicted this bird in his album of c.1700 (Fig. 2.4). He observed the partridge in the menagerie of Blauw Jan.73 On 7 March 1642 the VOC transported ten partridges from Persia to Batavia, and on 10 April of that year, another twenty. Other animals that were shipped from Persia to Batavia included ‘rough haired cats,’ bald ‘Cijpresse’ dogs, pheasants, and falcons from Ceylon, all of which had been demanded via a list of eischen from Batavia in 1640.74  NL-HaNA, VOC, 1.04.02 inv.nr. 1304, unfoliated.  NL-HaNA, VOC, 1.04.02 inv.nr. 1304, unfoliated. 71  Gaastra, Geschiedenis van de VOC, 99. 72  NL-HaNA, VOC, 1.04.02, inv.nr. 1188, f 559r; NL-HaNA, Nederlandse Factorij Japan, 1.04.21, inv.nr. 610, unfoliated; Leonard Blussé and Paul van der Velde, The Deshima dagregisters: their original tables of contents Vol. V, (Leiden: Centre for the History of European Expansion, 1990), 20; Leonard Blussé et al., The Deshima dagregisters: their original tables of contents Vol. VIII, (Leiden: Centre for the History of European Expansion, 1995), 91, 105, 117, 196, 266. 73  Pieters, Wonderen der natuur, 64; Artis Library of the University of Amsterdam f.27r. The album of Jan Velten, 1695–1709. 74  NL-HaNA, Geleynssen de Jongh, 1.10.30 inv. nr 142, unfoliated. 69 70

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Fig. 2.4  Chukar partridge, gouache by Jan Velten, Amsterdam, approx. 1700. Artis Library of the University of Amsterdam, Collection Jan Velten, inv.nr. 7R

The ‘falcons from Ceylon’ may have been the subspecies of the Black shaheen falcon (Falco Peregrinus Peregrinator), a raptor with a striking black cap, dark upper parts, and a pale melanin-coloured breast, that was and still is used in falconry.75 Falconry was a popular sport and status symbol among Persian rulers. In antiquity the Persians considered the falcon or the eagle as mythical. This fabulous bird was called simorgh.76 The first kings of the Sassanids wore crowns with depictions of the royal falcon, symbolising the great warrior god Bahrām.77 The geographic distribution of Falco Peregrinus Peregrinator did not go as far north as Persia, but Persians may have imported them from India or Ceylon.78 The central VOC office in Batavia, in turn, may have coveted this prized bird and 75  Hermann Döttlinger, The Black Shaheen Falcon: (Falco Peregrinus Peregrinator Sundevall 1837). Its morphology, geographic variation and the history and ecology of the Sri Lanka (Ceylon) population (Schweitenkirchen: Hermann Döttlinger, 2002) 10–18. 76  Hans-Peter Schmidt, ‘SIMORḠ,’ Encyclopædia Iranica, http://www.iranicaonline.org/ articles/simorg. [Accessed 1 January 2018]. 77  Alireza Shapur Shahbazi, ‘Hormuzd II,’ Encyclopædia Iranica, at: http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/hormozd-ii. [Accessed: 28 May, 2019]. 78  Döttlinger, The Black Shaheen Falcon, 33.

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requested the factory in Bandar Abbas to acquire a few specimens. The eisch did not elaborate on the specific aim of the request, but their purpose could have been diplomatic gift-giving. Creatures from Europe and the IOW were also imported into Persia. They were diplomatic gifts for the Shah to maintain the acquisition of silk.79 The most noticeable was the demand for particular dog varieties. In 1633, the eischen from Persia record ‘large dogs and very small lap dogs, the smaller the better.’80 This record indicates there was a wish for extraordinary dog breeds from Europe. In 1667, so-called white lion dogs were brought as a gift to the Shah in Isfahan, together with 500 ducats, 2 rings with emeralds, 2 elephants, 1 cockatoo, 1 lory, 1 myna, 1 meerkat, Siamese cocks and hens, and 3 birds of paradise.81 All social classes in Persia took great interest in hunting dogs.82 It was believed that hunting dogs should have long limbs, small heads, and protruding eyeballs. Royal hunting dogs were adorned with gold and fine fabrics.83 The Prophet Muhammad forbade animal fights in the Islamic realm, but the practice of dog fights was well attested in Persia.84 Sometimes dogs were made to fight other animals, like cocks.85 According to Persian folklore, the Prophet associated black dogs with the devil. It was said that he ordered all black dogs to be put to death.86 This myth might have been the reason why the VOC offered the Shah white dogs. The VOC clearly understood the value of exotic animals as gifts as an important facet of diplomacy, taking notice of local customs and wishes of the rulers and using this knowledge to smooth trading relations.

 Jacobs, Koopman in Azië, 122–3.  NL-HaNA, VOC, 1.04.02 inv.nr. 1113, f.118r. 81  NL-HaNA, VOC, 1.04.02 inv.nr. 1259, f.3377r. 82  M. Bahār Bundahišn, Farnbāḡ-dādagı̄ Bondaheš, (Tehran, 1990), 70, 364, via: http:// www.iranicaonline.org/articles/dog. [Accessed: 28 May, 2019]. 83  Ṭ ūsı̄ Asadı̄, Garšāsp-nāma (Tehran: Ḥ . Yaḡmāʾı̄, 1954) 416, http://www.iranicaonline. org/articles/dog. [Accessed: 1 January 2018] 84  Amr b. Baḥr Jāḥeẓ, A. M. Hārūn ed., Kitāb al-Ḥ ayawān, Vol. 2 (Cairo, 1968), 163–164, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/dog [Accessed: 28 May, 2019]. 85  Jāḥeẓ, Kitāb al-Ḥ ayawān, I, 376. 86  Ibid., 262, 291–293; Jāḥeẓ, Kitāb al-Ḥ ayawān, II, 153, 293. 79 80

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The Case of Mauritius and the Meaning of Its Animals The ecological effects of the VOC’s presence in the IOW were particularly stark in Mauritius. It was more or less a coincidence that the Dutch first landed on the archipelago in September 1598. Five ships were blown off course, they were separated from the rest of the fleet, and they found the green, fertile island that they named after Prince Maurits. Mauritius was uninhabited by humans and the flora and fauna had, until shortly before then, developed undisturbed for eight million years.87 In previous decades, the Portuguese had released livestock like cattle, pigs, and goats onto the island. The Dutch added Java deer and monkeys. The latter were probably transported as pets from the Indonesian Spice Islands.88 These introduced species took over the habitat, severely compromising the indigenous fauna. The Dutch exploited the island’s natural wealth of ebony from the endemic Diospyros tessellaria. Later, the French and English continued the logging, a process which has now led to Mauritius now being left with less than 2 per cent of its original native forest.89 Many endemic animals became extinct. In 1632, however, most of the forest was still standing and birds like the dodo, (Raphus cucullatus), the poorly volant Mauritius broad-billed parrot (Lophopsittacus mauritianus), the red rail (Aphanapteryx Bonasia), and the Mauritius giant tortoise (Cylindraspis inepta and C. triserrata) were still roaming around, despite the herds of grazing goats and tuberooting pigs. An anonymous VOC employee, who wrote the 1632 missive while he was stationed on the island for approximately three weeks, was struck by his encounter with the natural world of Mauritius. The correspondent described its animals as (European) personalities and food objects, in the manner of a parody.90 Both the caricatures and the parody style are examples of an alien conception of the IOW. The writer called the dodos rich and fat mayors; the red rails were soldiers; the tortoises were farmers; the pigs were portrayed as bad-tempered, grumpy, and rowdy; and the cows were dispersed 87  Anthony Cheke and Julian P.  Hume, Lost Land of the Dodo. The ecological history of Mauritius, Réunion and Rodrigues (London Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010), 20. 88  Ibid., 76. 89  Rachel Atkinson and Jean Claude Sevathian, A Guide to the Plants in Mauritius (Vacoas: Mauritian Wildlife Foundation, 2007), i, 48–50. 90  Winters, Hume and Leenstra, ‘A famine in Surat in 1631 and Dodos on Mauritius,’ 143–144.

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citizens. He called the salted meat they ate ‘Jan Bruyn’ (bruyn = brown) or ‘Van Souten’ (from salt), and the wine, that was lacking by the time his ship reached Mauritius, ‘Druyf,’ meaning grape. This literary form of parody was known in Dutch as a klucht. Kluchten had been performed in the Netherlands since the Middle Ages.91 The letter sheds light on the natural behaviour of the dodos, red rails, and the giant tortoises, by evoking our imagination of the stereotyped characters of rich and fat mayors, fearless soldiers, and plodding farmers. The author’s characterisation of the dodo stands out. He wanted the addressee to know that: The mayors are superb and proud. They present themselves with an unyielding, stern face and wide-open mouth, very jaunty and audacious of gait. They do not want to budge before us; their war weapon is the mouth, with which they can bite fiercely. Their food is raw fruit; they are not dressed very well, but are rich and fat, therefore we brought many of them on board, to the contentment of us all.92

The missive confirms the fact, which was so far only known from one or two other primary historical sources, that dodos could bite hard and take a defensive stance when threatened. Nowhere else is it established, though, that the dodo ate raw fruit. The missive’s tone is one of mockery, but its information is real and useful. The image of an incongruous, fat dodo— helped forward by the paintings of Roelant Savery and Hans Savery the younger—has been planted into the collective memory until the present day.93 Even though research has shown there was also a lean dodo, we like to hold on to the idea of the fat, funny-looking, chubby bird.94 Research in the natural sciences has shown that the episodic fattening of the dodo was caused by the seasonal availability of the fruits of high-energy palms and latkan fruits. In the periods of monsoonal storms the dodo was thinner.95 As Lawrence points out, the dodo’s aesthetics could not compare to  Ibid., 140.  Ibid., 149. 93  Ekkehart Mai. Roelof Savery in seiner Zeit (1576–1630). Cologne: Wallraf-RichartzMuseum, 1985. 94  Jolyan C. Parish. The Dodo and the Solitaire. A natural history. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 304; M. Nowak-Kemp, M., and J. P. Hume. ‘The Oxford Dodo. Part 2: From curiosity to icon and its role in displays, education and research,’ Historical Biology 1 (2016), 9. 95  France Staub. ‘New hypothesis on the dodo’s true morphology from an ecological consideration of its available diet,’ in Globalisation and the South-West Indian Ocean, eds. 91 92

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the dazzling brightness of the bird of paradise’s feathers.96 Nevertheless the dodo’s incongruity was of such an odd quality that the VOC employees, who had seen live dodos with their own eyes, thought it appropriate to assign the bird with the attribute of gift-giving.97 The dodo may indeed have been a good ‘icon of the Indies’ in biogeographical treatises such as Piso’s, but contemporary eyewitnesses valued the bird for its remarkableness or boldness, and once they had overcome their curiosity and fear, as a source for food.98 The dodo was for the employees of the VOC, just like the pangolin, good to eat. Lawrence’s proposition that the dodo, with its attribute of greed, ‘came to embody the questionable moral status of the aggressive VOC trading enterprises, functioning as an emblem of human gluttony,’ is a nonetheless a useful one.99 The 1631 letter writer connected greed that he recognised in the dodo’s plumpness and gape, with the majors of the Batavian society that he obviously regarded contemptuously; so much  so, that the VOC servants brought the birds aboard the ship to dine on. Even though it seems that the Dutch caught and ate many dodos, and even though it is imaginable that rats, pigs, and monkeys stole numerous eggs from the dodo’s nests on the ground, the dodo survived as a species

Sandra J.T.  Evers and Vinesh Y.  Hookoomsing. Leiden: International Institute for Asian Studies and Réduit: University of Mauritius, 2000. 67–76; Parish, The Dodo and the Solitaire, 287–288, 291, 303. See also: D. Angst, A. Chinsamy, L. Steel, J.P. Hume. ‘Bone histology sheds new light on the ecology of the dodo (Raphus cucullatus, Aves, Columbiformes),’ Scientific reports, 7, 7993 (2017). 2–8. 96  Lawrence, ‘Assembling the dodo,’ 387. 97  Ria Winters and Julian P.  Hume, ‘The dodo, the deer and a 1647 voyage to Japan,’ Historical Biology 27, 1 (2014), 258–64. 98  The opposition of ‘good to think with’ versus ‘good to eat’ comes from the work of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss described his ideas about the reembodiment of mental projections in objects or beings in Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (1962), translated and published in English: Totemism, (Boston: Beacon, 1963), see page 89 for: ‘The animals in totemism cease to be solely or principally creatures which are feared, admired, or envied; their perceptible reality permits the embodiment of ideas and relations conceived by speculative thought on the basis of empirical observations. We can understand, too, that natural species are chosen not because they are “good to eat” but because they are “good to think”.’ The dodo was good to think with as an icon in the entrepreneurial construction of contemporary (bio)geographical treatises. See also: Lawrence, ‘Assembling the dodo,’ 387; Lawrence, ‘Exotic origins. The emblematic biogeographies,’ 24. 99  Lawrence. ‘Assembling the dodo,’ 406–407.

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far into the 1680s.100 The bird was not always good to eat, because at certain times consuming its meat caused nausea. Hence the early name that was given to the dodo by the Dutch: ‘walghvogel,’ which signifies insipidness or nausea.101 It is not exactly clear why dodo meat caused this effect, but it is notable that another, still extant Mauritian pigeon that also lives on fruit, the pink pigeon (Columba mayeri), caused nausea as well. Pierre O′ Héguerty, who visited the Mascerenes in the 1730s wrote: It is dangerous to eat them all the year round; there is a season when they eat a seed that intoxicates them. If one eats them during this critical time, one is left with distressing effects, of which the least are contractions in the nerves and muscles, and often convulsions.102

The nauseating effect after eating the meat of ‘pigeons with red tails’— which were clearly the pink pigeons, that are not pink all over but have brown wings and a red tail—was also described by Reyer Cornelisz during his stay on Mauritius in 1602 with his ship the Swarte Leeuw. The men turned sick after eating the pigeons with red tails.103 A modern natural historian looking for a trace of information about the broad-billed parrot in the 1632 missive would be disappointed because the author did not mention the enigmatic bird. Maybe he just did not observe the parrot, or if he did, found the bird’s colours too bright to compare it with any member of Batavian society. It is known from other sources that the parrot had an impressive appearance; an enormous beak, a large blue head with a frontal crest, and red feathering on its breast and

100  David L. Roberts and Andrew R. Solow. ‘Flightless birds. When did the dodo become extinct?’ Nature, 426 (2003); See also Jan den Hengst. ‘The dodo and scientific fantasies: Durable myths of a tough bird.’ Archives of Natural History 36, 1 (2011), 136–145; Andrew Jackson. ‘Added credence for a late dodo extinction date.’ Historical Biology 26, 6 (2014); Kenneth Rijsdijk, Kenneth, et al. ‘A review of the dodo and its ecosystem: insights from a vertebrate concentration Lagerstätte in Mauritius.’ Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology (2016), 18. 101  Parish, The Dodo and the Solitaire, 5, 137, 376. 102  Cited in: A.W. Diamond, ed., Studies of Mascarene Island Birds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 42. 103  Jan Parmentier, Karel Davids and John Everaert, Peper, Plancius en porselein. De reis van het schip Swarte Leeuw naar Atjeh en Bantam, 1601–1603 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2003), 164. See also Winters, A Treasury of Endemic Fauna, 68.

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Fig. 2.5  Engraving of the Dutch in Mauritius, published in the travel narrative published in 1601, the ‘True report,’ by Jacob van Neck and Wybrant van Warwijck: Het tvveede boeck, iournael oft dagh-register, inhoudende een warachtich verhael ende historische vertellinghe vande reyse, gedaen door de acht schepen van Amstelredamme, gheseylt inden maent martij 1598

wings, possibly with an iridescent glow.104 The broad-billed parrot was already depicted in the illustrated Warachtich verhael, the ‘True report,’ published in 1601 in Amsterdam, of the Dutch fleet’s journey that landed with five ships on Mauritius in 1598. The illustrator placed the bird, recognisable by its large beak and prominent head, in a tree (Fig. 2.5). The caption above the engraving describes the bird as ‘Indische rave,’ Indian raven. It is notable that in the same illustration the dodo was also depicted, not as an obese, chubby creature, but as a large, naked bird, nonetheless with a big tummy, but as a swift bird that could run.105 104  Julian P.  Hume and Ria Winters, ‘Captive birds on Dutch Mauritius: Bad-tempered parrots, warty pigeons and notes on other native animals,’ Historical Biology 28, 6 (2016), 820. For information about the contemporary drawing of the broad-billed parrot that was sketched in the journal of the Gelderland, see: Perry Moree, Dodo’s en galjoenen. De reis van het schip Gelderland naar Oost-Indië, 1601–1603 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2001), 260. 105  The ‘True report’: Jacob van Neck and Wybrant van Warwijck, Het tvveede boeck, iournael oft dagh-register, inhoudende een warachtich verhael ende historische vertellinghe vande

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The broad-billed parrot was called an Indian raven, without the pre-­ suffix of ‘east.’ Like the dodo, it was referred to as an ‘Indian’ bird. However, in contrast, its image was not exploited to improve the marketability of (bio)geographic treatises, but it could have had a reputation that evoked awe, which may have been transmitted orally. This is supported by the following evidence. The Savery’s thought the Indian raven good to think with. This is indicated by the name of the house where Roelant’s brother Jacob lived in Amsterdam, ‘In de Indische Rave’ (in the Indian raven).106 The Savery’s may have read the ‘True report,’ or they might have heard about the Indian raven from Roelant’s contacts at the Prague court (the Habsburg emperor possessed Mauritian birds, both alive and stuffed) where Roelant was a painter in residence.107 Roelant and Hans never painted the broad-billed parrot, and its skin and bones never crossed the sandy borders of Mauritius, but the parrot was still an actant on the façade of a Dutch building.108 People who were trying to find the house of Jacob Savery, had to look out for the signboard of the Indian raven. Further evidence is provided by VOC servant Johannes Pretorius, who tried to tame the broad-billed parrot during his stay on Mauritius in the 1660s. In commission of the Heeren XVII he wrote a report about the islands’ arability. He did not just write about agriculture but also included details about the indigenous animals. He characterised the broad-billed parrot in the following way:

reyse, gedaen door de acht schepen van Amstelredamme, gheseylt inden maent martij 1598. Onder ’t beleydt vanden admirael Iacob Cornelisz. Neck, ende Wybrandt van VVarvvijck als vice-admirael (Amsterdam: Cornelis Claesz, 1601), 14. 106   Archives of the city of Amsterdam: Toegang 5075 Notarissen der standplaats Amsterdam. Nr. 6 Lieven Heylinc. Inv.nr. 54, f. 554r. The will of Jacob Savery, Roelant Savery’s elder brother, was made up in his own home, shortly after Jacob’s death in August 1602. Roelant Savery, during an interval of his court work in Prague, was present and signed the solicitor’s journal. 107  H.T. Haupt, Vigneau-Wilberg, E. Irblich & M. Staudinger, Le Bestiaire de Rodolphe II de la Bibliothèque nationale d’Autriche (Parijs 1990), 344–355. 108  Only in the nineteenth century were there numbers applied to Dutch homes. From the Middle Ages on, houses were distinguished by signboards on the facades. ‘In de Indische Rave’ was a rare signboard and seems to be only mentioned once in the seventeenth century. (Source: Jan ter Gouw and Jacob van Lennep, De uithangteekens. In verband met geschiedenis en volksleven beschouwd. Tweede deel. (Amsterdam: Gebroeders Kraay, 1868), 354.) It may well be that Jacob Savery’s house was the first one with a signboard of this name. The subsequent lodgers or owners may have maintained the sign.

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The Indian ravens are very beautifully coloured. They cannot fly and are not often found. This kind is a very bad tempered bird. When captive it refuses to eat. It would prefer to die rather than to live in captivity.109

Pretorius was obviously impressed by the bird, but his empirical observation speaks for itself. Collectively, these stories express how many Dutch perceived live exotic animals with a degree of admiration—anthropomorphizing them with caricatural identity, but simultaneously viewing them as objects for use in consumption, trade, or hunting. The latter is in line with the ways they perceived animals they knew from Europe, such as cows, horses, or foxes. The broad-billed parrot and many other species went extinct in the seventeenth century. Species that did live through the forest destruction of that era often did not survive the further transformation of the land into a green sea of sugar cane, given shape by the Dutch, French, British, and— nowadays—the Mauritians.110 Mauritius’ strategic position in the Indian Ocean (20.25°S 57.5°E), halfway between the Cape and the Spice islands, has indirectly led to the demise of its nature. Richard Grove has argued in his path-breaking Green Imperialism that the contemporary awareness of the ecological damage, that not only occurred on Mauritius but also at the Cape of Good Hope, lead to failed efforts of a Dutch centralised conservation policy in the seventeenth century.111 The island’s location was the main reason why the VOC held on to it, fearing that the French or British would take it over and gain a more competitive angle in trade with the East.112 The Dutch decision to give up the island only started to emerge in the early 1700s after a series of destructive tropical cyclones, droughts, 109  Hume and Winters, ‘Captive birds on Dutch Mauritius: bad-tempered parrots, 818–20. Note: Pretorius’ report was made in the period that the VOC made a centralised effort to reevaluate the Cape garden and its hinterland as a source of medicinal plants: see Grove, Green Imperialism, 137. 110  See: Richard B. Allen. Slaves, Freedmen and Indentured Labourers in Colonial Mauritius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; H. Ly Tio Fane Pineo, Lured away. The life history of Indian cane workers in Mauritius. Moka: Mahatma Gandhi Institute, 1984. 111  Grove, Green Imperialism, 125–144. According to Grove, the VOC did take stricter preservation measures in Ceylon and Java. 112  Dan Sleigh. Die Buiteposte, 664–670. Mauritius was a more favourable landing post than nearby Réunion because of its natural harbours, one in the south-east and two on the

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and the continuing failure to contain the plagues of rats that devoured the shoots of agricultural crops.113 Only by employing the centralistic, capitalistic forces of the Western European powers114 could Mauritius’ nature be subjugated. This, however, was terminal for much of its wildlife.

Conclusion The Dutch arrived in the IOW in search of spices, textiles, and exotic objects but also profited from the diplomatic value of live exotic animals. The cassowary that was given to the crew of the first Dutch fleet in the IOW in 1596 made it all the way back to the Dutch Republic and ended up in the proud possession of several European nobles. As more animals became available via the connecting shipping systems between the east and west IOW and the homeward-bound sailings from Batavia to the Dutch Republic, Dutch stadholders started keeping private zoos in the seventeenth century. The stream of foreign animals created a demand within the rich Dutch bourgeoisie, who built aviaries at their country estates. The keepers of the Amsterdam inn Blauw Jan ran an animal business: they sold exotic animals to citizens and royals. The inn, with its menagerie in the backyard, became a famous tourist attraction. Scientists used the remains of the deceased animals for research; painters portrayed them. The drawings and paintings are now the vivid reminders of the animals from the IOW that once set foot on Dutch soil, and who were admired by people who had never seen such creatures. Thus, the VOC was partially responsible for creating and spreading knowledge about the IOW and its fauna. Via the VOC’s trading routes between the west, east, and northeast of Batavia, it became possible to transport exotic animals not only to Europe but also within the IOW. The VOC was aware of the biological diversity of species and the value of exoticism, which the company exploited for its own benefit, using the animals mostly as diplomatic gifts. The VOC’s representatives approached Asia with a European view. They transplanted their European culture into the IOW.  The disciplined correspondence between the VOC factors supported the isolation of the European culture western side. Réunion had only one location where ships could anchor, namely on the south side of the island. 113  Moree, A Concise History of Dutch Mauritius, 97; Sleigh, Die Buiteposte, 666. The VOC had abandoned the island before in 1658 but reoccupied it in 1664. 114  See for instance Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson. Globalization. A short history. (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), 42–69.

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amid a tropical world. Whether European dogs, Persian horses, or Indonesian cockatoos—as long as they served the benefit of commerce, they were considered valuable. The dodo became a culturally transformed icon in the generalised biogeography De Indiae utriusque re naturalis et medica. The dodo was good to think with, to metaphorically connect the Dutch East and West Indies. The dodo’s flesh was—at times—however good to eat. Its incongruity made it fit as a gift for the ruler of Japan. The Dutch wanted to own the dodo, both in its cultural and natural form. After the VOC withdrew from the IOW following its dissolution in 1798, the remaining imprints of its role in the transport of exotic animals were diverse: in Holland it meant art and enrichment of knowledge; in Mauritius it meant mass extinction of flora and fauna species; in places dotted around the coasts of the Indian Ocean it meant the physical remains in the landscapes of the forts where the captive animals were once stationed. The VOC was a commercial enterprise that shaped these links for their own benefit. Diplomacy to advance trade was the most important goal in their role as transporters of exotic animals. The animals were not recognised as beings with feelings and with their own intrinsic value, but as objects of fascination and utilisation. They nevertheless diminished the distance between East and West and have left their imprint on the history of this exchange.

Bibliography Archival Sources Artis Library of the University of Amsterdam: Artis Library of the University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. National Archives The Hague (NL-HaNA): National Archives The Hague, The Hague, The Netherlands. Archives of the city of Amsterdam: Toegang 5075 Notarissen der standplaats Amsterdam: nr. 6 Lieven Heylinc.

Published Sources Allen, Richard B. Slaves, Freedmen and Indentured Labourers in Colonial Mauritius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Allin, Michael. A Giraffe’s True Story, from deep in Africa to the heart of Paris. London: Headline, 1999.

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Guidon de Chambelle, Jean and Dirk van der Cruysse ed. Mercenaires français de la VOC: la route des Indes hollandaises au XVIIe siècle. Le journal de Jean Guidon de Chambelle, 1644–1651, suivi en annexe de la relation d’un voyage aux Indes orientales par un gentilhomme français, 1630–1636. Paris: Chandeigne, 2003. Haupt, H., T.  Vigneau-Wilberg, E.  Irblich & M.  Staudinger, Le Bestiaire de Rodolphe ii de la Bibliothèque nationale d’Autriche (Parijs 1990). Hehenberger, Susanne. ‘Dehumanised sinners and their instruments of sin. Men and animals in early modern bestiality cases, Austria 1500–1800,’ in Early Modern Zoology. The construction of animals in science, literature and the visual arts 7.1, eds. Karel A.E. Enenkel and Paul J. Smith. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Hengst, Jan den. ‘The dodo and scientific fantasies: durable myths of a tough bird.’ Archives of Natural History 36, 1 (2011). Hume, Julian P. and Ria Winters. ‘Captive birds on Dutch Mauritius: Bad-­ tempered parrots, warty pigeons and notes on other native animals.’ Historical Biology 28, 6 (2016). Jacobs, Els M. Koopman in Azië. De handel van de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie tijdens de achttiende eeuw. Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2000. Jackson, Andrew. ‘Added credence for a late dodo extinction date.’ Historical Biology 26, 6 (2014). Jāḥeẓ, Amr b. Baḥr, A.  M. Hārūn, ed.  Kitāb al-Ḥ ayawān, Vol. 1 and 2 (Cairo, 1968). Keuning, Johannes en Reijer Cornelisz.  De Tweede Schipvaart der Nederlanders naar Oost-Indië onder Jacob Cornelisz. van Neck en Wybrant Warwijck, 1598–1600. ‘s Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1949. Kisling, Vernon N. Zoo and aquarium history. Ancient Animal Collections to Zoological gardens. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2001. Knolle, Paul and Ruud Vlek. ‘Aquarellen van vogels, andere dieren en planten,’ in Een koninklijk paradijs. Aert Schouman en de verbeelding van de natuur, eds. Charles Dumas and Sander Paarlberg. Dordrecht: Dordrechts Museum and WBooks, 2017. Kraan, Alfons van der. ‘On company business: The Rijckloff van Goens mission to Siam 1650.’ Itinerario 22, 2 (1998). Lawrence, Natalie. ‘Assembling the dodo in early modern natural history.’ British Society for the History of Science 48, 3 (2015a). Lawrence, Natalie. ‘Exotic origins: The emblematic biogeographies of early modern scaly mammals.’ Itinerario, 39, 1 (2015b). Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism. London: Merlin Press, 1962. Ly Tio Fane Pineo, H. Lured Away. The life history of Indian cane workers in Mauritius. Moka: Mahatma Gandhi Institute, 1984. Mai, Ekkehart. Roelof Savery in seiner Zeit (1576–1630). Cologne: Wallraf-­ Richartz-­Museum, 1985.

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Moree, Perry. Dodo’s en galjoenen. De reis van het schip Gelderland naar Oost-­ Indië, 1601–1603. Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2001. Mostert, Tristan. Chain of Command. The military system of the Dutch East India Company 1655–1663. Leiden: University of Leiden, 2007. Neck, Jacob van and Wybrant van Warwijck. Het tweede boeck, iournael oft dagh-­ register, inhoudende een warachtich verhael ende historische vertellinghe vande reyse, gedaen door de acht schepen van Amstelredamme, gheseylt inden maent martij 1598. Onder ‘t beleydt vanden admirael Iacob Cornelisz. Neck, ende Wybrandt van VVarvvijck als vice-admirael. Amsterdam: Cornelis Claesz, 1601. Nowak-Kemp, M., and J. P. Hume. ‘The Oxford Dodo. Part 2: From curiosity to icon and its role in displays, education and research.’ Historical Biology, 1 (2016). 1–12. Odegard, Erik. ‘Timmeren te Cochin. Scheepsbouw op de VOC-scheepstimmerwerf in Cochin.’ Tijdschrift voor zeegeschiedenis, 36, 2 (2017). Osterhammel, Jürgen and Niels P.  Petersson. Globalization. A short history. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Parish, Jolyan C. The Dodo and the Solitaire. A natural history. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Parmentier, Jan, Karel Davids and John Everaert. Peper, Plancius en porselein. De reis van het schip Swarte Leeuw naar Atjeh en Bantam, 1601–1603. Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2003. Parthesius, Robert. Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters: The development of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) shipping network in Asia 1595–1660. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. Pieters, Florence, F.J.M. Wonderen der natuur. In de menagerie van Blauw Jan te Amsterdam, zoals gezien door Jan Velten rond 1700. Amsterdam: Artis Library of the University of Amsterdam, 1998. Pieters, Florence, F.J.M. ‘De dieren in de menagerie ‘De Witte Oliphant’ te Amsterdam zoals gezien door Jan Velten rond 1700,’ in Over beesten en boeken. Opstellen over de geschiedenis van de diergeneeskunde en de boekwetenschap, eds. Koert van der Horst, Peter A.  Koolmees and Adriaan Monna. Rotterdam: Erasmus Publishing, 1995. Pieters, Florence, F.J.M. ‘The menagerie of the white elephant in Amsterdam, with some notes on other 17th and 18th century menageries in The Netherlands,’ in Die Kulturgeschichte des Zoos, eds. Ed. Hg. v. Lothar Dittrich, D. v. Engelhardt and A.  Rieke-Müller. Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2001. Piso, Willem. De Indiae utriusque re naturalis et medica, libri quatuordecim. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1658. Pontanus, Johannes Isacius. Beschrijvingh der wijdt-vermaarde Koop-stadt Amstelredam. Amsterdam: Jodocus Hondius, 1614.

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Prak, Maarten. The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth century. The Golden Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Prater, Sálim Ali. The Book of Indian Animals. Bombay: Bombay Natural History Society, 1965. Qazvı̄nı̄, Muḥammad and M.  Modarresı̄, eds. Neẓām-al-Molk, Sı̄āsat-nāma. Tehran, 1978. Queborn, Crispijn van den. Casuaris, meegebracht door Willem Jacobsz. uit Oost-­ Indië en geschonken aan prins Maurits, engraving, printed on paper. Amsterdam: Claes Jansz. Visscher, 1614 or 1615. Ringmar, Erik. ‘The European expansion.’ History of International Relations Cambridge. Open Book Publishers, 2018. Richart, Manuel B. Iconografia animal. La representacion animal en librus europeus de Historia Natural de los siglos XVI y XVII. Volumes I and II. Cuenca: Tapa blanda, 1999. Roberts, David L. and Andrew R.  Solow. ‘Flightless birds. When did the dodo become extinct?’ Nature. 426 (2003), 245. Robbins, Louise. Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic animals in eighteenth-­century Paris. Baltimore, London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2002. Roeper, Videke and Roelof van Gelder. In dienst van de compagnie. Leven bij de VOC in honderd getuigenissen [1602-1799]. Amsterdam: Athenaeum – Polak & Van Gennep, 2002. Rookmaaker, Cees. The Zoological Exploration of Southern Africa 1650–1790. Rotterdam: Balkema, 1989. Roscam Abbing, Michiel, Rembrandts olifant. In het spoor van Hansken. Amsterdam: Leporello Uitgevers, 2016. Ross, Robert. ‘The Dutch as globalizers in the western basin of the Indian Ocean?,’ in Globalisation and the South-West Indian Ocean, eds. Sandra J.T. Evers and Vinesh Y. Hookoomsing. Leiden: International Institute for Asian Studies and Réduit: University of Mauritius, 2000. Rossum, Matthias van. ‘Sampans, hout en slaven. De overzeese infrastructuur voor scheepsbouw en –onderhoud van de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie in Zuid en Zuidoost-Azië,’ Tijdschrift voor zeegeschiedenis. 36, 2 (2017). Ruangsilp, Bhawan and Hendrik E.  Niemeijer, ‘Letter from the Phrakhlang on behalf of the King of Siam Narai (r. 1656–1688) to the supreme government in Batavia, 27 January 1683 and a reply from Batavia 11 May 1683,’ in Harta Karun. Hidden Treasures on Indonesian and Asian-European History from the VOC Archives in Jakarta, document 18. Jakarta: Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia, 2016. Rijsdijk, Kenneth, et al. ‘A review of the dodo and its ecosystem: insights from a vertebrate concentration Lagerstätte in Mauritius.’ Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology (2016).

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CHAPTER 3

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

Introduction: Seashell Resonance In 1666, Governor Rijklof Van Goens of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) received a set of instructions from the India Council of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) in Amsterdam. Governor Van Goens perused the missives and other documents and compiled a report that he shared with his subordinates. An introduction to the report began with the following statement: ‘The Island of Ceylon, which is to be regarded as a valuable jewel among the possessions of the Company, having been, by God’s grace, rid of the Portuguese enemies, must now with God’s further help

S. Ostroff (*) Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Chaiklin et al. (eds.), Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42595-1_3

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be valiantly protected from all detriment.’1 Van Goens relayed orders to his officials on the island to continue procuring pounds of tiny seed pearls for export to Holland, while freezing any transactions for large pearls until further notice. He advised that ‘the pearl fishery should be proceeded with in a careful manner.’2 Having just secured rights to the pearl fishery by vanquishing the Portuguese, VOC officials exhibited both enthusiasm and caution during these early years of engagement with the marine environment and the pearl oysters that populated the area. A multivalent metaphor, Van Goens’ characterisation of Sri Lanka as a ‘valuable jewel’ sheds an iridescent, nacreous light on centuries of European engagements with one of the island’s most iconic and sought-after natural resources. Acquiring pearls for export to the homeland or sale in the domestic markets was not the only prerogative for the VOC and their European and Asian counterparts. Indeed, Governor Van Goens recognized that the value of the pearling grounds was not limited to any potential commercial and material returns. He also highlighted the military significance of the industry area: Aripo, which being situated six miles southward of Mantotte, is of great importance in connection with the pearl fishery. That the garrison stationed there must be kept on the same strength, in order to protect the roads. That this station is also a great protection to the inhabitants of Mantotte, and serves as a frontier station for the Island.3

To men like Governor Van Goens, the commercial and military values of the pearling industry and other natural resources of Sri Lanka were explicit, natural, and common sense. Strategically located between the western and eastern zones of the Indian Ocean World (IOW), Sri Lanka held considerable military and commercial value for both European and Asian maritime powers between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, a period that is often characterised by modern historians as an age of European imperial expansion and defined by increasing global interconnectivity. The Gulf of Mannar, the shallow body of water between southern India and western Sri Lanka, was home to a vibrant coastal trade, while the Palk Strait 1  Instructions from the Governor-General and Council of India to the Governor of Ceylon Touching the Government of that Island, 1656–1665, trans. Sophia Peters (Colombo: Ceylon Government Press, 1908), 1. 2  Ibid., 5. 3  Instructions from the Governor-General, 11.

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provided relatively  direct and securitised travel on a busy interregional oceanic highway system that ran along the coasts of the island and mainland, and between the Bay of Bengal and the Laccadive Sea. In the early nineteenth century, about a century and a half after the VOC first assumed managerial control over the pearl fishery, British Ceylon civil servant Anthony Bertolacci echoed his Dutch predecessors in a report on the economic and social conditions of Ceylon by describing the importance of the Gulf of Mannar: It ought further be observed, that the narrowness of the channel, which separates the Island of Ceylon from the Continent of India—and the position of Adam’s Bridge, which checks the violence of the monsoons—leaves on either side of it a calm sea, and facilitates a passage to the opposite coast at all times of the year.4

The pearl fishery was the political, commercial, and military fulcrum of the region and control over the people and animals that constituted the industry provided European powers with a pivot point in the IOW. Present-day popular discourses on the pearl fishery deepen the connections between the real, substantial importance of the industry for the regional environmental histories of South India and Sri Lanka, as well as the symbolic significance of pearling by keeping the jewel metaphor alive. The geographic shape of the island also bore a strong resemblance to an irregularly shaped, baroque pearl. Travel writing still describes Sri Lanka as the ‘Pearl of the East,’ and materials promoting tourism romanticise it as a ‘pearl-shaped tear hanging from the cheek of India.’5 In December 2018, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened ‘The Jewelled Isle: Art from Sri Lanka,’ a major exhibition featuring items from the museum’s world-class collection of Sri Lankan art, complete with guest lectures from renowned scholars, public events, and special programmes. Such activities resonate with Governor Van Goens’ island-as-jewel metaphor. The pearl fishery was also a site of fantastical and pleasurable projection. In the musical realm, for instance, the classic three-act opera Les Pêcheurs de Perles (1863) by French composer George Bizet presents a romanticized tale about tragic love and friendship set in fictionalized 4  Anthony Bertolacci, A View of the Agricultural, Commercial, and Financial Interests of Ceylon (London: Black, Parbury, and Allen, 1817), 5. 5  Harry Williams, Ceylon, Pearl of the East (London: R. Hale, 1950).

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ancient Ceylon village, a place far away from the stages and salons of nineteenth-­century Paris. American songwriter Les Baxter and his band released the track ‘Pearls of Ceylon’ on the album Ports of Pleasure (1957). The memory of pearling cultures is also kept alive by state-sponsored projects. Across the Gulf of Mannar from Sri Lanka, Thoothukudi in Tamil Nadu is known as the ‘Pearl City,’ and there is an express train of the same name that travels to and from Chennai. Hyderabad is known as the ‘City of Pearls.’ Crowds flock to the gem markets and tourists gape at the jewels of the Nizam, the collection of which contains pearls from Mannar and other areas of the IOW that had robust pearl fisheries in centuries past. In the Qatari capital of Doha, a statue of an oyster with a pearl in its shell memorializes the pearling industry that once thrived in the Gulf and formed the material and economic base on which the glittering, petrol-­ rich cities of the region are built. There are even man-made islands off the coast of Doha that are designed to resemble a string of pearls. The project, known as The Pearl-Qatar, is a multi-billion-dollar real estate development project complete with luxury apartments, hotels, and high-end shopping for the global elite. Though the industry is all but extinct today, Sri Lanka was one of the most bountiful and prized sources of pearls in the IOW. For thousands of years, natural pearls—formed in the body of molluscs by the secretion of nacre to contain foreign irritants like stones and sand—were collected from the high-yielding and oyster friendly waters of Mannar. The largest and most productive pearl beds were located off the western coast of the island, while across the Gulf, numerous albeit smaller banks hugged the littoral of southern India. From the turn of the sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, European imperial and commercial entities with global reaches and footprints—Portuguese Estado da Índia, Dutch VOC, British East India Company (EIC), and British Crown—had immediate entanglements with managing the human, animal, and environmental resources of the pearl fishery.6 The Portuguese, Dutch, and British each used an assemblage of scientific, political, and economic ideas in their 6  For historical overviews, see: Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Noble harvest from the sea: Managing the pearl fishery of Mannar, 1500–1825,’ in Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia, eds.  Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Burton Stein (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 134–72; S. Arunachalam, The History of the Pearl Fishery of the Tamil Coast (Annamalai Nagar: Annamalai University, 1952); N. Athiyaman, Pearl and Chank Diving of South Indian Coast: A historical and ethnographical perspective (Thanjavur: Tamil University, 2000).

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management of people and oysters designed to maximize productive capacity and reshape the pre-existing makeup of the industry.7 Indeed, increasing the harvest of oysters presumably meant larger yields of pearls, which led to more commercial activity and higher profits through taxation and leasing arrangements, with which European powers constantly tinkered. European proprietors were clearly incentivised to be good stewards of the industry and ensure good and regular productivity. Yet the ledger was not the only master. European officials summoned the forces of governmental power, reform, and statecraft. The pearl fishery was not only a source of jewels and revenue for Dutch and English East India Companies, but also functioned as a space through which governmental power flowed, territorial sovereignty established, and scientific knowledge produced. At the core of governmental enterprises to improving the pearl fishery was the attempt to interrupt indigenous pearling practices, to control environmental variables, and to generate reliable data about pearl oysters. Yet attempts by European officials to disembed the production and consumption of pearls from local milieus, as well as to bring a technical eye to natural resource management, never amounted to a complete transformation of the industry.8 Efforts to completely overhaul pearling in the Gulf were further complicated by a notoriously fickle marine environment and rather curious bi-valve mollusc. Each managerial regime invoked the volatility of the industry and unusual characteristics of pearl-producing oysters as a rationale for further interventions. As British Ceylon marine biologist William Herdman wrote in the early twentieth century, ‘there is no reason for any despondency in regard to the future of the pearl fisheries, if they are treated scientifically.’9 He stressed, ‘the material exists, ready for man’s operations.’10 While long-distance, continent-hopping voyages across vast oceanic spaces make for compelling narratives, the work of empire is detectable at a smaller scale. The Portuguese, Dutch, and British each entered a political landscape in which indigenous Indian and Sri Lankan rulers exercised various levels of control over the fisheries through duties and tribute, as well as through the symbolic incorporation of pearls into courtly cultures  Samuel Ostroff, ‘The Beds of Empire: Power and profit at the pearl fisheries of South India and Sri Lanka, c. 1770–1840,’ (Unpublished PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2016). 8  Subrahmanyam, ‘Noble harvest.’ 9  William A. Herdman, Report to the Government of Ceylon on the Pearl Oyster Fisheries of the Gulf of Manaar, I (London: The Royal Society, 1903–06), 8. 10  Ibid. 7

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and rituals. Cultural power, political authority, material riches, and territorial control had coalesced around the pearl trade over the longue durée. There are references in the medieval inscriptional record to transregional South Indian mercantile organizations, such as Manigrāmam and Ayyāvole, buying and selling pearls and other precious stones.11 A sixteenth-­ century Tamil inscription at a temple in Kilakkarai records ‘an agreement by which half a panam was to be given on every hundred pearls sold in Kilakkarai and the proceeds to be utilised for the worship and repairs to the temple.’12 Copperplate inscriptions record grants made by the Nayakas of Madurai and Setupatis of Ramnad of tax-free boats to several major temples along the southern Indian coastline.13 Travel accounts also testify to the complex political-economic entanglements of native powers with the people, institutions, animals, and environment connected to the production and consumption and pearls. Indeed, European language source materials contain valuable insight into the relationship between local rulers and the political economy of pearling. The intrepid traveller and diplomat Vasco da Gama famously expressed an interest in pearls sourced from Mannar during his visit to the court of the Zamorin of Calicut at the close of the fifteenth century.14 Sixteenth-century Portuguese voyager Duarte Barbosa described how the largest pearls from the season’s catch went to the King, while the divers and boatmen kept the more modest specimens and paid a tax for the right to fish. The Portuguese Estado da Índia was the predominant  European power  involved with the pearling industry from the turn of the sixteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century and continued many of these practices.15 The reign of the Portuguese came to an unceremonious end in 1658 when the Dutch VOC drove the Iberians from the region.16 Similar to 11  Meera Abraham, Two Medieval Merchant Guilds of South India (Delhi: Manohar, 1988), 139, 173–76. 12  A Topographical List of the Inscriptions of the Madras Presidency (Collected till 1915), ed. V. Rangacharya (Madras: Government Press, 1919), Vol. II, Ramnad District, No. 63 (396 of 1907), 1167. 13  Ostroff, ‘Beds of Empire.’ 14  Chandra R. De Silva, ‘The Portuguese and pearl fishing off South India and Sri Lanka,’ South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 1, 1 (1978), 7. 15  De Silva, ‘Portuguese and pearl fishing;’ Subrahmanyam, ‘Noble harvest.’ 16  Markus P. M. Vink, Encounters on the Opposite Coast: The Dutch East India Company and the Nayaka State of Madurai in the seventeenth century (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Zoltán Biedermann, The Portuguese in Sri Lanka and South India: Studies in the history of diplomacy, empire and trade, 1500–1650 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014).

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their vanquished Portuguese rivals, the VOC linked territorial and thalassic control to assertions of political sovereignty and bound them together with the exploitation of pearl oysters and the natural marine environment. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the VOC withdrew most of its military and commercial presence from South India and Sri Lanka and focused its colonial and imperial ambitions on Southeast Asia. In 1796, by virtue of its defeat of the Dutch, the British East India Company (EIC) claimed the pearl fishery as a ‘right of conquest.’ From 1796 to 1802, the Company governed erstwhile Dutch Ceylon from its administrative headquarters at Fort St. George, Madras. In 1802, the British Crown assumed control of maritime Ceylon, but the East India Company tightened its grip on the coastal areas of the Madras Presidency. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the pearl oyster beds were situated within the domains of two different British powers. The movement of people, things, and animals through the Gulf during the pearling season undermined attempts by Madras and Ceylon to actualise a vision of distinct realms for the Company and Crown, and made it difficult to police the maritime borderlands between the island and mainland. From 1858, when the EIC transferred its Indian territories to the British Crown, to 1947 and 1948, when India and Sri Lanka respectively achieved independence, the British colonial state managed the pearling industry.

Can the Oyster Speak? Humans and Molluscs at the Maritime Frontiers of Empire The small, pearl-producing bi-valve molluscs that once grew prodigiously along the low-lying, sandy shores of Mannar were more than a source of precious gems, valuable shells, and brackish protein. Oysters were live actors in a complex formed by interactions between humans, animals, and the environment. In the path-breaking essay ‘Can the Mosquito Speak?,’ historian Timothy Mitchell confronts deep, entrenched historical narratives—nationalist and otherwise—about the chequered record of economic development in post-WWII Egypt. Conventional narratives about the developmental trajectory of the modern Egyptian nation-state in the second half of the twentieth century point rightly to the disruptive shocks and aftershocks of war. Mitchell introduces non-human factors by drawing attention to pesky mosquitos and virulent malaria. He tracks the role of mosquitos that migrated to the Egyptian Nile through the hydraulic passageways, natural rivers, and transportation networks that had been the

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products of wartime infrastructure projects. The mosquito,  Anopheles gambiae, carried Plasmodium falciparum, a devastating strain of malaria. Whereas locals who lived through malarial outbreaks recall the devastation in vivid detail, professional historical accounts overlook the insect. Mitchell convincingly argues that the historiography of the modern  Middle East looks past the impact of mosquitos and mosquito-borne diseases because biases within modern social scientific paradigms cannot help but privilege human experiences thereby creating animal-shaped blind spots. According to Mitchell, ‘social theory typically operates by relating particular cases to a larger pattern or process,’ and presumes that ‘all actors are human.’ ‘Human agency,’ he adds, ‘like capital, is a technical body, is something made.’ Instead of removing non-human actors such as the mosquito from interpretations of the past, Mitchell emphasizes ‘hybrid agencies.’ Understanding how technologies, environments, animals, and humans interact sheds light on the features and functions of modern governmental power and techno-politics.17 Like Anopheles gambiae and Plasmodium falciparum in the 1940s Nile Delta, Margaritifera vulgaris as a non-human agent is often ignored in both academic and popular writings about pearling and the pearl trade in the IOW  and beyond. From Baja to Burma, any discussions of animal-­ related matters are instead focused on the production and consumption of pearls, shells, and oyster-derived products, such as chunam, a plaster-like substance made from oyster shells. To borrow a phrase from historian J. R. McNeil, the history of pearling in the Gulf of Mannar may also be written ‘as if nature existed,’ which, in an expansive reading, means that it ought to include members of the animal kingdom besides humans.18 During the early modern and modern periods, European naturalists integrated in commercial and imperial networks came to India and Sri Lanka to witness the spectacle of the pearl fishery, to study oysters, and to observe the marine ecosystem of Mannar. In 1691, for instance, Dutch VOC official Hendrick Adriaan van Rheede submitted a report to his superiors in Amsterdam on the location of pearl oyster banks that included detailed descriptions of the life cycle of pearl oysters.19 In 1796, when the EIC 17  Timothy Mitchell, The Rule of Experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), Ch.1, 19–53. 18  J.  R. McNeil, ‘The state of the field of environmental history,’ Annual Review of Environment and Resource 35, 1 (2010), 345–74. 19  ‘Extract uyt de missive door den Commissaries-Generaal, Hendrick Adriaan van Reede, here van Mydreght, etc., geschreven aan de vergaderingh van de seventiene uyt Tutucorin,

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assumed managerial control over the pearling industry, officials commissioned reports on natural history like their Dutch predecessors. In 1800, Governor Frederic North of Ceylon appointed French naturalist Eudelin de Jonville as the first surveyor general of Ceylon.20 De Jonville produced a manuscript (Quelques notions sur l’Isle de Ceylan) that provided a narrative account of his journey around the island, which he complemented with colourful illustrations of flora and fauna.21 Along with important settlements, roads, and waterways, de Jonville’s surveys highlighted the location of the pearl oyster beds off the western coast of the island.22 Quelques notions sur l’Isle de Ceylan also includes descriptions and drawings of pearl oysters, which brought specific knowledge about the habitat and life cycle of the species to the attention of government officials, including his benefactor Governor North (Figs. 3.1and 3.2). De Jonville’s contemporaries praised his work. British traveller George Annesley wrote that de Jonville was ‘possessed of considerable talents.’ He had a ‘very great knowledge in several branches of natural history’ and he ‘collected the most important information relative to the pearl fishery.’23 De Jonville even presented Lord Viscount  Valentia with a gift of rare and beautiful pearls at Colombo.24 Reports by naturalists such as de Jonville equipped government officials with useful knowledge about pearls and oysters that informed their decision-making around the management of the pearl fishery.

in dato 16 January 1691,’ in Pieter van Dam, Beschryvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie, ed. F. W. Stapel (‘s-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff, 1932), 2:412–33; Subrahmanyam, ‘Noble harvest,’ 148. 20  Rowland Raven-Hart, Travels in Ceylon, 1700–1800 (Colombo: Associated Newspapers of Ceylon, 1963); R. L. Brohier, Land, Maps, and Surveys (Colombo: Ceylon Government Press, 1950); Ian Barrow, Surveying and Mapping in Colonial Sri Lanka, 1800–1900 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), 33–6; James S.  Duncan, The City as Text: The politics of landscape interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 21  British Library India Office Records (hereafter: IOR) MSS Eur. E80–82. De  Jonville Manuscript. 22  Raven-Hart, Travels in Ceylon; Eudelin de Jonville, Quelques Notions sur L’Isle de Ceylon, trans. and eds. Philippe Fabry and Marie-Helen Esteve, (Paris: Ginkgo, 2012). 23  George Annesley, Voyages and Travels in India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia, and Egypt, II (London: W. Miller, 1809), 316. 24  James Cordiner, A Description of Ceylon: Containing an account of the country, inhabitants, and natural productions (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807), 2, 69.

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Fig. 3.1  Oysters. De Jonville Manuscript, British Library

Fig. 3.2  Oysters. De Jonville Manuscript, British Library

Sovereign Animal: Imperial Sovereignty, Fisheries, and the Global Seas In his encyclopaedic text from the early first millennium on the natural world, Pliny the Elder referred to pearls harvested from the Indian Ocean as ‘the richest merchandise of all’ and ‘the most sovereign commodity throughout the whole world.’25 Pliny alluded to the symbolic associations of pearls with kings and queens, but he also invoked another meaning in 25  Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, 10 Vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); George F. Kunz, The Book of the Pearl: The history, art, science, and industry of the Queen of Gems (New York: The Century Co., 1908), 3.

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which pearls might be seen as the purest and supreme expressions of precious stones. Indeed, unlike gems extracted from mines, such as diamonds and rubies, pearls do not require any cutting, polishing, or shaping. Besides drilling holes to string them together, pearls remain largely untouched by jewellers. The royal connotations remained as kings, queens, shahs, and sultans in royal courts across Europe and the IOW displayed pearls as symbols of royal wealth, power, and prestige. In a classic mineralogical text, American gem specialist George Kunz described pearls as the ‘Queen of Gems.’26 The relationship between the production and consumption of pearls and sovereignty was articulated in a different context, as Dutch and British officials hitched claims to legitimacy over the land, water, people, and resources of Mannar to their control over the pearl fishery. Scientific encounters between European empires, and the natural worlds of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, went hand in hand with colonial expansion and articulations of sovereignty at the frontiers of empire.27 Historian of imperial China Jonathan Schlesinger discusses in A World Trimmed with Fur how the Qing polity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries engaged in natural resource management and environmental protection on the Manchurian and Mongolian frontiers. Schlesinger’s painstaking research reveals how Qing rulers produced a salient concept of nature at its northern frontiers through the governmental and imperial logics of ‘purification’ rather than exploitation. ‘The empire did not preserve nature

 Kunz, The Book of the Pearl.  Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial expansion, tropical island Edens, and the origins of environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, eds., Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, science, and art in early modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2002); Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the construction of knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Londa Schienbinger and Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, commerce, and politics in the early modern world (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Londa Schienbinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial bioprospecting in the Atlantic world (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical expeditions and visual culture in the Hispanic enlightenment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012); Peter Boomgaard, ed., Empire and Science in the Making: Dutch colonial scholarship in comparative global perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Vinita Damodaran, Anna Winterbottom, and Alan Lester, eds., The East India Company and the Natural World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 26 27

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in its borderlands; it invented it,’ he writes.28 He mines Manchu and Mongolian archives to reveal how Qing rulers, advisors, and agents were far from indifferent about environmental exploitation but targeted the poachers, hunters, fishers, and merchants that supplied luxury animal goods to a growing base of urban consumers. Qing rulers intervened in the animal fur, Mongolian wild mushroom, and Manchu pearl mussel trades through various legal and political mechanisms, mainly licensing schemes and criminal prosecution, to expand and solidify Qing imperial rule. Parallels are found in other regions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The geographies of early modern and modern European imperial formations were not uniform but manifested themselves through the creation and management of intersecting fields of partial sovereignty at the frontiers of empire.29 As historian Lauren Benton writes, Although empires did lay claim to vast stretches of territory, the nature of such claims was tempered by control that was exercised mainly over narrow bands, or corridors, and other enclaves and irregular zones about them.30

The pearling zones of the Gulf of Mannar were one such ‘corridor’ through which European imperial powers stitched together various, and often-times contradictory, claims to territorial and thalassic control. Indeed, sovereignty was no small matter for the Dutch and English East India Companies in Asia, and modern historians have outlined the tensions between the political and commercial mandates of European overseas trading corporations.31 Archive-rich historical studies by Philip Stern on the British East India Company in India and Adam Clulow on the 28  Jonathan Schlesinger, A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild things, pristine places, and the natural fringes of Qing rule (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 4. 29  Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and geography in European empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 30  Benton, Search for Sovereignty, 2. 31  Jurrien van Goor, ‘A hybrid state: The Dutch economic and political network in Asia,’ in From the Mediterranean to the China Sea: Miscellaneous, eds. Claude Guillot, Denys Lombard, and Roderich Ptak (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998), 193–215; M.C.  Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200, 4th ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Janice E.  Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: Statebuilding and extraterritorial violence in early modern Europe, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

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Dutch East India Company in Japan have challenged the characterizations of the Companies as ‘strange absurdities,’ imperfect commercial bodies and second-rate political organizations.32 Both Stern and Clulow marshal compelling evidence to draw attention to a wide range of powers and practices—territorial possession, royal charters, treaty negotiations, standing armies, political discourses, and so on—that made the Dutch and English East India Companies proper political entities from the moment of their founding at the dawn of seventeenth century. An emergent global imperial legal discourse was one space through which the importance of marine animal fisheries in articulations of imperial sovereignty was formed. In the early seventeenth century, questions surrounding the legitimacy of the East India Companies in Asia converged with disputes between the British and Dutch over North Sea herring fisheries, which came to a head at the Anglo-Dutch Colonial Conferences in London and The Hague in the 1610s.33 One of the representatives of the Netherlands United Provinces was jurist Hugo Grotius, who just a few years prior to his attendance at the conference had anonymously published Mare Liberum, which, as the title suggests, argued that the seas were free and open to all nations.34 Scottish law professor William Welwood argued against the notion of the ‘free seas’ and advanced the view that states

32  Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate sovereignty and the early modern foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Adam Clulow, The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch encounter with Tokugawa Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Arthur Weststeijn, ‘The VOC as company-state: Debating seventeenth-century Dutch colonial expansion,’ Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction, 38, 1 (2014), 13–34. 33  Thomas W. Fulton, The Sovereignty of the Sea: An historical account of claims of England to the Dominion of the British Seas, and of the evolution of the territorial waters: With special reference to the right of fishing and the naval salute (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Son, 1911); David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); David Armitage, ‘The elephant and the whale: Empires of land and sea,’ Journal for Maritime Research 9, 1 (2007), 23–36. 34  Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, colonialism and order in world politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Martine Julia van Ittersum, Profit and Principle: Hugo Grotius, natural rights theories and the rise of Dutch power in the East Indies (Leiden: Brill, 2006); Monica Brito Vieira, ‘Mare Liberum versus Mare Clausum: Grotius, Freitas, and Selden’s debate on Dominion over the seas,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 63 (2003), 361–77; Peter Borschberg, Hugo Grotius, the Portuguese, and Free Trade in the East Indies (Singapore: National University Press, 2011).

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could claim dominion over water.35 Political and legal theorists further deliberated on the relationship between the sea and sovereignty.36 ‘Non-­ floating fisheries’ such as pearl oysters, conch shells, and coral, as well as large marine mammals including seals and walruses, were singled out because these animals lived along or just beyond the shoreline and not in the open seas like whales and cod. German political theorist Samuel Pufendorf addressed the topic of fisheries in Of the Law of Nature and Nations. He wrote: ‘tis [sic.] very usual that some particular kind of fish, or perhaps some more precious commodity as pearls, coral, amber, or the like, are to be found only in one part of the sea, and that of no considerable extent. In this case, there is no reason why the borderers should not rather challenge to themselves this happiness of a wealthy shore or sea than those who are seated at a distance from it. And other Nations can with no more justice grudge or envy them such an Advantage.37

Pufendorf promoted the territorialization of regions beyond a sovereign’s immediate shoreline. Marine animals (e.g. oysters) and marine animal products (e.g. pearls) were leitmotifs in emergent eighteenth-century legal discourses on territory, sovereignty, and the seas. In other words, oysters and pearls were good to think with for Pufendorf and his contemporaries. During the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European legal thought turned away from the theory of natural law and towards legal positivism. The continual use and exploitation of natural resources, a principle outlined as ‘positive prescription,’ was wedded to territorial claims.38 For Swiss political theorist Emer de Vattel, coastal 35  Martine Julia van Ittersum, ‘Mare Liberum versus the propriety of the seas? The debate between Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and William Welwood (1552–1624) and its impact on Anglo-Scotto-Dutch fishery disputes in the second decade of the seventeenth century,’ Edinburgh Law Review 10, 2 (2006), 239–76. 36  Fulton, Sovereignty of the Sea. 37  Samuel Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations, trans: Basil Kennett (London: 1729). 38  C. H. Alexandrowicz, An Introduction to the History of the Laws of Nations in the East India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967); Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The rise of imperial liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Robert Travers, ‘A British Empire by treaty in eighteenth century India,’ in Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European expansion, 1600–1800, ed. Saliha Belmessous (New York: Oxford University Press), 132–60.

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fisheries were the exclusive property of a sovereign, the control over which brought territorial rights to the coastline. He wrote in The Law of Nations (1758): The various uses of the sea near the coasts render it very susceptible of property. It furnishes fish, shells, pearls, amber, etc. Now in all these respects its use is not inexhaustible; wherefore the nation to whom the coasts belong may appropriate to themselves, and convert to their own profit, an advantage which nature has so placed within their reach as to enable them conveniently to take possession of it, in the same manner as they possessed themselves of the dominion of the land they inhabit. Who can doubt, that the pearl fisheries of [Bahrain] and Ceylon may lawfully become property? And though, where the catching of fish is the only object, the fishery appears less liable to be exhausted,—yet if a nation have on their coast a particular fishery of a profitable nature, and of which they may become masters, shall they not be permitted to appropriate to themselves that bounteous gift of nature, as an appendage to the country they possess, and to reserve to themselves the great advantages which their commerce may thence derive in case there be a sufficient abundance of fish to furnish the neighbouring nations?39

De Vattel concluded that a government could lawfully ‘extend their dominion over the sea along their coasts, as far as they are able to protect their right [to do so].’40 Indeed, a recurring argument in favour of dominion over the sea was that it protected natural resources. Pearl oysters, like other luxury marine products—and unlike ‘inexhaustible’ floating fish populations such as cod, herring, or tuna—were viewed as particularly vulnerable to over-exploitation. It followed—based on the political and legal logics of the day—that the power to provide such environmental protections could only be leveraged by a sovereign authority. Discourses on the relationship between the sea, animals, territory, and sovereignty further migrated into the writings of Dutch and English officials engaged with the management of pearl oysters and the natural marine environment of Mannar. Dutch officers made arguments in this vein, suggesting that the harvesting of pearl oysters entitled the VOC to territorial and thalassic control. Dutch Governor Hendrick Becker wrote about the

39  Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations, eds. Béla Kapossy and Richard Whitmore (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008), 252–3. 40  Ibid.

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importance of holding regular inspections of the pearl oyster banks in a report to Isaac Rumpf, next-in-line for the governorship, in 1716: These yearly inspections are held in the hope that these profitable banks may furnish the Company with the rich revenue to which it is indisputably entitled as Lord of the Shores, and also to enable it to purchase this jewel of the sea at a reasonable price so as to meet the demand.41

The title ‘Lord of the Shores’ was not a divine right; it was earned and therefore had to be maintained. Regular examinations of the oyster banks not only determined the feasibility of hosting a pearl fishery during the approaching season, but they also reinforced sovereign claims to the land and sea based on the principle of prescriptive use. In March 1762, Dutch Governor Jan Schreuder discussed the relationship between the pearl fishery and VOC claims to the island in a report to his successor, Jan Baron van Eck. According to Schreuder, the VOC had ‘by right of conquest, naturally acquired the full rights which the Portuguese had exercised,’ which Dutch officials interpreted as ‘sovereign rights over the sea and its products along the shore.’42 He recommended, like his predecessors, that regular examinations should be undertaken ‘with the object of exercising our dominium maris.’43 The EIC appropriated the pearl fishery as a so-called right of conquest from its Dutch rivals in 1796. As one Company officer wrote at the turn of the nineteenth century, ‘It is clear that we are, by right of Conquest, [and] the consequent devolution to us of whatever belonged to the Dutch, entitled to all the most valuable part of the Island.’44 He continued: Our Sovereign possession of that uninterrupted belt which follows the whole circumference of the coasts and encircles and hems in the entire Kingdom of Candy, places that Kingdom virtually under our control & dominion.45 41  Hendrick Becker, Memoir of Hendrick Becker, Governor and Director of Ceylon, for His Successor, Isaac Augustyn Rumpf, 1716, trans. Sophia Anthonisz (Colombo: H. C. Cottle, Government Printer, 1914), 12. 42  Jan Schreuder, Memoir of Jan Schreuder, 1757–1762, delivered to his successor, Lubbert Jan Baron van Eck on March 17, 1762, trans. E. Reimers (Colombo: Ceylon Government Press, 1946), 40. 43  Ibid. 44  IOR, G, 11, 54, 61. 45  Ibid., 61–62.

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Like the Dutch VOC, the EIC connected rights to the natural resources of the island—pearls, oysters, and the marine environment—to territorial control and political sovereignty of the maritime districts of the island but took it one step further. According to the author of the above-­ mentioned report: Our command of the Sea & Harbours makes us masters of the other Chief sources of riches to Ceylon, the Pearl fishery. Such being the case, is not the independence and Sovereignty of the King of the interior of the Island, a name more than anything else?46

EIC officials perform a rather impressive rhetorical sleight of hand by arguing that Company control over the erstwhile Dutch possession of coastal Sri Lanka and its ‘chief source of riches’ effectively nullified Kandyan legitimacy over the interior highlands. These expansionist impulses naturally turned towards the area beyond the shores with the pearl banks as the boundary line between land and sea. This idea—that the pearl fisheries could be the lawful property of the true sovereign—was further codified by a British colonial act in 1811, which extended the state’s dominion over the pearl banks beyond three miles from shore, the distance previously recognized by international law. British Ceylon now had control over waters extending anywhere from six to twenty miles from shore, depending on the exact location of the pearl banks. The regulation expanded state policing powers and permitted British Ceylon officials to arrest any unauthorized vessels traveling along the pearl oyster beds in the name of security and environmental conservation.47 This law even found its way into debates between the United States and Britain over seal hunting in the late nineteenth century. According to records of the summit between American and British leaders, [The Ceylon] pearl fisheries have been treated from time immemorial by the successive rulers of the island as subjects of property and jurisdiction, and have been so regarded with the acquiesce of all other nations.48

 Ibid., 62–63.  Regulation No. 1 of 1830, A Collection of Legislative Acts of the Ceylon Government from 1796 (Colombo: Government Press, 1853–54), 361. 48  Fur Seal Arbitration (Washington, 1895), 10:47. 46 47

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From Farm to Table: Oysters in Circulation at the Pearl Fishery European observers regularly commented on the infrequent nature of the pearl fishery and bemoaned the challenges they faced in determining its location and predicting its yield. In his report to British Ceylon, Herdman remarked that ‘a notable feature of these fisheries, under all administrations, has been their uncertainty and intermittent character.’49 Indeed, Dutch and British administrators of the pearl fishery expressed frustration with the sporadic nature of the industry and sought to bring a degree of regularity to the natural economy of pearling. Assaying the pearl oyster banks was an annual enterprise from the early Portuguese period onwards.50 An annual examination of the state of the oyster populations usually occurred in October and November when the southwest monsoon winds subsided, the waters became relatively placid, and travel from the sandy beaches to the pearling grounds was less treacherous. If the results were favourable, then a pearl fishery would be held during the next break in the monsoon winds. Dutch VOC official Jacob Pielat wrote in 1734: The pearl banks must be again inspected in February and March as formerly done. The weather is more suitable for an inspection at that time than any other, so that the work can be carried out with less inconvenience. The inspection in autumn must be revived as soon as the Commissioners consider the pearl banks in a condition to make a dive possible in the following year.51

In another instance, Dutch Ceylon Governor Julius Stein van Gollenesse (1743–1751) wrote about examining the pearl banks in a formal administrative report to his successor Gerrit Joan Vreeland in February 1751: And though we have dispensed with the inspection of the banks for this year in order to spare unnecessary trouble and because they were inspected in the previous year with utmost care and were found to be covered only with young and no full-grown oysters, this must be resumed in the following year

 Herdman, Report to the Government of Ceylon, 1:3.  De Silva, ‘Portuguese and pearl fishing,’ 24. 51  Memoir left by Jacob Christiaan Pielat to his successor, Diederik van Domburg, 1734, trans. Sophia Peters (Colombo: Government Press, 1908). 49 50

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once more in order to be satisfied that the Company does not lose such important profits by the neglect of its officers.52

In the nineteenth century, contemporary observers found that annual examinations combined with forms of natural resource management to limit exploitation continued to serve a useful purpose. As British military officer Jonathan Forbes wrote in 1840, ‘Repeated examinations of the banks, and judicious restrictions of the fishery to those places where the oysters are of full size, have almost brought the pearl-fishery to be a regular annual addition to the income of the island.’53 The examination of the pearl banks was undertaken more or less on an annual basis. The length of time between fisheries did vary by season and location, but it was generally believed that seven years was the optimal life cycle of a pearl oyster. According to a Madras government report in 1800, the local captain of the examination team remarked to British officials: A great many Oysters which they supposed to be of the age of six and a quarter years old that they seldom or ever exceed the age of seven at which period they vomit the Pearl and die that consequently it has become absolutely necessary … to fish it that it be commenced on the latter end of March or beginning of April otherwise the Oysters will die and the Company sustain much loss.54

Over the course of a few days, a local crew pulled up a relatively modest sample of pearl oysters—anywhere from between a few hundred to a few thousand—and later determined the age and size of the specimens and assessed the yield and quality of pearls. Pearl merchants and other gem specialists appraised the results of the examination and estimated the potential value of the season’s harvest to determine the feasibility of hosting a pearl fishery the following spring. British officials appear to have also elaborated the practice of employing local experts to evaluate the quality of the product obtained during the assaying process. Appraisers received pearls that had been classed and sorted based on such qualities as size, shape, and colour. This was the case at Tuticorin in 1800 when the sub-­ collector of Tirunelveli reported that ‘after Collecting the whole of the 52  Memoir of Julius Stein van Gollenesse, Governor of Ceylon, 1743–1751, trans. Sinnappah Arasaratnam (Colombo: Department of National Archives, 1974), 79. 53  Forbes, Eleven Years in Ceylon, 1:257. 54  TNA, BOR Proceedings, Vol. 242, 220–232 (13 January 1800).

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Pearls’ he had them ‘valued by four merchants’ in the presence of other British officials and ‘many of the other Principal native inhabitants.’55 All of this was closely documented by both government officials and members of the assaying team.56 Governor North even proposed a system in which the location of the fishery would rotate every seven years. He drew upon both scientific and local knowledge to propose a system of natural resource management analogous to crop rotation. In a letter to the Court of Directors in London, North wrote: By all the Information which I could collect at Arippo, I am induced to think that the Extent of bank covered with unripe Oysters is fully sufficient for the Execution of the Plan … of dividing it into Seven Parts, one of which may Fished each year by a Proportionate number of Boats, so that at the Expiration of the Seventh Year (which is the Supposed Term of the Maturity of Pearl Oysters) the First Division may be again Fished and a Constant succession of Fisheries be in that [Manner] without Danger of exhausting or injuring Banks. This System, however, cannot, from Immaturity of the Oysters, commence till the year next.57

Even though Governor North’s creative system never materialized, there was a driving force behind his proposal. He wrote elsewhere that the Company had an interest ‘in preserving the Banks from premature exhaustion.’58 When the EIC assumed managerial rights to the pearl fishery of Mannar in 1796, the divers, boat captains, and other members of the pearling workforce were regularly paid with one-third or one-fourth of the day’s catch of oysters. As special legal counsel to the EIC, Henry Smith undertook a diagnostic of the pearling industry to understand the Madras government’s newest and potentially most valuable source of revenue: The Boats and Apparatus are the Property of Individuals, who, as well as the divers and crew are remunerated for each [day’s] Work, by a certain proportion of the produce of each [day’s] adventure there are also certain Officers, such as the Pilot who conducts the fleet of Boats to the fishing Banks, the  TNA, BOR Proceedings, Vol. 242, 223 (18 January 1800).  Ostroff, ‘Beds of Empire,’ Ch. 1. 57  BL, IOR, F, 4, 130, 2402, 10–11. 58  UKNA, CO, 54, Vol. 7, 196–196v. 55 56

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Shark Charmers etc. who are paid by a certain number of Oysters from each Boat, the residue of the Oysters taken, is the gain of the Proprietors of the Fishery, who have been accustomed to make it available to them in several ways.59

From the perspective of the boat owners, renters, and government proprietors, this system of in-kind payments was cost-effective and reduced risk because it minimized up-front labour costs. Compensation to divers and other labourers largely came from the sea. This also meant that the livelihoods of divers and their families were highly precarious and open to the volatility of the marketplace. The so-called cutcherry servants—the scribes, accountants, cash-keepers, and others administrative staff—also received a share of the oysters in addition to their normal wages. Oysters may also have served as a food source, but such evidence is scant and largely anecdotal. British military officer Jonathan Forbes wrote, ‘the pearl-oyster, although neither palatable nor wholesome, has no poisonous quality, and is said to be sometimes eaten by the poorest of those people who frequent the fishery.’60 The British governments of Madras and Ceylon usually allocated a share of the oysters to the shark-charmers (kadalkutti or ‘binder of sharks’). From the shore, as the boats went out to the pearling grounds each morning, shark-charmers recited prayers and cast spells that protected divers and crewmembers from sea predators. An early twentieth-­ century historian characterized the use of shark-charmers as ‘one of the most novel features’ of the pearl fishery of Mannar.61 References to shark-­ charmers are found in some of the earliest written accounts of the pearl fishery. Marco Polo provides a widely cited description: In consequence of the gulf being infested with a kind of large fish, which often prove destructive to the divers, the merchants take the precaution of being accompanied by certain enchanters belonging to a class of Brahmans, who, by means of their diabolical art, have the power of constraining and stupefying these fish so as to prevent them from doing mischief.62  IOR G, 11, 53, 39v.  Jonathan Forbes, Eleven Years in Ceylon, I (London: R. Bentley, 1840), 255. 61  Kunz, Book of the Pearl, 115. 62  Marco Polo, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, ed. and trans. Henry Yule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 625. 59 60

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He added that the shark-charmers: Discontinue the effects of the charm in the evening in order that dishonest persons who might be inclined to take the opportunity of diving at night and stealing oysters, may be deterred by the apprehension they feel of the unrestrained ravages of these animals.63

The Portuguese, Dutch, and British continued to employ shark-­charmers.64 While often represented in contemporary travel accounts as a curiosity, the shark-charmers were an integral part of the moral economy at the pearl fishery, as well as the overall production and exchange of goods and services. As colonial officer James Bennett reported in his study of British Ceylon: This shark charming trade is a very lucrative one, because as it is not the mere government stipend that satisfies them, they insist upon the additional daily tithe of ten or a dozen oysters from each boat, which is readily paid.65

Shark-charmers were paid in various forms, including coin, pearls, oysters, and other valuables for their work. According to statements from the 1822 pearl fishery, the ‘conjurers’ received ten oysters from each boat. The shark-charmers received 5240 oysters from the divers’ share of oysters and 23,849 from the state’s share of oysters for a total of 29,089.66 Mercantile elites also patronized shark-charmers. As Percival wrote: ‘The conjurers reap here a rich harvest, for besides being paid by the government, they get money and presents of all sorts from the black merchants and those successful in fishing up the oysters.’67 Kundappah Chetti, during his rent of the 1804 pearl fishery at Arippu, engaged some shark-charmers to protect and promote the prosperity of his investment. According to the description of one eyewitness:

 Ibid.  Kunz, Book of the Pearl, 116. 65  John Bennett, Ceylon and its Capabilities: An account of its natural resources, indigenous productions, and commercial facilities (London: W. H. Allen and Co., 1843), 205. 66  TNA, TDR, Vol. 4696, 233 (21 December 1822). 67  Robert Percival, An Account of the Island of Ceylon, Containing Its History, Geography, Natural History (London: C. and R. Baldwin, 1803), 68. 63 64

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The renter indulged in a number of superstitious ceremonies, with a view of promoting his success; and allowed himself to be led away by soothsayers and magicians. In all his conduct he discovered low cunning, duplicity, and mysteriousness, which characterized the higher ranks of Indians.68

Concerns over disease at the pearl fishery, as well as the uncontrolled migration of people, overlaid wider concerns about sanitation, health, and security at crossroad institutions like bazaars, army barracks, and religious pilgrimage sites.69 Portuguese chronicler João Ribeiro wrote, For the last nine days [of the fishery] the enclosures are cleansed, as so many flies are bred by the corrupt matter that the adjacent places and the whole country might be annoyed by them, if care were not taken to sweep into the sea the impurities collected during the fishery.70

Dutch Governor Baron van Imhoff also wrote about the unhygienic scene at the pearl fishery and speculated about the risk to VOC troops: We must also mention the hazards run by a few hundred men sent to keep immense crowds in order, and their exposure to sickness and death as well after the fishery as during its continuance from the stench of the oysters.71

British officials on both sides of the Gulf expressed concern about a range of environmental factors, which they maintained had the potential to negatively impact the productivity and profitability of the pearl fishery.  Cordiner, A Description of Ceylon, II, 70–1.  David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State medicine and epidemic disease in nineteenthcentury India (Berkeley: University of California, 1993); Anand Yang, Bazaar India: Markets, society, and the colonial state in Gangetic Bihar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 112–60; Eric Tagliacozzo, ‘Hajj in the time of cholera: Pilgrim ships and contagion from Southeast Asia to the Red Sea,’ in Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print, eds. James L.  Gelvin and Nile Green (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 103–20; Erica Wald, Vice in the Barracks: Medicine, the military, and the making of colonial India, 1780–1868 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 70  João Ribeiro, History of Ceylon: Presented by Captain John Ribeyro to the King of Portugal, in 1685, trans: George Lee (Colombo: Government Press, 1847); James Hornell, Report of the Government of Madras on the Indian Pearl Fisheries in the Gulf of Mannar (Madras: Government Press, 1905), 9. 71  Gustaaf Willem Baron van Imhoff, Memoir Left by Gustaaf Willem Baron van Imhoff, Governor and Director of Ceylon, to his Successor, Willem Maurits Bruynink, 1740, trans. Sophia Peters (Colombo: Government Press, 1911), 54; Hornell, Report to the Government of Madras, 16. 68 69

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The pearl fishery compound had long been considered by government officials and travellers as insalubrious, unsanitary, and injurious to a person’s physical health and well-being. Millions of oysters were hauled ashore and left to dry in the hot sun, which created a miasma of rotting flesh and stale shells. The stench wafting from the drying grounds could perhaps be tolerated so long as a handsome profit awaited. As British traveller and colonial official James Bennett wrote, ‘After the second or third day’s fishing, the stench of the dead oysters becomes intolerable to all, except those whose thirst for gain absorbs every other sense.’72 The intensity of the smell diminished over time, as the flesh of the oyster wasted away, leaving all but the shell and—hopefully—a bright, beautiful pearl. Bennett continued: ‘But, as use reconciles one to most things in this life, custom soon neutralises the olfactory effect of the nuisance; for the stench is considered less diffusive, as the process progresses.’73 Ceylon-born Dutch naturalist Henry Le Beck offered a vivid description of the scene at the 1797 pearl fishery: The pestilential smell occasioned by the numbers of purifying pearl fishes [sic.], renders the atmosphere of Condatchey so insufferably offensive when the southwest wind blows, that it sensibly affects the olfactory nerves of any one unaccustomed to such cadaverous smells. This putrefaction generates immense numbers of worms, flies, [mosquitoes], and other vermin; all together forming a scene strongly displeasing to the senses.74

Percival offered a similar account: The stench occasioned by the oysters being left to putrefy is intolerable; and remains for a long while after the fishery is over. It corrupts the atmosphere for several miles round Condatchy, and renders the neighbourhood of that country extremely unpleasant till the monsoons and violent southwest winds set in and purify the air.75

During the nineteenth century, British officials and European naturalists came to view the pearl fishery through an epidemiological lens. It was a dangerous space in which contagions spread. The anxiety of European travellers and officials who became sick with various illnesses while  Bennett, Ceylon and its Capabilities, 205.  Ibid. 74  Henry Le Beck, ‘An Account of the pearl fishery in the Gulph of Manar, in March and April, 1797,’ Asiatick Researchers, 5 (1807), 399. 75  Percival, Account of the Island of Ceylon, 71. 72 73

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attending to their duties at the pearl fishery is palpable. George Turnour, for example, who contracted the so-called Mannar fever during his inspection of the pearl banks in late 1798, wrote to his colleague Hugh Cleghorn: I am sorry to add that the Dutch Surgeon (the only Medical person we have here) is of the opinion, that my Complaint is the Manar [sic] fever, & that he is apprehensive of its returning today, tomorrow, or next day; and if it should not return, he thinks that I must have recourse, for eight or ten days to preventive remedies but as I have no doubt, but that with care & an unbroken constitution, I shall be perfectly recovered by that time.76

Turnour also feared that he had been infected with smallpox during his service, while his colleague James McDowall came down with a case of boils, and Cleghorn believed he contracted a fever from ‘the putrid exhalations of the oysters.’77 Government officials also described how the physical conditions of the pearl fishery camp negatively affected their health when writing to their superiors in Madras and Colombo with requests for extra compensation. For example, Collector James Hepburn of Tirunelveli requested a bonus from the Board of Revenue following his superintendence of the 1810 pearl fishery. He wrote: Conducting this fishery required six weeks incessant vigilance and personal attendance on my part obliging me to reside during the whole time a place rendered almost intolerable from the putrid State of the [atmosphere] Caused by the Exposure of so many Millions of Oysters to Corruption in the open air the bad effects of which were felt upon the health of almost every Servant who Accompanied [my] performance of that duty.78

Such requests went to the highest levels of the East India Company and British Ceylon governments, and it often took several years for replies from London to reach Madras or Colombo.79  IOR, F, 4, 129, 2401, 142.  Aylwin Clark, An Enlightened Scot: Hugh Cleghorn, 1752–1837 (Duns: Black Ace Books, 1992), 200. 78  TNA, TDR, Vol. 3586, 142–3 (20 March 1810). 79  Hepburn waited more than two years to receive a bonus for his work at the 1807 pearl fishery. TNA, Board of Revenue Proceedings (hereafter: BOR) Vol. 517, 5017–21 (21 June 1810). In the case of the 1810 pearl fishery, Hepburn did not receive his award until July 1815, nearly five years after he made the request. TNA, BOR Vol. 682, 7610–1 (10 July 1815). Collector James Cotton of Tirunelveli also waited five years for a response from London. TNA, BOR, Vol. 936, 1121 (20 January 1823). 76 77

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Cholera was a particularly contagious and aggressive bacterial disease that regularly struck the inhabitants of the pearl fishery camp. Historian David Arnold has called cholera in colonial India a ‘disease of disorder.’80 Government officials were aware of this state of affairs and took positive steps to mitigate the damage cholera and other diseases wrought on the profitability and productivity of the pearl fishery. The employment of medical professionals to control outbreaks and treat patients was one way that British governments intervened. In advance of the 1799 pearl fishery at Arippu, the superintendents addressed Governor North, anxious about the potential of a vast number of people being exposed to cholera. They wrote: Besides the numbers of Europeans, and great concourse of Natives daily expected at Arripo, there is, and probably will continue to be stationed here, nearly 100 of the Hon’ble Company’s Troops, such a Multitude collected in one place, many of whom from their particularly vocations exposed to casualties, must occasionally require medical assistance.81

In another case, Collector Hudleston, the superintendent of the 1822 pearl fishery at Tuticorin, urgently requested a medical professional repair to the camp. He wrote: Several cases of cholera having recently occurred at the fishery one poor individual being at this moment probably in extremity and the disease having likely to make the most dreadful horror amongst a vast assembled population.82

He continued: In such a situation and under such circumstances I deem the service of a medical officer absolutely necessary here and … have to request your immediate attendance with ample provisions of anti-cholera medicine at the fishery near Tutacoreen.83

 Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 159–99; Tagliacozzo, The Longest Journey, 133–55.  IOR F, 4, 130, 2402, 194. 82  TNA, TDR, Vol. 4696, 413 (15 March 1822). 83  Ibid. 80 81

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The nearest on-staff medical professional was William Turnbull, who received a letter from the Madras government that contained dire warnings. Turnbull administered what were described as European medicines, which most likely include opium and laudanum, and he quarantined infected persons on a floating ‘Hospital Boat.’84

Reconsidering the Oyster In the first century, Pliny the Elder described the oysters of ancient Taprobane (Sri Lanka) ‘as the most productive of pearls of all parts of the world.’85 The reputation of Margaritifera vulgaris as the ‘greatest pearl producer in the family of pearl oyster’ continued to the early twentieth century.86 During the course of the twentieth century, pearling centres across the IOW from Bahrain to Broome went boom and bust as cultured pearls emerged as a commercially viable alternative. In 1958, a scientist for the government of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) remarked that ‘the success of future fisheries’ was contingent upon finding ‘a suitable export market’ and speculated that ‘there still appears to be a good market for natural pearls in India though cultured pearls offer stiff competition.’87 From dredging and overfishing to the rise of industrial manufacturing in the region, the latter of which attracted labour and capital previously concerned with pearling, a mix of local and global forces—not least of which included the rise of cultured pearl production—led to the slow death of the pearling industry. From the sixteenth century onwards, European  officials, travelers, and naturalists  ruminated over the unpredictable nature of pearling and the mysterious qualities of the oyster, while local pearlers and indigenous knowledge experts did so both in conjunction with and in parallel to their foreign  counterparts. Marine biologist Daniel Pauly identified a ­phenomenon that he called ‘shifting baselines’ and introduced historical perspectives to the study of the marine environment and fisheries populations.88 Historian William Bolster’s impressive scholarly monograph The  TNA, TDR, Vol. 4364, 99–100 (25 March 1822).  Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia. 86  Kunz, The Book of the Pearl, 67. 87  S.  Sivalingam, The 1958 Pearl Oyster Fishery, Gulf of Mannar (Colombo: Fisheries Research Station, 1961), 19. 88  Daniel Pauly, ‘Anecdotes and the shifting baselines syndrome of fisheries,’ Trends in Ecology and Evolution 10, 10 (1995), 430; Jeremy B.C. Jackson, Karen Alexander and Enric Sala, eds., Shifting Baselines: The past and the future of ocean fisheries (Washington: Island 84 85

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Mortal Sea built upon the idea of ‘shifting baselines’ to show that each generation of Atlantic fishermen feared dwindling supplies of fish, which directly challenged characterisations of the sea as a bountiful and inexhaustible resource.89 Bolster used historical data to show that fish populations in the Atlantic remained relatively stable until the introduction of industrialized fishing practices. Those engaged with the management of the pearl fishery of Mannar from the sixteenth century onwards always feared that a crisis of productivity was imminent. Dutch Governor Baron van Imhoff wrote in 1740: It is now several years since the pearl banks have fallen into a very bad state both at Manaar [sic] and Tuticorin; this is mere chance, and experience has shown that, on former occasion, the banks have been unproductive even for a longer period than has yet occurred at present.90

In the early nineteenth century, Ceylon civil servant Anthony Bertolacci remarked, ‘the pearl fishery, is doubtless, one of the great resources of the Colonial Government; but it is one of a very uncertain nature.’91 He added: It has, I believe, been the ambition of every successive Governor, since we acquired possession of Ceylon, to place this source of revenue upon such a systematic plan, if possible, to derive from it a permanent sum yearly: but hitherto their endeavours have failed; and the periods at which the fisheries can be affected, appear, still, to remain a matter of great uncertainty.92

The inability of colonial officials to ‘know’ the oyster facilitated European engagements with the humans, animals, and environment of the pearling industry in the Gulf of Mannar. The Dutch and English company-states and British crown government obsessed over every detail. However, pearls and profit were not the only incentives. European officials maintained that oysters required special care. Company and Crown officers advanced a Press, 2011); Kathleen Schwerdtner Máñez and Bo Poulsen, eds., Perspectives on Oceans Past: A handbook for marine environmental history (Dordrecht: Spring, 2016). 89  William J. Bolster, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the age of sail (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); William J. Bolster, ‘Putting the ocean in Atlantic history: Maritime communities and marine ecology in the Northwest Atlantic, 1500–1800,’ The American Historical Review, 113, 1 (2008), 19–47. 90  Baron van Imhoff, Memoir; Herdman, Report to the Government of Ceylon, I, 3. 91  Bertolacci, A View of the Agricultural, Commercial, and Financial, 192. 92  Ibid., 255.

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position that only a governmental entity marshalling knowledge of the natural world and the science of political economy could serve as a just and responsible steward of the industry. Yet, more often than not, the humble oyster had other plans. The sovereign animal had its own domain.

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De Jonville, Eudelin. Quelques Notions sur L’Isle de Ceylon. Translated and edited by Philippe Fabry and Marie-Helen Esteve. Paris: Ginkgo, 2012. De Silva, Chandra R. ‘The Portuguese and pearl fishing off South India and Sri Lanka.’ South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 1, 1 (1978). Duncan, James S. The City as Text: The politics of landscape interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Forbes, Jonathan. Eleven Years in Ceylon, 2 Vols. London: R. Bentley, 1840. Gillis, John and Franziska Torma, eds. Fluid Frontiers: New currents in marine environmental history. Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 2015. Grove, Richard. Green Imperialism: Colonial expansion, tropical island Edens, and the origins of environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Heesterman, J. C. ‘Littoral et intérieur de l’Inde,’ in History and Underdevelopment: Essays on underdevelopment and European expansion in Asia and Africa, eds. Leonard Blussé, H.  L. Wesseling, and George D.  Winius. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1980. Herdman, William Abbott. Report to the Government of Ceylon on the Pearl Oyster Fisheries of the Gulf of Manaar. 5 Vols. London: Royal Society, 1903–06. Hornell, James. Report of the Government of Madras on the Indian Pearl Fisheries in the Gulf of Mannar. Madras: Government Press, 1905. Jackson, Jeremy B.C., Karen Alexander, and Enric Sala, eds. Shifting Baselines: The past and the future of ocean fisheries. Washington: Island Press, 2011. Keene, Edward. Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, colonialism and order in world politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Kunz, George F. The Book of the Pearl: The history, art, science, and industry of the Queen of Gems. New York: The Century Co., 1908. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. ‘The jeweled isle: Art from Sri Lanka.’ http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/jeweled-isle-art-sri-lanka. Accessed: 23 July 2018. Máñez, Kathleen Schwerdtner, and Bo Poulsen, eds. Perspectives on Oceans Past: A handbook for marine environmental history. Dordrecht: Spring, 2016. Marco Polo. The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, 2 Vols. Translated and edited by Henry Yule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Markovits, Claude, Jacques Pouchedass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Introduction: Circulation and society under colonial rule,’ in Society and Circulation: Mobile people and itinerant cultures in South Asia, 1750–1950, eds. Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchedass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. McNeil, J. R. ‘The state of the field of environmental history.’ Annual Review of Environment and Resource 35, 1 (2010). Mitchell, Timothy. The Rule of Experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

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Ostroff, Samuel. ‘The Beds of Empire: Power and profit at the pearl fisheries of South India and Sri Lanka, c. 1770–1840.’ Unpublished PhD dissertation: University of Pennsylvania, 2016. Pauly, Daniel. ‘Anecdotes and the shifting baselines syndrome of fisheries.’ Trends in Ecology and Evolution 10, 10 (1995). Percival, Robert. An Account of the Island of Ceylon, Containing Its History, Geography, Natural History. London: C. and R. Baldwin, 1803. Pitts, Jennifer. A Turn to Empire: The rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, 10 Vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pearson, Michael N. The Indian Ocean. London: Routledge, 2003. Pufendorf, Samuel. Of the Law of Nature and Nations. Translated by Basil Kennett. London: 1729. Raj, Kapil. Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the construction of knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Raven-Hart, Rowland. Travels in Ceylon, 1700–1800. Colombo: Associated Newspapers of Ceylon, 1963. Ribeiro, João. History of Ceylon: Presented by Captain John Ribeyro to the King of Portugal, in 1685.  Translated by George Lee. Colombo: Government Press, 1847. Ricklefs, M.C. A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200, 4th ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Schienbinger, Londa. Plants and Empire: Colonial bioprospecting in the Atlantic world. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Schienbinger, Londa and Claudia Swan, eds. Colonial Botany: Science, commerce, and politics in the early modern world. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Schlesinger, Jonathan. A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild things, pristine places, and the natural fringes of Qing Rule. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. Schreuder, Jan. Memoir of Jan Schreuder, 1757–1762, delivered to his successor, Lubbert Jan Baron van Eck on March 17, 1762.  Translated by E.  Reimers. Colombo: Ceylon Government Press, 1946. Sivalingam, S. The 1958 Pearl Oyster Fishery, Gulf of Mannar. Colombo: Fisheries Research Station, 1961. Sivasundaram, Sujit. Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka, and the bounds of an Indian Ocean colony. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013. Smith, Pamela H. and Paula Findlen, eds. Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, science, and art in early modern Europe. New York: Routledge, 2002. Stern, Philip J. The Company-State: Corporate sovereignty and the early modern foundations of the British Empire in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

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Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. ‘Noble harvest from the sea: Managing the pearl fishery of Mannar, 1500–1825,’ in Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia, eds. Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Burton Stein. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. Tagliacozzo, Eric. Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and states along a Southeast Asian frontier, 1865–1915. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Tagliacozzo, Eric. ‘Hajj in the time of Cholera: Pilgrim ships and contagion from Southeast Asia to the Red Sea,’ in Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print, eds. James L.  Gelvin and Nile Green. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Thomson, Janice E. Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-building and extraterritorial violence in early modern Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Travers, Robert.  ‘A British Empire by treaty in eighteenth century India,’ in Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European expansion, 1600–1800, ed. Saliha Belmessous. New York: Oxford University Press, n.d. van Dam, Pieter. Beschryvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie. 7 vols. Edited by F. W. Stapel. ‘s-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff, 1927–43. van Goor, Jurrien. ‘A Hybrid State: The Dutch economic and political network in Asia,’ in From the Mediterranean to the China Sea: Miscellaneous, eds. Claude Guillot, Denys Lombard, and Roderich Ptak. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998. van Imhoff, Gustaaf Willem Baron. Memoir Left by Gustaaf Willem Baron van Imhoff, Governor and Director of Ceylon, to his Successor, Willem Maurits Bruynink, 1740.  Translated by Sophia Peters. Colombo: Government Press, 1911. van Ittersum, Martine Julia. Profit and Principle: Hugo Grotius, natural rights theories and the rise of Dutch power in the East Indies. Leiden: Brill, 2006. van Ittersum, Martine Julia. ‘Mare Liberum versus the propriety of the seas? The debate between Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and William Welwood (1552–1624) and its impact on Anglo-Scotto-Dutch fishery disputes in the second decade of the seventeenth century.’ Edinburgh Law Review 10, 2 (2006). Vattel, Emer de. The Law of Nations.  Edited by Béla Kapossy and Richard Whitmore. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008. Vieira, Monica Brito. ‘Mare Liberum versus Mare Clausum: Grotius, Freitas, and Selden’s debate on Dominion over the Seas.’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 63 (2003). Vink, Markus P.  M. Encounters on the Opposite Coast: The Dutch East India Company and the Nayaka State of Madurai in the seventeenth century. Leiden: Brill, 2016.

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Wald, Erica. Vice in the Barracks: Medicine, the military, and the making of colonial India, 1780–1868. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Ward, Kerry. Networks of Empire: Forced migration in the Dutch East India Company. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Weststeijn, Arthur. ‘The VOC as company-state: Debating seventeenth-century Dutch colonial expansion.’ Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction, 38, 1 (2014). Williams, Harry. Ceylon, Pearl of the East. London: R. Hale, 1950. Yang, Anand. Bazaar India: Markets, society, and the colonial state in Gangetic Bihar. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

CHAPTER 4

Chank Fishing in South India Under the English East India Company, 1800–40 Sundar Vadlamudi

Introduction A wide variety of animals and animal products have circulated in the Indian Ocean World (IOW) since the first millennium BCE.1 Marine shells formed one of several animal products that were exchanged as commercial 1  Nicole Boivin, Alison Crowther, Mary Prendergast, and Dorian Fuller, ‘Indian Ocean food globalisation and Africa,’ African Archaeological Review, 31, 4, (2014), 549–550; Grant Parker, ‘Ex Oriente Luxuria: Indian commodities and Roman experience,’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 45,1, (2002), 40–95; Tansen Sen, ‘The impact of Zheng He’s expeditions on Indian Ocean interactions,’ Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 79, 3, (2016), 609–636. For an useful list of circulation of species in the Indian Ocean region, see: Nicole Boivin, Alison Crowther, Richard Helm, and Dorian Fuller, ‘East Africa and Madagascar in the Indian Ocean World,’ Journal of World Prehistory, 26, 3, (2013), 215–216; Gwyn Campbell, ‘Africa and the Early Indian Ocean World Exchange System in the Context of Human-Environment Interaction,’ in Early Exchange between Africa and the Wider Indian Ocean World, ed. Gwyn Campbell (US: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 1–24.

S. Vadlamudi (*) American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Chaiklin et al. (eds.), Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42595-1_4

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objects. This chapter examines the trade in chanks, a marine shell that is extracted from the ocean bed near southeastern India and Sri Lanka. Diving for chanks (also known as conch shells) and pearls has a long history along the coast of India and in the Gulf of Mannar (located between mainland South India and Sri Lanka). While pearls have captured the popular imagination of scholars, chanks have received less attention.2 They have been fished since antiquity in certain locations along the coasts in India and Sri Lanka. These shells have been transported across vast distances within the IOW and have acquired functional and symbolic value in Indian culture. The European trading companies, beginning with the Portuguese and the Dutch, evinced great interest in managing the fisheries due to the wealth associated with them.3 By 1802, the British, via the East India Company (EIC) in mainland South Asia and the British Crown in Ceylon, established their authority over the coastal territories that were used to organise diving for conch shells and pearls. The EIC, in its efforts to generate revenue from marine sources, took over control of the fisheries. This chapter examines the management of chank fishing by the EIC in the first half of the nineteenth century along India’s southeastern coast. In so doing, it discusses the participation of Tamil Muslim merchants, a community of South Indian maritime merchants, in this industry.4 It then explores the limits of the EIC’s ability to implement its policy of monopoly over the fishing and sale of chanks. By taking control over the chank fishery, the EIC considered its role primarily as an administrator. In managing this long-established economic activity, the EIC built upon previous 2  See, for example: S.  Arunachalam, The History of the Pearl Fishery of the Tamil Coast (Annamalai Nagar: Annamalai University, 1952); Bertram Bastiampilai, ‘The pearl fishery of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) under British administration in the 19th Century,’ Vidyodaya Journal of Arts, Science, and Letters, 8, 1–2 (1980), 25–41. For a general survey of pearl industry around the world in the early twentieth century, see George Kunz and Charles Stevenson, The Book of the Pearl (New York: The Century, 1908). 3  Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Noble harvest from the sea: Pearl fishery in the Gulf of Mannar, 1500–1925,’ in Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia, eds. Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Burton Stein (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 134–174; C.R.  De Silva, ‘The Portuguese and pearl fishing off South India and Sri Lanka,’ South Asia, 1, 1 (1978), 14–28; James Hornell, The Sacred Chank of India: A monograph of the Indian conch (Turbinella pyrum) (Madras: Government Press, 1914). 4  The term Tamil Muslims is used to refer to a particular group of merchants who were involved in chank fishing. The extent to which religion influenced their commercial operations is not discussed in this chapter, since the materials used in this chapter do not provide much scope to explore the issue.

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practices but also introduced changes in the operations of the fishery that were designed to increase revenues. Tamil Muslim merchants used their local knowledge and position as ship-owners to secure contracts to conduct the fishery at multiple locations in South India.

Chanks: Locations and Uses The chank, a name derived from the Sanskrit word Śaṇkha, is the encasing of Turbinella pyrum, a gastropod mollusc found in certain areas along India’s western and eastern coastline, mostly in shallow waters. In western India, they are found along the Kathiawar coast (in present-day Gujarat) and the southern portion of the Kerala coast. On India’s east coast, they are located along the coastline stretching from Kanyakumari in the extreme south to Chennai (Madras), a distance of about 450 miles. Chanks are also found in the Gulf of Mannar, located between the northwestern coast of Sri Lanka and southern India. In these locations, seabeds with sandy, muddy bottoms provide the ideal habitat, since chanks feed on marine worms that grow under such conditions. In Tamil, these sandy areas are identified as poochi manal (worm sands).5 Besides the sandy ocean floor, chanks can also be found at the edges of rocky reefs and in sandy patches located between rocks.6 The Turbinella pyrum is valued for the covering shell that it produces as a defensive mechanism against other marine predators. James Hornell  (1865–1945), a marine biologist and the Superintendent of Fisheries in the Madras Government in the early twentieth century, observed that it was very difficult to extract the animal from its shell without cracking it open, even after the creature’s death. This hard covering protects the mollusc from most fishes, but not from the strong jaws of a shark. Another danger to the mollusc comes from marine sponges that can bore into the protective layer. Such ‘wormed’ shells resemble a honeycomb and possess limited value. A well-formed cover, after it undergoes a 5  Hornell, The Sacred Chank of India, 28–29. This section relies primarily on the observations made by James Hornell, a marine biologist and the Superintendent of Fisheries in the Madras government in the early twentieth century. Hornell conducted significant research on chank fishing in India. As a biologist and an administrator of fisheries, his work provides useful information to understand the natural habitat of the mollusc and management of conch shell fishing in the nineteenth century. 6  James Hornell, The Indian Conch and its Relation to Hindu Life and Religion (London: Williams and Norgate, 1915), 3.

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cleaning process, is thick, can withstand a high degree of polishing, and resembles white porcelain in colour and appearance.7 Hornell identified three types of chanks on the basis of their shape: central, obtuse, and elongate. The central variety is more numerous and could be found in the Gulf of Mannar region and along the coast of southernmost India. The obtuse type is located along the coastline stretching from Pamban Pass in the south to the delta of the Godavari River in the north. The elongate form is mostly found in the Andaman Islands. Among the three types, the central variety possesses the largest shell and is considered the most valuable.8 Since antiquity, chanks have been widely demanded and used in the Indian subcontinent and in neighbouring regions. Excavations conducted in Indus Valley Civilisation sites reveal that ornaments in the Neolithic phase included wide bangles that were made from large conch shells. Archaeological evidence also shows that chanks were used as trumpets in the Indus Valley Civilisation.9 The sounding of shells is common across several cultures and was intended for different purposes: to ward off evil spirits by noise, to gather people together for battle or sacrifice, or to invoke the deities to witness a sacrifice.10 The blowing of chanks constitutes perhaps one of the lasting legacies of the Indus Valley Civilisation into classical and modern Hinduism. In the Hindu epic Mahabharata, some of the protagonists are described as possessing chanks with names such as God-Given, Eternal Victory, Sweet Voice, and Jewel Blossom.11 A cursory examination of contemporary Hindu religious iconography reveals the continued relevance of the conch shell as a sacred object. Writing in the early twentieth century, James Hornell observed the widespread use of chanks in a variety of settings: as libation vessels in rituals, as articles of personal adornment, as part of the foundations of new buildings, as medicine when in powdered form, and as part of life cycle ceremonies and religious rituals when blown. Hornell also noted the sacred status given to conch shells in Buddhist monasteries in Tibet and its use as currency by the Naga tribes of Assam hills until the late nineteenth century. Thus, conch shells served a multitude of uses, both in its original form and after  Ibid., 7.  Ibid., 4–5. 9  Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 38–39. 10  Ibid., 120. 11  James Hornell, ‘The Indian chank in folklore and religion,’ Folklore, 53, 2 (1942), 114. 7 8

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undergoing cutting, reshaping, and polishing.12 The practical and symbolic uses reveal not just the circulation of these shells far from their places of natural occurrence, but also the multiple meanings given to them by the people who used them. The widespread use of chanks contrasts with the limited areas of their availability. This divergence suggests that, since antiquity, long-distance trade networks connected the areas of availability of chanks with workshops and markets where the shells were processed and sold. In the urban phase of the Indus Valley Civilisation, roughly between 2500 and 1700 BCE, conch shells were obtained from the Makran coast located at a distance of 500 kilometres to the south, near present-day Karachi, Pakistan. This represents the earliest known instance of trade and utilisation of chanks.13 Outside the zone of the Indus Valley Civilisation, several sites in the Deccan and South India provide archaeological evidence for the presence of chank processing workshops during the Neolithic and Iron Age periods.14 The first textual references to the South Indian chank industry and the people associated with it occur in Tamil classical literature from the first and second centuries CE. These sources indicate the presence of workshops at the ancient port cities of Korkai and Kayal for processing these shells in southern Tamil Nadu.15 For reasons that are not fully clear, the processing of chanks was largely abandoned in Tamil Nadu, with the exception of some small workshops. The Portuguese, who took over the management of fishing of chanks from the Indian rulers in the sixteenth century, sent the shells to Bengal, implying the continuation of an earlier trade practice.16 Jean Baptiste Tavernier  (1605–1689), the seventeenth-­century French nobleman merchant, observed that Dhaka and Pabna (in Mughal Bengal) were processing centres for chanks.17 While the chapter is human-centric in that it focuses on how humans administered the chank fisheries, the critical role of the non-human Turbinella pyrum cannot be overstated. These molluscs grow in a natural environment, which is not created or maintained by human actions.  Ibid., 115–25; Hornell, The Indian Conch, 16.  Kenoyer, Ancient Cities, 38–39. In his early twentieth-century study on chank fishing in India, Hornell does not mention the Makran coast as a site of fishing. It is possible that the Makran Coast was not a major fishing zone by this time. 14  Hornell, Sacred Chank, 42–67. 15  Ibid. 16  Ibid., 5. 17  Ibid., 69. 12 13

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Geological and ecological factors primarily shape the environment and life cycle of the molluscs. A shell’s value is determined by its size, shape, and directionality of the whorl; these features develop independently of any direct human actions. The involvement of humans occurs when the chank beds are examined prior to the start of the regular fishing season in order to evaluate the growth of shells and to determine the feasibility of conducting a fishery. This demonstrates the extent to which the mollusc limits the actions of humans in the fishery. Despite the centrality of Turbinella pyrum, foregrounding the mollusc in the history of chank fishery poses some challenges.18 First, the desirable part of the mollusc is the encasing and not the animal itself. Therefore, the animal loses ‘value’ as soon as the shell is removed. Second, the mollusc does not survive the extraction procedure. These twin developments mean that the mollusc loses ‘visibility’ within a short period of time that it emerges from the ocean. The difficulty in bringing focus on the mollusc is further compounded by the fact that although the conch shell occupies a prominent role in Indic iconography, public rituals, and material culture, the mollusc is notably absent in such representations. Despite such limitations, the records of colonial administrators of fisheries and scientific studies on chank beds and molluscs, while outside the scope of this chapter, might provide avenues to foreground the story of Turbinella pyrum in chank fishing. By the early nineteenth century, the gathering of shells was conducted chiefly along India’s southeastern coast and in the Gulf of Mannar, notwithstanding the conduct of some conch shell fishing along Gujarat’s Kathiawar coast in western India. As the vast coastline in southeastern India and Sri Lanka came under British control, these regions became testing grounds for the EIC’s efforts to identify various means to derive revenue from marine sources. The shells, as done  earlier, were shipped to workshops in Bengal, then a large province that included the present-day 18  Environmental studies is attempting to foreground non-Humans and move away from purely human-centric focus. For a sampling of recent efforts, see Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘Science,’ in Pacific Histories: Ocean, land, people, eds. David Armitage and Alison Bashford (Basingstoke, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity (Berkeley, CA: California: University of California Press, 2002); Deborah Rose Bird, ‘Multispecies knots of ethical time,’ Environmental Philosophy, 9,1 (2012), 127–140; Rohan Deb Roy, Malarial Subjects: Empire, medicine and nonhumans in British India, 1820–1909 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

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Indian state of West Bengal and the modern country of Bangladesh. The following section examines how the EIC managed the collection of chanks in South India and the ways in which the Tamil-speaking Muslim merchants, who were involved in the chank trade for several centuries (including during the periods of Dutch and Portuguese prominence), participated within the new arrangement.

Chank Fishing Under the EIC The fishing of chanks was an elaborate affair that involved several groups of people native to southern India and Ceylon. The operation consisted of divers reaching the designated fishing zone in boats. The divers reached the required depth by using diving stones and then releasing the stones that were pulled back into the boat by the boat’s crew. The divers gathered the shells and returned to the boat. This operation was repeated multiple times in a day and continued for a designated number of days (at least 30) during the fishing season. The following announcement (Table 4.1) illustrates the groups of people involved in a chank fishing operation. Besides the divers and boat crew, the operation also involved a group of people called as Cadulcattee (kadalkutti, literally: sea binders), who were believed to bring about a favourable wind pattern for reaching the fishing zone and returning to the shore. Equally important, the kadalkutti were believed to possess spells that rendered sharks harmless to the divers. EIC officials, while disapproving of the divers’ ‘superstitious’ beliefs in the kadalkutti, nevertheless endorsed the practice of using them since it

Table 4.1  EIC proclamation issued by the district collector of Tinnevelly announcing the fishery for fasli 1229 (July 1819–June 1820) Whereas John Cotton, Collector of Tinnevelly, does hereby acquaint the divers, boatmen, Cadulcattee or conjurers, and all other persons concerned in the chank fishery of Tutacoryn, that in conformity to the orders of the Board of Revenue, the rent of the chank fishery on the Coast of Tutacoryn for Fusly 1229 is given to Mohammadoo Causem Lavy Maracayen of Keelakarai. The said divers, boatmen, conjurers, and others are hereby strictly enjoined to conduct themselves with due obedience to the orders of the renter to be diligent in their duty and not to be guilty of any frauds in regard to the fishery. India Office Records (Hereafter: IOR) F/4/30141

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helped them to organise the fishery.19 The Company assumed the governorship of South India from the Nawab of Arcot in 1801, and northern Ceylon became a Crown Colony in 1802. This is where chank and pearl fisheries were organised. The Company conducted both fisheries intermittently. Between 1782 and 1785, when the EIC captured Tuticorin in South India from the Dutch, the Collector of Assigned Revenue conducted pearl and chank fishery once, which yielded 67,860 Porto Novo Pagodas to the government.20 With a view towards generating revenue from marine sources, EIC officials studied the economic activities in the coastal territories under their control. In December 1800, the Assistant Collector of Tanjore, John Wallace, wrote a detailed report to the District Collector in which he outlined his proposals to increase revenue from marine sources.21 One of Wallace’s recommendations involved implementing changes to prevailing chank fishing methods along Tanjore’s coast. He provided information on the types of boats and the number of people per boat used for gathering conch shells, making detailed calculations on the expenses and revenue for each type of boat and estimating the profits that could be earned by the EIC. To earn more revenue, Wallace proposed two changes to existing fishing procedures. First, he noted that the divers did not venture far from their homes in search of chanks. Therefore, he recommended that the divers should be sent to places where large shells could be found. Second, Wallace observed that small and immature shells were being fished and, as a result, the merchants who bought these shells were not paying high prices for the entire collection of shells. He recommended that shells that measured below a specific size should be thrown back into the sea. Wallace indicated that chank fishing at Mannar, which he termed as the ‘most profitable’ of all chank fisheries, necessitated the use of a wooden plank with holes that were used to measure the size of the fished shells. Any shell that passed

19  Tamil Nadu State Archives (hereafter: TNSA): Tanjore District Records, December 15, 1800, Vol. 3177, 256–261, 291–292, 302–303. 20  Hornell, Sacred Chank, 6. Currency in South India consisted of gold, silver, and copper coins, respectively pagodas, fanams, and cash. For gold coins, Porto Novo pagodas and Star pagodas were the commonly used. The following exchange rates generally prevailed: 100 Star Pagodas = 120 Porto Novo Pagodas = 350 Silver Madras Rupees; 100 Madras Rupees = 93 Sicca Rupees. 21  TNSA Tanjore District Records, December 15, 1800, Vol. 3177, 256–261, 291–292, 302–303.

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through a small hole was considered immature and thrown back into the sea. Wallace proposed using a similar system in Tanjore. Wallace’s observations about chank fishing in Tanjore imply that the activity was done as a local economic endeavour and without any extensive participation by indigenous rulers from the littoral in managing fishing activity. His proposal to use the divers away from their home villages indicates that the EIC officials considered the entire southeastern coastline as an extended economic zone in which labour could be moved to desired locations. Furthermore, his idea of using a wooden plank points to an effort to standardise the fishing procedures within the territories controlled by the EIC.  Wallace indirectly hinted that the local population might accept these changes by noting that merchants purchased these shells along the coast and shipped them to Bengal, where they typically made profits of fifty per cent on the sale. Wallace also identified other locations along Tanjore’s coast where the fishing of chanks was abandoned or neglected, and he suggested plans to undertake regular fishing activities. In 1806, the Collector of Tanjore recommended to the Board of Revenue in Madras that the chank fishery on the coast must be encouraged since revenue could be derived from the sale of conch shells as well from shark fins, shark tails, and ray skins ‘which are taken casually during the chank fishery.’22 The Collector noted that the fins and tails could be exported to China where there was a ‘huge market’ for the items.23 The Collector’s ideas reveal both the wide variety of animal products that were gathered along with conch shells and a trade in these animal products that predated the EIC’s involvement in the region. The EIC managed three main chank fishing zones along the southeastern coast of India. These fisheries were administered through the District Collector’s offices in Tinnevelly, Ramnad, and Tanjore. The Collector issued notices announcing the occurrence of chank fishing for the ensuing year and invited proposals for renting each fishery. In this system, commonly referred to as revenue farming, a renter submitted a bid to conduct the fishery and provided the name of a person who would act as a guarantor. The Collector reviewed the proposals and selected the one whose terms were most advantageous to the Company. In implementing such an approach, the EIC followed an existing practice. A treaty that was negotiated in 1788 between the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the  TNSA Board of Revenue Proceedings, July 24, 1806, Vol. 430, 4645–54.  Ibid.

22 23

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Nawab of Carnatic over the sharing of revenues from pearl and chank fisheries in Tuticorin indicated that the contracts for conducting the conch fishery would be granted ‘as usual to the highest bidder.’24 The highest bidder could be selected through a public auction or by asking applicants to submit sealed proposals. In Ceylon, the EIC took control of Jaffna in September 1795 and began administering the chank fishery from 1796 onwards. For the first two fishing seasons, the EIC accepted sealed proposals from applicants for the fishery, perhaps continuing the earlier method followed by the VOC.25 From 1798, the EIC implemented a new policy and awarded contracts by public auction.26 The reason for the change is unclear, but it could have been based on a need to generate more revenue for the Company. But in South India, as will be shown below, the Company awarded contracts through a process of submission of sealed proposals. Typically, after selecting a proposal, the Collector issued a cowle (lease) that described the terms of the contract to gather chanks. Table 4.2 contains the terms of a lease given to a renter for renting Tinnevelly conch fishery for fasli 1217 (July 1807–June 1808). The first condition in the cowle imposed the limit within which the renter would have to confine his gathering of shells. By inserting this stipulation, the EIC officials sought to impose a boundary in a maritime context that did not contain such limits. The reasoning was three-fold. Firstly, the EIC did not wish to use ‘new’ fishing areas that might be leased for additional rent. Secondly, EIC officials observed that the shells differed across fishing locations and these variances produced price differences.27 Therefore, the officials sought to ensure that the chanks gathered through a particular lease had similar types of shells. Thirdly, EIC officials desired to limit disputes that might arise from encroachments on fishing areas. Although the EIC controlled the entire fishing coastline, any dispute among the divers and renters of the fishery affected the normal operations of the fishery and hence its revenue.28

 TNSA Military Country Correspondence, Vol. 40, October 28, 1790, 139–49.  Anon., ‘Some remarks on the chank fishery of Ceylon,’ The Asiatic Journal, 23, 136, (1827), 469–473. 26  Ibid. 27  TNSA Madura District Records, May 27, 1800, Vol. 1129, 136–140. 28  For an example of a dispute over fishing boundaries, see: TNSA Board of Revenue Proceedings, November 8, 1811, Vol. 556, 11,398–11,409. 24 25

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Table 4.2  Terms of cowle (grant) issued for chank fishing in Tinnevelly for fasli 1217 In consequence of your offer for the rent of the chank fishery at Tutacoryn for Fusly 1217 having been the highest and in consequence of your having entered into a Muchelka (Declaration) binding yourself to conform to the conditions contained in this Cowle and having also given security for the due performance of your engagement, I do hereby in virtue of the authority rested in me by the Board of Revenue in their Secretaries Letter of the [.…] issue this Cowle to you for the rent of the aforesaid Chank from the 13th July 1807 to 12th July 1808 or for Fusly 1217 on the following conditionsYou are only to fish for chank in those places where they have been usually caught and you are not at liberty to go in search of them in any other than the places where they are commonly fished. You are to pay the amount of your rent being according to your proposal PN Pagodas -------- or Star Pagodas ------- into the Collector’s treasury according to the Subjoined Kistbundy (Contract for payment of debt or rent). Should there be Pearl Fishery in the course of the year at Mannar or Tutacoryn and if the divers, donies, coolies etc. be required to attend at the Pearl Fishery by orders of the Circar you will in that case be entitled according to the condition in your proposal to a remission of 3000 PN Pagodas in the amount of your rent. All such chanks as fall through the third hole in the plank commonly used in sorting the chank are to be considered as small chanks and you are to cause all such to be thrown into the sea again. In the event of you failing to perform any of the several conditions in this Cowle you will be subject to a forfeiture of your lease or to such penalty not exceeding 1000 Pagodas as the Board of Revenue may think proper to direct. TNSA Tinnevelly District Records, October 2, 1807, Vol. 3582, 261–64

The third condition in Table 4.2, regarding the remission of rent in the event a pearl fishery was organised during the chank season, highlights the interlinked nature of chank and pearl fisheries. This practice of rent remission began under the VOC in Ceylon since the boats and divers that were used for chank fishing were diverted to pearl fishing as the latter was more lucrative than the former. In Ceylon, the VOC allowed a remission of one-­ half of the rent for that year’s chank fishery. The EIC adopted this policy but introduced some changes. In Ceylon, for example, the British Crown reduced the rate of remission from one-half to one-third of the rent.29 In Ramnad (South India), the remission amount was based initially on the loss claimed by the fishery’s renter.30 In contrast to Ramnad, by 1807, the  Ibid.  Between 1803 and 1809, the renter claimed remissions amounts that were based on the number of days during which the boats and divers from conch fishery were sent to join the pearl fishery in Tuticorin or Gulf of Mannar (Ceylon). TNSA Board of Revenue Proceedings, June 10, 1811, Vol. 545, 6378–6387. 29 30

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remission amount for renters of a chank fishery in Tinnevelly was fixed at 3000 Porto Novo Pagodas (roughly 9000 rupees).31 By 1822, the remission amounts were revised and different rates were assigned for pearl fisheries at Mannar (9000 rupees) and Tuticorin (6000 rupees).32 The changes in remission rates might reflect the officials’ observation that chank fishery renters suffered greater losses when the divers and boats went to Mannar since more days were lost in the transit. In contrast, in the case of a pearl fishery at Tuticorin, divers could complete the pearl fishing and re-join the remaining days of a chank fishing season much sooner. The fourth condition of throwing away small chanks back into the sea reflects, as mentioned in the earlier discussion of Wallace’s report, an effort by the EIC to standardise some aspects of fishing operations in the territories under their control. The British also began to tax the chanks that were exported from ports under its control, both in Ceylon and South India.33 This was a new policy designed to secure additional revenue from the chank fishery. This discussion of the EIC’s management of chank fishing reveals a continuously evolving method of managing the fishery that built upon existing practices but also introduced gradual changes. These transformations should be understood in the context of how the EIC viewed its role as an administrator of an existing economic activity. The system of revenue farming provided a cheap way to manage a complex operation. The renters of the fishery were responsible for organising the boats, divers, and other groups of people who were involved in the fishing.

Chank Fishing Renters Company officials in Tinnevelly, Ramnad, and Tanjore districts solicited proposals from bidders to manage the fishery. EIC officials reviewed these applications and announced the renter for the year (July to June calendar). These applications demonstrate the participation of Tamil Muslims in bidding for fishing contracts through their details about the bidders, such as their place of residence and the names of guarantors. Besides this information, Company officials also commented on the capability of the proposers in the applications. An appreciation of these documents helps to  TNSA Tinnevelly District Records, October 2, 1807, Vol. 3582, 261–64.  TNSA Board of Revenue Proceedings, June 28, 1822, Vol. 918, 6389–6390. 33  Anon., ‘Some remarks on the chank fishery of Ceylon,’ 469–473. 31 32

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understand the officials’ rationale for choosing winning bids. The evidence demonstrates that Tamil Muslim merchants frequently secured the contracts to rent chank fishing in the early decades of the nineteenth century across the three fishing zones of Tinnevelly, Ramnad, and Tanjore. The Tamil Muslim merchants, who had a history of participation in conch fishing before the EIC arrival, adapted their practices to EIC policies so that they remained prominent chank fishers in the region. The District Collectors, upon receiving applications, sent them to the Board of Revenue officials at Fort St. George, Madras, and sought approval to award the contract to the applicant. In forwarding these applications, the Collectors made remarks about the suitability of a particular applicant. The following table (Table 4.3) shows the details of applications submitted for renting the Ramnad fishery for fasli 1210 (July 1800–June 1801). The Collector’s remarks indicate his preference to award the contract to Caveeb Mohomed on the basis of the fame and wealth of his uncle, as well as Mohomed’s acceptance of the Collector’s conditions regarding the fishery. The wealth and status of applicants played an important role in the bidding process. In an economic activity based on speculation about the quantity of product that could be fished, EIC officials relied on merchants who could provide sufficient financial guarantees for their bids. In the list of proposals submitted in 1807 for Tinnevelly fishery, Shaik Sulliman Table 4.3  List of offers made for renting Ramnad chank fishery (1800–01) Applicant’s name

Name of guarantor Amt. offered (PN pagodas)

Remarks

Caveeb Mohomed

Nulla Tomby Pilly 11,100 & Saira Mootheliar Lubby

Cadumbalingem Pilly

Mahomed Abauker 10,500 & Arna Lebby

Arnachellum Pilly

Nulla Tombeya Pilly (Keelakurry) & Nulla Meera Pilly

The proposer is nephew of Abdul Cauder, a Lubby of great wealth—his security is unexceptionable … the collector therefore recommends this offer. The proposer and his securities are of good character and responsible. The proposer and his securities are of good character and responsible.

11,100

TNSA Madura District Records, May 27, 1800, Vol. 1129, 136–140

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submitted the highest bid and named Abdul Cauder Mercoy as his security. The Collector noted that Abdul Cauder Mercoy was an inhabitant of Keelakarai and that he ‘carried on as extensive a trade as any native on the coast.’ The Collector recommended Shaik Sulliman’s offer since it was the highest and had good security.34 Table 4.4 shows the frequency with which the Tamil Muslims rented the Tinnevelly chank fishery conducted at Tuticorin. Specifically, Tamil Muslims residing in Keelakarai, a prominent trading town on the southeastern coast that served as one of the home ports for Tamil Muslim merchants, owned the leases for eleven out of the twenty-three years between Table 4.4  Names of renters of chank fishery in Tuticorin from 1801 to 1833 Fasli

Year

Names of the renters

Amount (Madras Rs.)

1211 1212 1213 1214 1215 1216 1217 1218 1219 1220 1221 1222 1223 1224 1225 1226 1227 1228 1229 1230 1231 1232 1233

1801–02 1802–03 1803–04 1804–05 1805–06 1806–07 1807–08 1808–09 1809–10 1810–11 1811–12 1812–13 1813–14 1814–15 1815–16 1816–17 1817–18 1818–19 1819–20 1820–21 1821–22 1822–23 1823–24

Donda Row Donda Row Donda Row Ramasawmy Naig and Mahomed Selimolevy Ramasawmy Naig Pakevadaken Shaick Selimolevy Cawder Saib Mercoyen a Cavemahomed Mercoyen a Cauder Saib Mercoyen a Walootawle Pillay Walootawle Pillay Walootawle Pillay Abdul Cader Mercoyen a Abdul Cader Mercoyen a Mr. Meyer Syed Mahomed Levya Mahomed Marcoyena Mahomed Saib Levya Mahomed Saib Levya Mahomed Casim Levy Mercoyena Mr. G. Hughes Mahomed Casima Average of 23 years

38,850 39,025 39,200 40,936 22,166 26,395 36,198 23,260 32,447 31,281 36,458 39,407 33,575 26,687 24,864 25,520 23,770 28,291 11,666 28,291 28,291 32,000 38,500 30,740

Merchant from Keelakarai

a

TNSA Board of Revenue Proceedings, August 12, 1824, Vol. 1001, 9687–89

 TNSA Tinnevelly District Records, October 2, 1807, Vol. 3582, 261–64.

34

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1800 and 1824. The number could be higher since Keelakarai merchants occasionally submitted bids through their agents, relatives, and partners. For instance, Ramaswamy Naig, who leased the fishery between 1804 and 1806, sometimes acted in partnership with Keelakarai Tamil Muslim merchants.35 Besides demonstrating the large number of years that Tamil Muslims managed to obtain the contracts for conducting the fishery, Table 4.4 and information about the proposals for specific years allow us to map the links between these merchants. The renter for 1807–08, Shaick Selimolevy, named Abdul Cauder Mercoy as his security, the same merchant who rented the fishery for the years 1814 through 1816.36 Between 1818 and 1822, Mahomed Casim Levy Mercoyen successively won the bids for the fishery at Tinnevelly and he named Sagoo Satagutollah as his security.37 Table 4.5 gives details of proposals submitted for fasli 1229 (July 1819–June 1820), one of the years that Mahomed Casim Levy Mercoyen won the bid. All three applicants were from Keelakarai. An applicant, Mahomed Caussim Lebby, listed another contender, Sagoo Satagutollah, as his guarantor. This suggests that both applicants might have been Table 4.5  List of offers made for renting Tinnevelly chank fishery (July 1819– June 1820) Name and residence of the applicant

Amt. of offer Name of security (Rs.)

Syed Esoomal Lebby (Keelakarai) Sagoo Satagutuulah Mercaun (Keelakarai) Mahomed Caussim Lebby (Keelakarai)

22,327 28,128 28,291

Sagoo Satagutollah Mercaun, son of the late Cabee Mahomed Mercaun of Keelakary

IOR/F/4/1124/30141

35  In 1807, Ramaswamy Naig submitted an offer for pearl fishery at Tuticorin for which Caveeb Mahamud also submitted a proposal. Both of them named each other as security for the proposal. For the 1807 Pearl fishery proposal, see: TNSA Tinnevelly District Records, February 20, 1807, Vol. 3582, 64–73. 36  TNSA Tinnevelly District Records, October 2, 1807, Vol. 3582, 261–64. 37  IOR/F/4/1124/30141. 23 August 1819; TNSA Board of Revenue Proceedings, July 7, 1820, Vol. 857, 4861–63; TNSA Tinnevelly District Records, July 16, 1821, Vol. 4695, 89–90.

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working in partnership with one another. The small difference in the proposed amounts by these two applicants also suggests close collaboration between them to ensure that the winning bid belonged to one of them. Besides the fishery at Tuticorin, Keelakarai merchants also won bids to manage the fisheries in Ramnad and Tanjore districts. Abdul Cauder Mercoy, the merchant who rented the fishery in Tinnevelly between 1814 and 1816, was awarded the contract to fish for chanks in Ramnad for fasli 1212 (1802–03), fasli 1214 (1804–05), and fasli 1217 (1807–08). In Tanjore, Cauder Saib Marecan, who managed the Tinnevelly fishery between 1809 and 1811, obtained the contract for Tanjore fishery for 1812–13.38 Extensive details regarding the awarding of contracts for Tanjore fishery are not available, but the participation of Keelakarai Tamil Muslims in the Tanjore fishery is evident from the observation by the Collector of Tanjore that the ‘family of the Keelacaray mercoir’ had secured ‘almost a monopoly’ of chank fishery on the Tanjore coast.39 The success of Tamil Muslim merchants from Keelakarai in obtaining the contracts could be explained by their ownership of ships that could transport chanks to Calcutta, where they were in demand. In 1810, the Collector of Tinnevelly recommended the offer of Abdul Cawder Mercoy and noted that he was able to offer a higher price since he could transport the chanks and other merchandise to Bengal in his own vessels. Besides, the Collector added, Abdul Cawder Mercoy’s security was unquestionable.40 The ownership of vessels allowed the fishery renters to carry the shells as ballast, which ensured high profits, since they could be sold in Bengal markets and the proceeds could be used to purchase goods for the return journey. In addition, the ‘fishing’ of chanks required a good knowledge of the animal (mollusc), its habitat (ocean beds), and risks (sharks, jellyfish, and ocean currents). Tamil merchants were ideal candidates in this context owing to their role in the chank trade since before the EIC’s arrival. As a Collector of Tinnevelly noted in 1824, ‘the Mercoyen family of Mohomedan [sic] merchants settled at Keelkaire [sic]’ resided close to the fishery sites and possessed ‘an intimate knowledge of its [fishery’s] value.’41 Besides having knowledge of local conditions, the same merchants who rented the fishery also shipped their harvest to Bengal. Therefore, the merchants were able to combine their deep knowledge of production  TNSA Board of Revenue Proceedings, December 30, 1812, Vol. 602, 1710–16.  TNSA Board of Revenue Proceedings, June 28, 1822, Vol. 918, 6386–88. 40  TNSA Tinnevelly District Records, November 17, 1810, Vol. 3586, 246–47. 41  TNSA Board of Revenue Proceedings, August 12, 1824, Vol. 1001, 9687–9689. 38 39

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areas of chanks with their direct participation in the trade in Bengal to achieve a dominant position in chank fishing in South India during the early decades of the nineteenth century. EIC officials, noticing the dominance of the Tamil Muslims in chank fishing, wished to introduce more competition in the bidding process to increase the price of rent for the fishery. As early as 1811, the Secretary to the Board of Revenue forwarded an offer made by Edward Watts, a European merchant, to the Collector of Tinnevelly for leasing the chank fishery at Tuticorin. Interestingly, Watts named Thomas de Mello, a merchant engaged in pearl fishing in Ceylon, as his security. This shows that networks of European merchants, who were already participating in Ceylon pearl fishing, wished to extend their involvement to chank fisheries as well. Compared to conch fishing, pearl fishing yielded higher profits and had attracted the attention of European merchants much earlier.42 Typically, only Indian merchants in the coastal districts submitted proposals for chank fishery. In this instance, the Board of Revenue added a note to the forwarded proposal, which asked the Tinnevelly collector to invite proposals by public advertisement at Madras as well as in the Tinnevelly district since chanks were ‘a valuable article of trade.’43 The Collector awarded the contract to Walootawle Pillay, an agent of a prominent merchant from Tellicherry. While the reason for the rejection of Watts’s proposal is not available, it is possible that Pillay’s bid was similar in value to that submitted by Watts, and Pillay had the added advantage of being a local merchant with good knowledge of hiring boats and divers for the fishery. Pillay won the bids to conduct the fishery for the next two years as well.44 As the EIC established a more direct role in chank fisheries, European merchants gradually began to participate in the trade. It is no accident that Watts made the abovementioned offer for the Tinnevelly fishery, which was considered the most valuable among the fisheries on the South Indian coast. In the 1820s, the firm of Messrs. Scott & Co. of Calcutta began to bid and win the contracts for managing the fishery. The earliest award of the Tinnevelly fishery contract to a European bidder occurred in fasli 1232 (1822–23) when Hughes, an agent of Messrs. Scott & Co., obtained  Subrahmanyam, ‘Noble harvest from the sea,’ 134–174.  TNSA Tinnevelly District Records, September 9, 1811, Vol. 3572, 308–11. For the involvement of Thomas de Mello in Ceylon pearl fishing, see: TNSA Public Consultation, January 31, 1809, Vol. 355, 1449–52. 44  TNSA Board of Revenue Proceedings, Vol. 1001, 9687–9689. 42 43

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the lease for the chank fishery at Tuticorin.45 Probably in response to Hughes’s attempt to bid for the fishery, Abdul Cawder Mercoyen of Keelakarai submitted an offer to lease it for ten  years at Rs. 30,350 per annum. The Collector rejected the offer since he believed that annual leases might provide better revenue for the government.46 Subsequently, Hughes successively won the bids from fasli 1235 to fasli 1240. Records note that he relinquished the fishery due to low profits.47 Despite Hughes’ setback, Europeans ventured into chank fishing and won bids to manage the fishery. Between 1841 and 1843, Rosmally Cocq of Tuticorin won the contract.48 In the mid-nineteenth century, Cocq and Barter acquired the leases for chank fishery in Tinnevelly.49 The firm of Scott & Co. also submitted proposals for the conch fishery in Tanjore, beginning in 1822.50 In Ramnad, the fishery was awarded to a European, Captain Gordon, for a period of three years (1825–28).51 Tinnevelly’s Collector refused to accept multi-year bids whereas Madura’s Collector awarded a three-year contract to Gordon. This difference could possibly be explained by the fact that the Tuticorin fishery was highly profitable and the Collector did not wish to set the prices for the fishery for multiple years since the value of the fishery might increase through single year contracts. In the case of the Madura fishery, it was not as highly profitable as the Tuticorin fishery and the Collector accepted a three-year proposal since it guaranteed some revenue to the government. But three years later, the Collector informed the Board of Revenue of his decision to close the fishery since it did not yield any benefits to the government.52 It is possible that the low revenue derived from the fishery did not support the cost of administering it. The following table (Table  4.6) shows the revenue derived from the Tinnevelly and Tanjore chank fisheries. From 1829, both fisheries show a 45  In Table 4.4, the fishery for fasli 1226 (July 1816–June 1817) was given to Mr. Meyer. While this might count as the earliest instance of the fishery awarded to a European, another EIC record indicate that Mohommed Cassim Saib Mercoir acquired the fishery for fasli 1226. See: TNSA Board of Revenue Proceedings, August 9, 1832, Vol. 1335, 8251–52. 46  TNSA Board of Revenue Proceedings, March 9, 1822, Vol. 908, 2496–98. 47  TNSA Board of Revenue Proceedings, August 9, 1832, Vol. 1335, 8251–52. 48  TNSA Tinnevelly District Records, November 18, 1829, Vol. 4712, 271–72; Board of Revenue Proceedings, June 15, 1843, Vol. 1864, 9017–23. 49  James Hornell states that two Tuticorin merchants, Cocq (mentioned earlier) and Barter acquired the leases for chank fishery during the mid- to late-nineteenth century. See: Hornell, Sacred Chank, 13. 50  TNSA Board of Revenue Proceedings, June 28, 1822, Vol. 918, 6386–88. It is not clear whether Scott & Co. were able to participate in the Tanjore fishery for additional years. 51  TNSA Madura District Records, April 28, 1825, Vol. 4673, 83. 52  TNSA Madura District Records, August 23, 1828, Vol. 4676, 224.

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Table 4.6 Government’s revenue from chank fisheries conducted in Tinnevelly and Tanjore

Year

Tirunelveli

Tanjore

Amount (Rs.) Amount (Rs.) 1801–02 1802–03 1803–04 1804–05 1805–06 1806–07 1807–08 1808–09 1809–10 1810–11 1811–12 1812–13 1813–14 1814–15 1815–16 1816–17 1817–18 1818–19 1819–20 1820–21 1821–22 1822–23 1823–24 1824–25 1825–26 1826–27 1827–28 1828–29 1829–30 1830–31 1831–32 1832–33 1833–34 1834–35 1835–36 1836–37 1837–38 1838–39

38,850 39,025 28,700 40,937 19,250 17,646 27,449 23,260 23,698 31,221 36,458 39,407 24,826 17,937 16,119 25,521 20,854 28,292 11,667 28,292 19,787 32,000 38,500 43,500 36,250 36,250 36,250 2327 4092 3904 3155 1500 1000 1214 2500 5000 5000 5000

2137 3407 2100 2689 3525 10,198 4456 9838 7497 6841 6840 2572 4398 1785 3792 3998 4527 5468 4597 4433 4666 7000 5444 5445 5444 a a a

800 1450 1450 442 1410 1410 1410 a

1531 1910

James Hornell, The Indian Pearl Fisheries of the Gulf of Mannar and Palk Bay (Madras: Government Press, 1922), 44–48; Hornell, The Sacred Chank, 173–180 a

No fishery was conducted

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drastic decline in the revenue earned for the government. Due to a lack of information, it is difficult to explain the exact reasons for such a steep and continuous decline in the government’s revenue. Nevertheless, it is possible to suggest some tentative reasons to describe the decline. A possible explanation could be that the annual fishing resulted in the depletion in the availability of molluscs, which could not be replaced in sufficient numbers. Two factors mitigate the effectiveness of this explanation. Firstly, an examination of chank beds was undertaken prior to the announcement of the fishery. This was done in order to have an estimate of possible revenue from the fishing season. So, any significant reduction in the availability of molluscs would have been detected. Secondly, a depletion of the mollusc population could have halted in a few years, but the loss of revenue continued for about ten years.53 This suggests that the loss of revenue could have resulted from other factors. The onset of decline from 1829 corresponds to increased participation of European merchants in the Tinnevelly fishery. Management of the fishery required a good knowledge of sea conditions, location of chank beds, and coordination with several groups of divers, boat owners, and other crew members. It is possible that the European merchants who rented the fishery for several years from 1829 were not effective in managing the fishery, which resulted in a loss of revenue. At the same time, one cannot draw definite conclusions for the decline in revenue since Tamil Muslims managed the fishery for some of the years in which the decline occurred. But the data on revenues implies that a detailed examination of labour management is necessary to arrive at a more complete assessment of decline in revenues in chank fishery from 1829 onwards.

Limits of EIC Control Over Chank Fishery The EIC derived revenue from chank fishing from two sources. First, the Company received money from the renters who submitted bids to manage the fishery. Second, merchants paid port duties on shells when shipping them to Bengal or transporting them between ports in South India and Ceylon. The following incident shows the challenges that the Company faced in regulating the trade in shells, both within the fishing region and in the trade with Bengal. 53  Between 1841 and 1851, there was a small increase in revenue, though not to the levels seen between 1801 and 1828. After this brief period of increased revenues, there occurred a prolonged fall between 1851 and 1873. See: Hornell, Sacred Chank of India, 173–174.

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In July 1812, port officials in Nagore detained three vessels belonging to Cabeeb Mohamed Mercoy and his brother Cauder Saib Mercoyer, two prominent Tamil Muslim merchants of Keelakarai who were involved in chank fisheries and the transport of shells to Bengal.54 Officials claimed that the merchants’ vessels, a three-mast ship Cauder Mohideen Bux, a two-mast snow Cauder Bux, and a two-mast brigantine Mohideen Bux, contained chanks that were being smuggled to Bengal without payment of port duties. Cabeeb Mercoy denied the charges and claimed that the shells on board the Mohideen Bux belonged to Mawnah Pilla Mercoyer to whom he had freighted the vessel. He produced an agreement provided by Sagutamby, son-in-law and partner to Mawnah Pilla Mercoyer, which indicated that Mawnah Pilla Mercoyer rented the Mohideen Bux for shipping conch shells to Bengal. The agreement promised Cabeeb Mercoy a lesser fare for shipping grains from Bengal on the vessel’s return trip. Besides demonstrating the role of Tamil Muslim merchants in grain transport from Bengal, the agreement also highlights the rights of the vessel’s renter and the special privileges accorded to ship-owners. As for the chanks found on the remaining two vessels, Cabeeb Mercoy declared that the two vessels did not complete their last voyage to Bengal due to bad weather and so the vessels contained the shells from the previous voyage as well as newly acquired chanks from the current year (1812). In order to prove his legal ownership of the chanks in the two vessels and the payment of port duties, Cabeeb Mercoy provided a detailed accounting of his acquisition of the shells in his ships. He produced certificates and port clearances issued to him and to twenty-seven other boat-­ owners, both Muslims and non-Muslims, that provided details of the various places from whence the shells were shipped. EIC authorities, while accepting the port clearances for boats carrying chanks that were issued by their own officials, questioned whether Cabeeb Mercoy purchased the shells from the listed suppliers. Investigation into the sources of acquisition of chanks on Cauder Mohideen Bux revealed that they were shipped from ports in Ceylon (Mannar, Calputty, Jaffna, Trincomalee) as well as 54  The details of the case are drawn from the following collection of documents. TNSA Public Consultations, Vol. 397, 5012–24; TNSA Board of Revenue Proceedings: Sea Customs, July 11, 1812, Vol. 17, 647–58; TNSA Board of Revenue Proceedings: Sea Customs, November 24, 1812, Vol. 18, 1412–15; TNSA Board of Revenue Proceedings: Sea Customs, July 26, 1812, Vol. 17, 813–22; TNSA Board of Revenue Proceedings: Sea Customs, July 23, 1812, Vol. 17, 828–34; TNSA Board of Revenue Proceedings: Sea Customs, August 10, 1812, Vol. 17, 895–900.

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several ports along the southeastern coast in India (Nagore, Keelakarai, Vadaaly, Rameswaram, Tondee). The details of this case illustrate the large network of boat-owners who benefited from shipping and selling chanks to merchants with more capital, who would then ship them to Bengal. The case of Cabeeb Mercoy is not an isolated one since in June 1811, another merchant, Soalimah Lubby was caught purchasing about 7400 conch shells from a fisherman and exporting them without paying duties.55 The smuggling case involving Cabeeb Mercoy highlights the inter-­ connected nature of the merchants involved in the chank trade. During the investigations, EIC officials discovered that Mawnah Pilla Mercoyer had once served as Cabeeb Mercoy’s broker. Cabeeb Mercoy had stated in his petitions that he helped Mawnah Pilla Mercoyer in bidding for chank fishing contracts by serving as a guarantor in the bid and by providing boats and personnel. But EIC authorities suspected that Cabeeb Mercoy was the actual renter even though Mawnah Pilla Mercoyer submitted the bids. The Collector of Sea Customs at Nagore informed the Board of Trade in Madras that ‘it is common proceeding in this country for rents or contracts to be made out in the name of some department of the real renter who frequently becomes the security.’56 In 1803, the EIC introduced an export duty of five per cent on export of chanks in Ceylon.57 This duty might also have been introduced in South India at the same time. The imposition of this duty was one of the changes introduced by the EIC. The export duty on conch shells arose from an inability of the EIC to prevent the gathering of shells by fishermen and divers who lived near the fishing zones.58 As a result, the renters of the fishery bought these ‘illegally’ fished shells. In addition, as shown by the smuggling case discussed above, the shells were also sold to ship-owners who could transport them to Bengal. Thus, the EIC lost revenue since these shells were gathered outside the revenue farming system. Therefore, the EIC levied an export-duty to make up for what it considered as lost revenue from ‘illegal’ fishing. Any evasion of export duties on chanks caused a loss of revenue to the Company, first by the gathering of shells and second by the avoidance of duties. Despite the Company’s efforts to limit such losses, the  TNSA Board of Revenue: Sea Customs, June 22, 1811, Vol. 15, 475–76.  TNSA Board of Revenue Proceedings: Sea Customs, July 26, 1812, Vol. 17, 813–22. 57  Anon., ‘Some remarks on the chank fishery of Ceylon,’ 470. 58  Ibid. 55 56

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examples discussed above expose the Company’s inability to monitor the vast coastline. While such incidents resulted in lost revenue, ‘illicit’ gathering and trading of shells cannot account for the steep and continuous decline in revenue from 1829.59 But such incidents suggest that the Company had limited success in restricting unregulated trade in chanks. Despite the inability to fully  monitor the chank trade, the EIC (and later the British Crown) continued to manage fisheries in several locations in India. By the early twentieth century, chank fishery was conducted in several places: Tinnevelly, Ramnad, and Tanjore, as well as South Arcot, Travancore (Kerala), Kathiawar (Gujarat), and Ceylon. In all these places, the fishery was organised as a government monopoly even if the manner in which the monopoly was regulated varied between them. In Tinnevelly, the government controlled the fishery through a Fisheries Department officer, named the Superintendent of Chank and Pearl Fishery. In Tanjore, the shells were bought at fixed rates from the fishermen by the Customs Department on behalf of the Fisheries department. In South Arcot, the exclusive right to collect was contracted to a renter for a term of years. A similar process was adopted in Kathiawar where the Indian ruler, Gaekwar of Baroda, exerted his authority over the local fishery. In Ceylon, the fishery was rented to the highest bidder, a system that was replaced in 1890 with a policy of levying an export duty on the shells. Travancore also adopted the method followed in Ceylon.60 The inability of the EIC to control the ‘illicit’ trade in shells, the continuance of the fisheries, and the differences in the EIC’s management of the fisheries allow us to draw some conclusions. First, despite the diminishing revenues, the EIC viewed these fisheries as important sources of income. Second, the variations in fishery management practices suggest that the Company might have adopted existing practices while also introducing some changes, as outlined in this chapter’s discussion on the fisheries in Ceylon and South India. These differences might also reflect the EIC’s efforts to maximise its revenue while limiting the losses from ‘illicit’ trading. Finally, the occurrence of the fisheries also hints at a possible continuation of ‘illicit’ trade by indigenous merchants.

59  The major smuggling case discussed in this section took place in 1812, when the revenue from the fishery was much higher than in 1829. 60  Hornell, Sacred Chank, 3.

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Conclusion During the early years of EIC control in India, chank fishing was an elaborate and complex activity that involved planning and coordination between the government and several groups of people. The activity involved divers, boat owners, boatmen, moneychangers, and merchants for buying the shells and transporting them. The EIC’s interest in management of the fishery occurred due to the Company’s need to increase revenue from its newly acquired territories in South India. As part of this wider effort, EIC officials identified various marine sources, such as salt, chanks, and pearls, as potential sources of income. In managing the fishery, Company officials continued the earlier practice of renting the fishery to the highest bidder. The person who rented the fishery coordinated the complex management between the various groups of people. Tamil Muslim merchants utilised the opportunities provided by the EIC’s need to generate revenues from its territories and obtained contracts to fish chanks along the South Indian coast. In particular, Tamil Muslim merchants from Keelakarai dominated the renting of chank fishery during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. The Company organised the fisheries through its district officials and sought to control the shells produced within each district. The EIC administered the fishery by creating a monopoly on the fishing and trade of chanks. Initially, revenues from the fishery, particularly in Tuticorin, remained consistently high. However, from 1829, the fishery’s revenues registered a steep decline. This period corresponded with the awarding of fishing contracts to European merchants. To be sure, the fishery produced reduced income even under the management of Tamil Muslim merchants. While the depletion of molluscs could account for reduced revenues, the prolonged period of decline indicates that other factors might also have a role. Since the fishery required the participation of various groups of labourers, the availability and coordination of diverse teams of people also affected the success of a fishery. A more complete explanation would require a closer examination of labour management surrounding the fishery from 1830 onwards.

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Bibliography Archival Sources India Office Records (IOR): India Office Records, British Library, London, UK. Tamil Nadu State Archives (TNSA): Tamil Nadu State Archives, Chennai, India.

Published

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Anon. ‘Some remarks on the chank fishery of Ceylon,’ The Asiatic Journal, 23, 136, (1827). Arunachalam, S. The History of the Pearl Fishery of the Tamil Coast. Annamalai Nagar: Annamalai University, 1952. Bastiampilai, Bertram. ‘The pearl fishery of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) under British administration in the 19th Century.’ Vidyodaya Journal of Arts, Science, and Letters, 8, 1–2 (1980). Bird, Deborah Rose. ‘Multispecies knots of ethical time.’ Environmental Philosophy, 9, 1 (2012). Boivin, Nicole, Alison Crowther, Richard Helm, and Dorian Fuller. ‘East Africa and Madagascar in the Indian Ocean world.’ Journal of World Prehistory, 26, 3 (2013). Boivin, Nicole, Alison Crowther, Mary Prendergast, and Dorian Fuller. ‘Indian Ocean food globalisation and Africa,’ African Archaeological Review, 31, 4 (2014). Campbell, Gwyn. ‘Africa and the early Indian Ocean world exchange system in the context of human-environment interaction,’ in Early Exchange between Africa and the Wider Indian Ocean World, ed. Gwyn Campbell. New  York, USA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. De Silva, C.R. ‘The Portuguese and pearl fishing off South India and Sri Lanka.’ South Asia, 1, 1 (1978). Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Hornell, James. The Sacred Chank of India: A monograph of the Indian conch (Turbinella pyrum). Madras: Government Press, 1914. Hornell, James. The Indian Conch and its Relation to Hindu Life and Religion. London: Williams and Norgate, 1915. Hornell, James. The Indian Pearl Fisheries of the Gulf of Mannar and Palk Bay. Madras: Government Press, 1922. Hornell, James. ‘The Indian chank in folklore and religion.’ Folklore, 53, 2 (1942).

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Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark. Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Kunz, George and Charles Stevenson.  The Book of the Pearl. New  York: The Century, 1908. Mitchell, Timothy. Rule of Experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. Berkeley, CA: California: University of California Press, 2002. Parker, Grant. ‘Ex Oriente Luxuria: Indian commodities and Roman experience.’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 45, 1, (2002). Roy, Rohan Deb. Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British India, 1820–1909. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Sen, Tansen. ‘The impact of Zheng He’s expeditions on Indian Ocean interactions.’ Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 79, 3 (2016). Sivasundaram, Sujit. ‘Science,’ in Pacific Histories: Ocean, land, people, eds. David Armitage and Alison Bashford. Basingstoke, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. ‘Noble harvest from the sea: Pearl fishery in the Gulf of Mannar, 1500-1925,’ in Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia, eds. Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Burton Stein. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996.

CHAPTER 5

Horses and Power in the Southern Red Sea Region Since the Seventeenth Century Steven Serels

Introduction State power in the Southern Red Sea Region (SRSR) has historically been established, consolidated, maintained, and expanded through violence. The SRSR is a sub-region of the Indian Ocean World (IOW) that encompasses parts of present-day Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia,

Researching and writing this chapter was supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with funds from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under RES grant agreement n°605728 (Postdoctoral Researchers International Mobility Experience). This chapter builds on research supported by grants from the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Volkswagen Stiftung, the Social Studies and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Harvard University’s Weatherhead Initiative on Global History, and the Indian Ocean World Centre. S. Serels (*) Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 M. Chaiklin et al. (eds.), Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42595-1_5

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Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. The various states that have come and gone in the SRSR over the past 300 years were built through actual or threatened physical and material harm. The three most important expressions of state power were conquest, punishment, and economic extraction, all of which required either violence or the threat of it. In some instances, these states supplemented their strategies of violence with other, ‘softer’ strategies that sought to coerce their subjects into collaborating or, at the very least, stop resisting the exercise of official prerogatives. However, these coercive strategies were never definitive in constructing hierarchies of power. Real physical and material violence committed by organised armed forces has been, and continues to be, the basis of state power throughout the region. This power built on violence has had its limitations. States have struggled to command all of the territory they claim. Areas of tight control—particularly around cities, fertile zones, and desert oases—were generally surrounded by areas in which states had no influence, such as in arid and semi-arid lowland pastures. Even in areas of tight control, state penetration was frequently shallow and contested. Local elites, invading forces, and outlawed bandits often tried to establish their own control over these prized areas at the expense of state influence. Historically, the cavalry was the centrepiece of all the armed forces in the SRSR. Pre-twentieth-century SRSR states resembled the cavalry states of West Africa. According to Robin Law, in West Africa ‘horses were valued primarily for their use in warfare. In consequence, the securing of supplies of horses was a matter of paramount strategic importance and a major concern of national policy.’1 Until relatively recently the same was true for the SRSR. The link between state power in the SRSR and patterns of human-horse interaction was so strong that it should be characterised as a state/horse power complex. This chapter examines the history of this complex from the seventeenth century until the military modernisations of the twentieth century. Horses, unlike all other domesticated animals, were traditionally reserved in the SRSR for projecting state power. Though horses could theoretically be used for commercial transport, they generally were not. Such tasks were left to mules, donkeys, and camels. Similarly, horses were not used to draw ploughs or work irrigation water wheels. Both of these tasks were left to cattle. Instead, horses were reserved for the battlefield. They were a technology of war as, if not more, important than 1  Robin Law, The Horse in West African History: The role of the horse in the societies of pre-colonial West Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 61.

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the spears and swords used until the late nineteenth century. The unique place of horses in state formation in the SRSR remained remarkably stable for centuries before the complete reorganisation of the regional political economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The SRSR is currently divided between Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Sudan. The modern borders that divide these countries are only recent inventions, but they in some way capture longstanding political divisions in the region. Though the specific rulers and the precise political institutions changed over time, there have been for centuries complex states located along the Sudanese Nile, in the Ethiopian plateau, in the Yemeni mountains, and in the urban centres of Western Arabia. These states were supported by the consistent surpluses produced by the multifaceted SRSR socio-economic system, which, in turn, was built upon intensive intra-regional maritime trade. The SRSR is knit together by the sea, bound by the same climatological system that traditionally linked the region to the rest of the IOW. In the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, the seasonality of the maritime monsoon winds south of the 19°N parallel historically facilitated rapid communications between the African and Arabian littorals. Similar patterns of maritime circulation were not possible in the northern Red Sea because the winds in this area lack a seasonality and the natural geography of the shore line, with its shoals and coral reefs, impeded coastal sailing. While there have historically been few significant ports in the northern Red Sea despite the proximity to Egypt and other Mediterranean markets, south of the 19°N parallel the shore is dotted with numerous major ports, minor ports, and occasionally utilised natural harbours. Which harbours became ports and which ports became major ports was a result of a combination of market dynamics and political force. Traditionally, there have always been two major ports—one near the Bab al-Mandab and one slightly north of the 19°N parallel. In the nineteenth century, these ports were respectively Aden and Jeddah. Major ports traded directly with the broader IOW. Foreign goods brought by ship from as far away as Western India were often trans-shipped at these major ports onto local dhows destined for the minor ports and/or, occasionally, undeveloped natural harbours that only engaged in local trade. The goods, ideas, and people that circulated at sea along this hub-and-spoke system moved on land via an elaborate network of caravan routes and market towns that connected distant centres of production and consumption in the Yemeni mountains, the

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Hijaz, the Sudanese Nile, the Ethiopian highlands, and the Somali Ogaden. These strongly interdependent areas comprise the SRSR.2 This chapter looks at two distinct periods in the political history of the SRSR.  The first period extends from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. This period begins with a consolidation of power in the region by the Ottoman and Ethiopian empires, the Yemeni Imamate, and the Sudanese Funj Sultanate following the multilateral sixteenth-century Portuguese military intervention into the SRSR. However, the initial gains in state power soon proved unsustainable; what followed was nearly two and a half centuries of political instability. This political instability reinforced the state/horse power complex. Since the spears and swords used in battle were widely available, the number and quality of horses could tip the balance on the battlefield. Therefore, states sought to maximise their control over local horse stocks. Throughout this period, every state had a horse-mounted cavalry at the centre of its armed force and every rival leader with political ambitions commanded a militia organized along similar lines. Since all who competed for power needed horses to establish their dominance, instability increased demand for and dependence upon horses. The state/horse power complex was dismantled in the second period under review, which began in the late nineteenth century. The driving force behind this radical reorganisation of power in the SRSR was technological. Horses were no match on the battlefield for modern rifles. When mass-produced European arms began flooding the region, political dominance quickly became a function of access to rifles. Though rifles had existed since the fifteenth century, these new rifles were faster loading, more precise, and cheaper than earlier models. With the right training, a soldier with a rifle could take down a charging horse from a significant distance. As a result, as soon as they became widely available, cheap rifles replaced swords and spears on the battlefields. This process was reinforced by the establishment of British control over Sudan, Somaliland, and Southern Yemen; French control over Djibouti; and Italian control over Eritrea and, briefly, Ethiopia. In addition to ushering a new constellation of political players, the widespread proliferation of modern rifles also 2  For a more detailed description of how this system worked see: Steven Serels, ‘Food insecurity and political instability in the Southern Red Sea Region during the ‘Little Ice Age,’ 1650–1840,’ in Famines during the ‘Little Ice Age’ (1300–1800), eds. Dominik Collet and Maximilian Schuh (New York: Springer Science, 2017), 115–27.

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radically upended longstanding patterns of human-horse interaction. Horses stopped being politically useful and, therefore, lost much of their local utilitarian value. As infantries became the core of the armed forces in the region, cavalries were progressively dismantled. Initially, cavalries in the arid and semi-arid lowland areas were replaced with camelries. However, even this transition was short lived. In the second half of the twentieth century, animal transport was completely phased out in favour of gas-powered vehicles. Though violence remained central to state power, animal power was no longer needed.

The State/Horse Power Complex There are two primary, unique horse breeds that were developed in the SRSR—the Dongolawi and the Arabian. Each of these horse breeds developed separately in specific locations and spread mainly via overland trade routes. The ancestors of the Dongolawi breed were introduced to the Sudanese Nile Valley during the New Kingdom Egyptian colonisation of Nubia (1550–1425  BCE). Though initially a technology of a foreign power, over time horses in Nubia became incorporated into local social, political, and economic practices. A recent excavation at Tombos, near the third Nile cataract, of an ornate tomb of a chariot-pulling horse has shown that horses were part of a distinct, independent, politically ascendant Nubian identity in as early as 1050 BCE.3 Chariotry gave way to horseback riding sometime in the early Christian era. During this transition, local horse stocks were selectively bred to meet the needs of a mounted, chainmail-wearing cavalry. The resulting horse breed, Dongolawi, took its name from the Sudanese region of Dongola, which corresponds to the Nile Valley between the third and fifth cataracts. Dongolawi horses gained a strong reputation in neighbouring regions and, as a result of trade, the breed was established in West Africa and the Ethiopian plateau.4 The precise historic origin of the Arabian breed of horses is unknown. However, petroglyphs indicate that horses had already achieved a high social status in Arabia by the first millennium BCE. Rock drawings from this time indicate that horses were finely groomed and that their use in 3  See: S. Schrader, S. Smith, S. Olsen, and M. Buzon, ‘Symbolic equids and Kushite state formation: A horse burial at Tombos,’ Antiquity, 92, 362 (2018), 383–97. 4  H.  Epstein, The Domestic Animals of Africa, II (New York: Africana Publishing Corporation, 1971), 458–9.

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both chariot warfare and by the cavalry was common.5 Though horses were also used in the regional caravan trade in Arabia, they were not generally exported. Arabian horses only made their way to neighbouring parts of the SRSR after the seventh century CE Arab invasion of North Africa. When the Banu Hilal pastoralists from Arabia were sent to Egypt, they brought their Arabian horses with them. These horses and their descendants subsequently made their way across the Sahara to West Africa and via the Nile Valley to Sudan and then Ethiopia.6 It is important here to note that the Arabian horse did not come to Africa via the more direct trans-­ Red Sea route. Arabian horses were unknown to the African Red Sea littoral prior to the eleventh century. This suggests that these horses had generally been excluded from maritime trade. Breeders of Dongolawi and Arabian horses developed their own understandings of the nature and qualities of the particular breeds. Physical characteristics such as colour and markings were often seen as indicating specific character types. As a result, favourable phenotypes were selectively bred.7 Unlike European breeders who record the heirs of prized stallions, those in the SRSR focused on relations of matrilineal descent.8 Maintaining the purity of these two breeds was not always an important priority. In Ethiopia especially, Dongolawi and Arabian horses were interbred producing a number of lineages that are sometimes classed as a distinct breed called, alternately, Galla, Abyssinian, or Ethiopian.9 However, this categorisation remains controversial precisely because the development of these lineages occurred within the past two centuries through the interbreeding of two well-established breeds. Though the breeds developed in the SRSR continue to be in demand to this day, communities in the SRSR historically did not engage in intensive horse breeding. This was in part a result of economic considerations. Horses were considerably less valuable than mules and therefore mares were more frequently used to breed the latter. In the mid-nineteenth 5  Sandra Olsen, ‘Insight on the ancient Arabian horse from north Arabian petroglyphs,’ International Journal of Archaeology and Social Sciences in the Arabian Peninsula, 8 (2017), 1–35. 6  Epstein, The Domestic Animals of Africa, II, 428. 7  A.  Paul, ‘Horse breeding among the Shankhab,’ Sudan Notes and Records, 18, 1 (1935), 139–40. 8  Margaret E. Derry, Bred for Perfection: Shorthorn cattle, collies and Arabian horses since 1800 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 104–5. 9  Epstein, The Domestic Animals of Africa, II, 460–1.

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century, a good mule could sell in the market for up to double the price of a good horse.10 The price difference was determined by the different demand. Mules and donkeys were widely used in both local and long-­ distance transport because they could carry more over longer distances with less need for water and fodder.11 However, horses had few civilian uses. They were a technology of war demanded only by pre-colonial military forces. Historically, military engagements in the SRSR were limited to quick raids. Generally, offensive manoeuvres occurred in two phases. In the first phase, a force would relatively slowly make its way to the general vicinity of the attack. In the second phase, the force would launch a rapid attack on the enemy, often killing the men, sometimes enslaving the women and children, and generally seizing herds and other movable property. Horses were the fastest means of transport over short distances, such as those from the staging ground to the site of the raid. Men on horseback could easily defeat foot soldiers. Both were armed with just spears and swords; however, the cavalry had the decisive advantage of speed. The military strategies employed in the relatively well-watered highlands of Ethiopia and Yemen necessarily had to differ from those used in the neighbouring arid and semi-arid lowlands. Horses in the lowlands cannot both move over large, poorly-watered distances and be fit for galloping during raids. Nomadic communities in Arabia overcame this limitation by developing a military strategy that depended upon using camels as support animals. During the march towards battle, horses were left unencumbered. They were simply tied to the saddles of the camels, which also carried all the provisions and the soldiers. En route, horses were fed camel milk and, in emergency situations, camel blood. Horses were only mounted during raids, thereby conserving as much horse power as possible for the armed confrontation. This camel-horse system was already in use by Arab forces during their seventh-century conquest of North Africa.12 This

10  Charles William Isenberg, The Journals of C W Isenberg and J L Krapf: Missionaries of the Church Missionary Society: Detailing their proceedings in the Kingdom of Shoa, and journeys in other parts of Abyssinia, in the years 1839, 1840, 1841, and 1842 (London: Seeley, Burnside and Seeley, 1843), 95. 11  Istituto agronomico per l’oltremare (hereafter: IAO) FASC 524 Il Patrimonio zootecnico del Seraè e la sua pastorizia. [n.d. before 1940]. 12  Pita Kelekna, The Horse in Human History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 212–3.

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system subsequently spread to the African Red Sea littoral, where it was used by both state armies and pastoralist militias.13 Dependence on horses also brought with it an important inherent vulnerability—it tied state power to horse biology. Prior to recent advances in veterinary medicine, there were geographic limitations on the breeding of high-quality horses. Horses thrive in dry regions with large grazing pastures. Only here can a horse find the grasses optimised for digestion in its unique cecum. Horses reared off of other grasses were often too small, slow, or otherwise unfit for the battlefield. However, such areas are unsuited to the intensive agriculture that is often needed to support complex states. In Sudan and Arabia, both types of territory are geographically proximate and therefore easy to hold simultaneously. However, the Ethiopian highlands are too far from suitable grazing lands to have allowed for state control of both types of territories. Ethiopia was not the only state to be both horse-dependent and without access to proper horse breeding grounds. Jos Gommans has shown that similarly situated states existed in South Asia until the nineteenth century. As we shall see, Ethiopian rulers, like those in South Asia described by Gommans, had to adapt their politics and trade practices to overcome their horse-breeding strategic deficit.14 States in the SRSR faced the added threat of African Horse Sickness, an enzootic viral disease that kills approximately 90 per cent of infected horses. The virus is spread by a species of midge. Within 24 hours after infection, a horse will have a high fever and will suffer from respiratory symptoms. Within 48 hours, the horse will be dead. The virus only causes subclinical infections in zebras and produces a mortality rate of only 10 per cent in infected donkeys. Therefore, it is believed that these two animal populations act as reservoirs from which the disease periodically spreads, decimating horse populations.15 Extant known archival sources 13  The indigenous militias continued to employ this system during their late-nineteenthcentury fight against European imperial expansion. See: Douglas Jardine, The Mad Mullah of Somaliland (London: Herbert Jenkins Limited, 1923), 98; Sudan Archive, Durham University (hereafter:  SAD) Intelligence Department, Egyptian Army, Sudan Intelligence Report, No 52 (February and March 1897), 3. 14  See: Jos Gommans, The Indian Frontier: Horse and warband in the making of empires (London: Routledge, 2018); and, Jos Gommans, Mughal Warfare: Indian frontiers and high roads to empire (London: Routledge, 2002). 15  S.  Zeintara, C.  T. Weyer and S.  Lecollinet, ‘African horse sickness,’ Scientific and Technical Review of the Office International des Epizooties, 34, 2 (2015), 315–27.

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provide only a limited picture of the history of the disease in the region before the twentieth century. The earliest record of an outbreak of a disease that resembles African Horse Sickness in the SRSR is from Yemen in 1327. Outbreaks of the disease have been recorded in every part of the SRSR.  In the nineteenth century, there were devastating outbreaks in Dongola and the Hijaz.16 In the first half of the twentieth century, there were repeated outbreaks in Yemen, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somalia.17 There is still no known cure for this disease, which remained completely unchecked until vaccination campaigns were begun after the Second World War. Without any effective treatment or prophylaxis, repeated epizootics decimated horse populations and rendered even horse breeding states regularly in need of new sources of healthy animals. Though military strategy impelled each SRSR state to cultivate a geographically diverse range of sources of warhorses, many rulers viewed trans-border horse trade as a security threat. In addition to potentially encouraging the spread of diseases, trading horses with a neighbouring territory would arm actual or potential enemies. This was the official position of the Ottoman Empire. After seizing control over much of the Red Sea littoral in the sixteenth century, Ottoman officials prohibited the export of horses from their new territories.18 This prohibition continued the policies of some pre-Ottoman states in the SRSR and contemporaneous states elsewhere in the IOW. For example, Simon Digby has shown that the longevity of the Delhi Sultanate was directly linked to its official

16  Durham University Archive (hereafter: DUA) WYL/72/22 Part of a letter by A B Wylde. n.d. November 1879. 17  Archives Diplomatiques, Nantes (hereafter: ADN) 12PO/1/9 Gouverneur de la Côte Française des Somalis to Agent Consulaire de France à Aden, 4 January 1912; Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence (hereafter: ANOM) 1E7 Prunier, Rapport de Tournee, 20 January 1939; IAO FASC 521 Ufficio Agrario dell’Eritrea, Sevizio della Zootecnica e pastorizia. Estratto riguardante la pastorizia dalla relazione annual sulla agricultura e pastorizia in Eritrea nel 1938; National Archives, Kew, (hereafter: NAK) CO505/134/1 E F Peck. The Annual Report of the British Somaliland Veterinary and Agricultural Department for 1938; SAD ‘Annual Report. Veterinary Department, 1908;’ SAD ‘Customs Department, 1908’ in Reports on the Finances, Administration and Condition of the Sudan, 1908 (1908), 419. 18  This prohibition was widely applied across the empire. Hedda Reindel-Kiel, ‘No Horses for the Enemy: Ottoman trade regulations and horse gifting’ in Pferde in Asien: Geshichte, Handel und Kultur, eds. Bert Fragner, Ralph Kauz, Roderich Ptak and Angela Schottenhammer (Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2009), 43–51.

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policy of denying neighbouring states access to horse imports.19 Similarly, the Rasulids who ruled Yemen from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries generally prohibited the export trade in horses. The Rasulids allowed for one exception: Indian merchants in Aden were allowed, at the end of the summer trading season, to purchase any horse that the government had decided not to buy.20 Though the Ottoman restrictions were more far reaching than those of the Rasulids, they were generally poorly enforced, and horses continued to be exported by sea mainly to states in southern India.21 This trade was facilitated by the monsoon winds. Ships would leave southwestern Indian ports in early March and reach the SRSR within a month, their arrival marking the beginning of the main trading season. They would then stay in port trading until mid-August, when the change in winds would allow for the return journey. Nearly every ship making this return journey carried horses.22 This trade continued until the end of the eighteenth century, when all trade between India and the SRSR contracted and Indian merchant firms withdrew their representatives from SRSR ports.23 While the exact causes of this contraction remain unclear, it occurred simultaneously with a weakening of the monsoon system in the second half of the century. Repeated monsoon failures made open water maritime communication difficult.24 The Sudanese Funj Sultanate and the Ethiopian Empire did not similarly restrict the cross-border horse trade. The overland horse trade on the African side of the SRSR was, for the most part, unidirectional with Ethiopia importing horses from Sudan. Following the establishment of a 19  Simon Digby, War-Horse and Elephant in the Dehli Sultanate: A study of military supplies (Oxford: Orient Monographs, 1971). 20  Daniel Mahoney, ‘The role of horses in the politics of medieval South Arabia,’ Arabian Humanities, 8 (2017), 3. 21  Northern Indian states did not have to depend on the seasonal monsoon winds to import horses. Throughout the year, ships leaving northern Indian ports would catch coastal winds to travel to and from the major Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea horse exporting ports of Muscat and Hurmuz. Ralph Kauz, ‘Horse exports from the Persian Gulf until the arrival of the Portuguese’ in Pferde in Asien, 130. 22  Éric Vallet, L’Arabie Marchande: État et commerce sous les Sultans Rasulids du Yémen (628–858/1229–145) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010), 565–7. 23  Pedro Machado. ‘Awash in a sea of cloth: Gujarat, Africa and the western Indian Ocean, 1300–1800,’ South Asian Textiles in the World, eds. Prasannan Parthasarathi and Giorgio Riello (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 170. 24  Edward R.  Cook,  Kevin J.  Anchukaitis, Brendan M.  Buckley, Rosanne D.  D’Arrigo, Gordon C. Jacoby, and William E. Wright, ‘Asian monsoon failure and megadrought during the last millennium,’ Science, 328 (2010), 486–9.

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permanent Ethiopian capital at Gondar in the seventeenth century, the trade in horses shifted onto the direct route between the capitals of the two states. Though this trade increased the military might of Ethiopia, it also created a kind of Pax Equestris. The trade was a disincentive for Ethiopia to attack Sudan, as doing so would cut the Ethiopian state off from its crucial supply of horses. This does not mean that peace was complete. There were occasional military confrontations between the two states. Nonetheless, the trade had an overall calming effect on inter-state tensions. Instead of turning their horses against their supplier, successive Ethiopian emperors used them to launch raids against neighbouring communities to the south and west of the highlands.25 The Pax Equestris broke down in the general SRSR political crisis of the second half of the eighteenth century. Elsewhere I have argued that this crisis was linked to an unusual 200-year-long mega-drought associated with the Little Ice Age. When the mega-drought began in the mid-­ seventeenth century, states throughout the SRSR made small adjustments to cope with the unusually dry conditions. However, these changes could not adequately address the scope of the slow-moving natural disaster. As generation after generation suffered from increased food insecurity, new political fissures opened. The Funj Sultanate lost control over all of its peripheral territories, the central Ethiopian imperial state collapsed into elite infighting, the Yemeni Imamate’s hold on the countryside disintegrated, and the Ottoman Empire was driven out of western Arabia by an ascendant Saudi-Wahhabi military alliance.26 Political instability reinforced the state/horse power complex because all the parties competing for power in the SRSR needed to command horses. Political might remained bound directly to battlefield victories, which in turn stayed tied to a strong cavalry. For example, the Shayquiyya ethnic group from the Dongolawi horse-breeding region of the Sudanese Nile Valley organised themselves into autonomous cavalry militias during this period as part of an effort to establish and maintain their autonomy from the Funj Sultanate.27 The princes who vied for power in Ethiopia in the decades after the deposition of Emperor Iyoas in 1769 had a unique  Richard Pankhurst, ‘Ethiopia’s economic and cultural ties with the Sudan from the middle ages to the mid-nineteenth century,’ Sudan Notes and Records, 56 (1975), 75. 26  Serels, ‘Food insecurity and political instability,’ 115–127. 27  Lisa Heidron, ‘The horses of Kush,’ Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 56, 2 (1997), 112. 25

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problem in this regard. Unlike in the rest of the SRSR, there were no centres of horse breeding in Ethiopia and increased instability along the border between Sudan and Ethiopia was causing trade to seize up. When they could no longer import horses from neighbouring Sudan, Ethiopians responded by learning to breed their own warhorses in the less than ideal conditions of the highlands. Despite the geographic limitations, the Ethiopian highlands became a significant horse-breeding region during this period.28 This political crisis was followed by a period of imperial expansion and consolidation that yet again further reinforced the state/horse power complex. Insecurity in the eighteenth century created the opening for Egyptian imperial expansion in the SRSR in the nineteenth century. Imperial conquest required horses, which posed a problem for Egypt as that country was also poorly suited for the proper breeding of warhorses.29 To overcome this problem, advancing Egyptian forces requisitioned nearly all the horses in newly conquered territory.30 Similar strategies were implemented around the same time by the Ottomans after they were restored to power in western Arabia, and by Sahle Sellassi as he sought to reestablish the power of the Ethiopian imperial state. Sellassi was so successful in this regard that by the 1840s he could command a force consisting of approximately 30,000 horsemen.31 Imperial expansion provoked sustained organised resistance movements that were also dependent on horses. The Mahdist rebels in Sudan and the Somali followers of Muhammed Abdullah Hassan (pejoratively called the ‘Mad Mullah’ by the British) were organised into cavalry militias. The ratio of cavalry to infantry was estimated at one-to-four for the Mahdist force and one-to-two for that commanded by Muhammed Abdullah Hassan.32 Centuries of political instability put a severe strain on the horse stock of the SRSR. Horses were not being bred in large-enough numbers to replace those that fell in war or died during outbreaks of African Horse Sickness. As a result, the population of horses declined dramatically during the  Pankhurst, ‘Ethiopia’s economic and cultural ties with the Sudan,’ 85.  Epstein, The Domestic Animals of Africa, II, 427. 30  Ibid., 453. 31  M. Rochet d’Héricourt, Second voyage sur les deux rives de la Mer Rouge dans le Pays des Adels et le Royaume de Choa (Paris: Arthus Bertrand, 1846), 180. 32  Governatore dell’Eritrea to il Ministro degli affair esteri, 31 July 1894 reprinted in Camera del Deputati, Government of Italy, Agordat-Cassala (Rome, 1895) 49–58; Jardine, The Mad Mullah of Somaliland, 98. 28 29

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nineteenth century. By the end of the century, whole areas were left without any horses. This decrease was most dramatic in the Dongola province of Sudan, which had once been known for its prized horses. A census taken following the 1896 British-led conquest of Dongola revealed that there were no horses in the province.33 A similar animal census conducted by the Italians in Eritrea in 1905 revealed that there were only approximately 1000 horses in the colony. By contrast Italian colonial officials reported that there were over 17,000 camels, 400,000 sheep and goats, and 300,000 head of cattle in Eritrea. The same census found that horses made up just a small fraction of the equid population, with the ratio of horses to mules to donkeys being just 1 to 6 to 22.34 The decline in horse population was reflected in an increase in the price of horses throughout the SRSR. For example, the price of a Dongolawi horse suitable for battle in the Sudanese capital of Umm Durman was reported to be rising quickly in the late 1880s and early 1890s, peaking at 600 Mahdist silver thalers in 1895. This was nearly 50 per cent more than the price for a riding camel.35 However, these high prices would not last. By 1901, horses were selling in the same market for less than half the price of a camel.36 This shift reflected a sharp decline in demand caused by the sudden collapse of the state/ horse power complex.

Horses in the Age of Guns In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, cheap, modern rifles flooded the SRSR. The proliferation of fast-loading rifles radically altered dynamics on the battlefield and, in so doing, upended the SRSR state/horse power complex. Once there was a critical mass of soldiers carrying rifles, speed was no longer the decisive factor in victory because a galloping horse was easily felled by a well-aimed bullet. Marksmanship and access to ever more deadly weapons had become key. During this period, modern arms were brought to the SRSR in four ways. First, they were given to locals by European imperial agents seeking to establish footholds in the SRSR. In 33  NAK FO4407/142/80 Memorandum on the Conditions of the Dongola Province [n.d. March 1897]. 34  Istituto Coloniale Italiano, L’Industria del Beestiame nella Colonia Eritrea, (Rome: Istituto Coloniale Italiano, 1910), 5–6. 35  SAD Intelligence Department, Egyptian Army, Sudan Intelligence Report, No 36 (1895), 15. 36  ‘Market Prices’, Sudan Gazette, 30 (1 December 1901), 4.

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the 1880s, British and Italian military officers armed the indigenous militias fighting against the Mahdist Rebellion.37 In 1912, British officials implemented a similar program of heavily arming allied indigenous militias in Somaliland.38 Second, they were granted or sold in large quantities by Italian and French imperial agents to the Ethiopian Emperor Menelik II, who was seeking to rapidly modernise the force under his command.39 Third, French agents imported arms and ammunition in large quantities to Djibouti and then re-exported them on dhows to Arabian ports. Though some of these arms and ammunitions were destined for Hijazi and Yemeni militias or for private sales in Arabian markets, many of them were yet again illegally re-exported back to the African Red Sea littoral. This trade picked up in the beginning of the twentieth century. Between 1899 and 1914, approximately ten million Maria Theresa thalers-worth of arms and ammunitions were imported into the port of Djibouti from Europe. Nearly 90 per cent of these arms and ammunitions were re-­ exported.40 Finally and, perhaps most significantly, modern arms were brought by the British, French, Italian, and Ottoman imperial armed forces stationed in the region. Military officers from these four empires recognised that their strength in the SRSR came from the arms imbalance between their militaries and those of local armed forces. With speed no longer the deciding factor, the new imperial rulers of the arid and semi-arid parts of the SRSR did not need to invest in a cavalry supported by a large herd of camels, as had long been the winning combination in the region. Instead, these powers were able to develop imperial camelries. The British were the first to recognise that a camelry would suffice. In 1883, they created a camelry to police the Nilotic frontier between Sudan and Egypt.41 The Sudanese Camel Corps served as the model for the development of a similarly organised unit in Somaliland in

37  SAD Intelligence Department, Egyptian Army, Suakin Intelligence Report, No 97 (11 to 23 December 1889). 38  NAK CO535/18 Commissioner of the Somaliland Protectorate to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 21 Feb 1910. 39  Jonathan A Grant, Rulers, Guns, and Money: The global arms trade in the age of imperialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) 47–50. 40  Agnès Picquart, ‘Le Commerce des armes à Djibouti de 1888 à 1914,’ Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 58 (1971), 416. 41  In 1904, this corps was expanded and augmented with a mule cavalry. G. A. V. Keays, ‘Note on the history of the Camel Corps,’ Sudan Notes and Records. 22, 1 (1939), 103–6.

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1912.42 For British officials in Somaliland, this reflected a dramatic shift in their understanding of local military advantage. Just eight years earlier, British officials were trying to increase the number and quality of horses owned by local Somali militias because they believed this was the best way to ensure security in the colony.43 By 1912, they had come to believe that camel-mounted soldiers with modern rifles were better than an armed cavalry. Ottoman military planners made a similar decision during the First World War, when they made a camelry the centre of their Hejaz Expeditionary Force. In 1922, Italian officials similarly formed a camelry called the Mehristi to police arid and semi-arid parts of Eritrea.44 French officials followed suit in 1938 by establishing the camel-mounted Milice Indigène to patrol the countryside of the Côte Française des Somalis (Djibouti).45 The imperial powers that ruled the SRSR did not turn their backs entirely on horses. British and Italian officials, in particular, continued to see the value of a cavalry in better-watered terrain. Warhorses were part of the Italian strategy in the highlands of Eritrea throughout the colonial period and in Ethiopia during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. In the late 1930s, the Italian force advancing through Ethiopia purchased as many horses as possible for the army to use to police newly conquered territory.46 However, the Italian armed forces were not entirely dependent on horses in the highlands. In the 1930s, they also greatly augmented the number of mules used by the military.47 On the other hand, British officials saw the horse stocks in their SRSR territories as strategic imperial assets that could be mobilised for use elsewhere. British officials in Sudan bought and exported several thousand horses for use in the campaign to conquer

42  NAK CO535/27 Byatt, Memorandum on the Political Situation in Somaliland in April 1912, 30 April 1912. 43  NAK CO4535/2 Swayne to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 31 October 1905. 44  Though this part of Eritrean history is understudied, there are interesting depictions of the horse and camel cavalry in: Ascari d’Eritrea: volontari eritrei nelle forze armate italiane, 1889–1941 (Florence: Vallecchi, 2005). 45  ANOM 1B5 Inspection des Services de la Milice Indigène. 20 July 1938. 46  ADN 198/PO/A/14 Bodard to Ministre des affaires etrangers, 21 November 1936. 47  Renzo Giuliani, Problemi zootecnici ed agrari dell’eritrea. (Bologna: Tipografia Paolo Cuppini, 1932), 17.

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Palestine during the First World War,48 and approximately 1600 horses for use in holding Egypt during the Second World War.49 Since they continued to see horses as a strategic asset, British and Italian officials invested in stock improvement programs in their SRSR colonies. In 1904, British officials in Somaliland imported stallions and distributed them to key allies as part of a broader effort to support local horse-­ mounted militias.50 This program was abandoned when the British took inspiration from their experiences in Sudan and shifted their strategy away from horses to camels in 1912. In 1910, the Sudan Veterinary Service began small experiments to improve horse stocks in the colony.51 When these efforts were expanded in the 1920s, they focused exclusively on the major horse-breeding regions of Darfur and western Kordofan.52 Around the same time, Italian officials began their own experiments to improve the stock of horses in the highlands of Eritrea. To this end, they established model stables and imported prized stallions from Sudan and Arabia.53 Nonetheless, the horse improvement schemes in Sudan and Eritrea failed to produce the desired results. The foals that were produced were considered of inferior quality and all the schemes were quietly ended before the Second World War.54 Despite their interest in the SRSR as a warhorse reserve, the new imperial rulers of the SRSR did not attempt to restrict horse exports from their territories. British, Italian, and French officials did not impose specific regulations on the horse trade beyond levying the standard duties that were generally applicable on all imports or exports. This followed the longstanding practice of the Ethiopian state, which allowed the free trade in horses throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Ottoman Empire was the only major power to restrict the horse trade at the dawn of the twentieth century. However, Ottoman rule in the SRSR ended with the Arab Revolt (1916–1918) and with it so did the Ottoman trade restrictions. In the first half of the twentieth century, the SRSR horse 48  J. D. M. Jack, ‘The Sudan’ in A History of the Overseas Veterinary Services, ed. G. P. West (London: British Veterinary Association, 1961), 128. 49  Jack, ‘The Sudan,’ 137. 50  NAK CO4535/2 Swayne to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 31 October 1905. 51  Jack, ‘The Sudan,’ 127. 52  Ibid., 131. 53  Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Government of Italy, Il Servizion Veterinario Nell’Africa Italiana (Rome, 1965), 22. 54  Ibid.; Jack, ‘The Sudan,’ 131.

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trade took place along three trajectories: 1) overland from Ethiopia to Sudan; 2) overland and by sea from Ethiopia via Djibouti to Aden; and 3) overland from Yemen to Aden. However, this trade was just a marginal part of the overall trade in live animals. Free trade had not caused the trade in horses to flourish because demand had dried up. The best statistics for the live animal trade in the first half of the twentieth century were kept by the Italian rulers of Eritrea. In the decade starting in 1921, Eritrea imported 1366 horses. Only 26 of these horses were imported by sea. The remaining 1340 were imported overland from the Ethiopian highlands. Over the same period, 7378 donkeys and 7362 mules were imported intro Eritrea, nearly all from Ethiopia.55 Market conditions in Eritrea held elsewhere in the SRSR.56 Demand for horses had dried up even though state violence continued. The rapid proliferation of modern rifles either through grants from imperial powers or through normal market mechanisms led to a further destabilisation of the region.57 However, like the imperial powers who ruled much of the SRSR, the local rulers, elites, warlords, and bandits who sought to profit from violence had little need for more horses. They, too, understood that they were living in the age of guns. The end of European imperial rule did not change this. Decolonisation did not lead to the reconstruction of the old state/horse power complex. As the region attained political independence over the course of the twentieth century, newly formed states sought to expand their armed forces by increasing their stocks of modern arms and the size of their infantry. With grants from the United States, the Soviet Union, and Egypt, these states 55  For detailed statistics on trade movements organized by commodity and country of origin/destination see: IAO Ministero Delle Colonie, Government of Italy, Statistica del Movimento Commerciale Marittimo dell’Eritrea, della Somalia Italian, Della Tripolitania e Della Cirenaica del Movimento Commerciale Carovaniero Dell’Eritrea E Movimento Della Navigazione Marittima Delle Quatro Colonie Anni (Rome; Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato) published annually in the 1920s and 1930s. 56  ‘Customs Department, 1908’ in Reports on the Finances, Administration and Condition of the Sudan, 1908 (1908), 120–1; ANOM FM 1AFFPOL/133 Rapport de Monsieur A G Rozis Conseiller du Commerce Extèrieur de la France sur le Protectorat de la Cote Francaise des Somalis, 1911. 57  R. J. Gavin, Aden Under British Rule, 1839–1967 (London: C Hurst and Co, 1975), 205–9; Janet Ewald and William Gervase Clarence-Smith, ‘The economic role of the Hadhrami diaspora in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, 1820s to 1930s,’ in Hadhrami Traders, Scholars and Statesmen in the Indian Ocean, 1750s–1960s, eds. Ulrike Freitag and William Gervase Clarence-Smith (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 292.

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e­ stablished modern mechanised armies. The extant cavalry and camelry were phased out and transport animals were replaced with cars, trucks, and tanks. Though horses were removed from the battlefield, they continued to be bred. Communities in the SRSR developed new relationships with horses that revolved around their symbolic rather than use value.58 These new patterns capitalized on long-standing, though less significant practices that linked horses to elite privilege. Owning and riding particularly beautiful or ornately appointed horses were long seen as signs of elite standing because they implied a favoured relationship with the state.59 These elite practices have recently been redeveloped for a new age. Horses are now groomed, displayed, and raced in the SRSR in public displays linked to cultural heritage demonstrations.60 As part of this practice, elite horse breeders in the SRSR have replaced their traditional breeding practices with western ones. This shift is most acutely observable in the treatment of the Arabian breed. American and European horse breeding institutions, such as the Arabian Horse Registry of America and the International Arabian Horse Association, from their founding have categorically refused to recognise Arabian horses bred in the SRSR as purebred because traditional breeding practices in the region do not recognise the primacy of patrilineal descent. Instead, the only purebred Arabian horses that have been officially recognised are the direct descendants of Arabian horses imported via Egypt to European stables in the nineteenth century. Elite breeders in the SRSR have recently changed their practices to conform to the standards set by these foreign breed registries in part to display their status as part of the global elite.61 Redefining horses as part of the cultural heritage of communities in the SRSR has not entirely been positive. The Sudanese state readily mobilised 58  This change mirrors similar changes in Europe. As horses became less important to European armies from the nineteenth century on, new patterns of human-horse interaction emerged that were informed by evolving understandings of tradition, gendered behaviour, and emotional expression. See: Ulrich Raulff, Farewell to the Horse: The Final Century of Our Relationship (London: Allen Lane, 2017). 59  Mahoney, ‘The role of horses in the politics of medieval South Arabia,’ 4. 60  ‘New Saudi Horse Racing Championship to have $17 Million in Prizes,’ Reuters (7 February 2018), online edition [Accessed: 7 June 2018]; Chris Hedges, ‘Khartoum Journal; In Sudan all the Horses Run Under a Handicap,’ The New  York Times (12 December 1994), A04. 61  For a detailed recounting of this history see: Derry, Bred for Perfection, 104–55.

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this redefinition during the Darfur Genocide. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the government of Sudan deployed Janjaweed militias of armed pastoralists mounted on horseback to terrorise, drive out, and murder their neighbours that they defined as ‘non-Arab.’ The Janjaweed used horses because they saw them as an integral part of their cultural heritage: horse ownership was one of the signs that they believed marked them as ‘Arab.’62 The Janjaweed were exceptional only in that they continued to use horses to project state power in the SRSR. By using horses to commit genocide, the Janjaweed were acting as the real keepers of traditional practices involving horses. Though there has been an elite investment in sanitising horse culture in the SRSR, the Janjaweed reflected the last vestiges of the state/horse power complex.

Conclusion State power in the SRSR is still dependent on the use or threat of violence. The states of the SRSR have been and continue to be powerful only in so far as they are willing and able to harm and kill both their own subjects and citizens of neighbouring states. The only thing that has changed is how force is deployed. For centuries, these states needed to command large cavalries because the speed provided by horses was decisive on the battlefield. As a result, state power was tied to the biological realties of horse breeding and of equine diseases. Nonetheless the state/horse power complex was remarkably stable in the SRSR. In fact, demand for horses increased alongside political instability because horses were needed by all who vied for power. This complex was only dismantled in the twentieth century, after a better technology became widely available. The widespread proliferation of cheap, rapid-loading, higher-accuracy rifles radically altered battlefield strategies. As a well-armed, well-trained infantry became more effective than the cavalry, the latter was phased out. Now, states are locked in a race to secure and deploy ever more deadly weapons. The twentieth-century dismantling of the state/horse power complex resulted in a shift in the treatment of horses as a tradable commodity. For centuries, states in the SRSR regulated the trade in horses to meet specific military and diplomatic objectives. On the Arabian side of the SRSR, the rulers of Yemen and the Hijaz sought to curtail horse exports to prevent 62  Ted Degane, Sudan: The crisis in Darfur and the status of the North-South Peace Agreement (Washington DC: Congressional Research Service, 2010), 21–2.

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the arming of potentially hostile neighbouring states. On the African side, the rulers of Sudan and Ethiopia strategically deployed the trade in horses to create and maintain the Pax Equestris. As a result, there was a robust overland trade in horses between Sudan and Ethiopia even as the trans-­ Red Sea trade in horses was severely limited. Over the past century, the decoupling of state and horse power allowed for the liberalisation of the horse trade. However, the same processes led the demand for horses to disappear. With the notable exception of the genocidal cavalry militias of Darfur, communities in the SRSR keep horses now primarily as symbols of their cultural heritage. The new symbolic use of horses in the SRSR often requires forgetting that horses were, until recently, primarily used to attack, raid, enslave, and kill.

Bibliography Archival Sources Archives Diplomatiques, Nantes (ADN): Diplomatic Archives, Nantes, France. Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence (ANOM): National Overseas Archives, Aix-en-Provence, France. Durham University Archive (DUA): Durham University Archive, Durham, UK. Istituto agronomico per l’oltremare (IAO): Overseas Agronomic Institute, Florence, Italy. National Archives, Kew (NAK): National Archives, Kew, London, UK. Sudan Archive, Durham University (SAD): Sudan Archive, Durham University, Durham, UK.

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Ascari d’Eritrea: volontari eritrei nelle forze armate italiane, 1889–1941. Florence: Vallecchi, 2005. Camera del Deputati, Government of Italy. Agordat-Cassala. Rome, 1895. Cook, Edward R, Kevin J. Anchukaitis, Brendan M. Buckley, Rosanne D. D’Arrigo, Gordon C. Jacoby, and William E. Wright. ‘Asian monsoon failure and megadrought during the last millennium.’ Science, 328 (2010). Degane, Ted. Sudan: The crisis in Darfur and the status of the North-South Peace Agreement. Washington DC: Congressional Research Service, 2010. Derry, Margaret E. Bred for Perfection: Shorthorn cattle, collies and Arabian horses since 1800. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Digby, Simon. War-Horse and Elephant in the Dehli Sultanate: A study of military supplies. Oxford: Orient Monographs, 1971.

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Epstein, H. The Domestic Animals of Africa. 2 Vols. New York: Africana Publishing Corporation, 1971. Ewald, Janet and William Gervase Clarence-Smith. ‘The economic role of the Hadhrami diaspora in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, 1820s to 1930s,’ in Hadhrami Traders, Scholars and Statesmen in the Indian Ocean, 1750s–1960s, eds. Ulrike Freitag and William Gervase Clarence-Smith. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Gavin, R. J. Aden Under British Rule, 1839–1967. London: C Hurst and Co, 1975. Giuliani, Renzo. Problemi zootecnici ed agrari dell’eritrea. Bologna, Tipografia Paolo Cuppini, 1932. Gommans, Jos. The Indian Frontier: Horse and warband in the making of empires. London: Routledge, 2018. Gommans, Jos. Mughal Warfare: Indian frontiers and high roads to empire. London: Routledge, 2002. Grant, Jonathan A. Rulers, Guns, and Money: The global arms trade in the age of imperialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Heidron, Lisa. ‘The horses of Kush.’ Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 56, 2 (1997). Isenberg, Charles William. The Journals of C W Isenberg and J L Krapf Missionaries of the Church Missionary Society: Detailing their proceedings in the Kingdom of Shoa, and journeys in other parts of Abyssinia, in the years 1839, 1840, 1841, and 1842. London: Seeley, Burnside and Seeley, 1843. Istituto Coloniale Italiano. L’Industria del Beestiame nella Colonia Eritrea. Rome: Istituto Coloniale Italiano, 1910. Jack, J. D. M. ‘The Sudan,’ in A History of the Overseas Veterinary Services, ed. G. P. West. London: British Veterinary Association, 1961. Jardine, Douglas. The Mad Mullah of Somaliland. London: Herbert Jenkins Limited, 1923. Kauz, Ralph. ‘Horse exports from the Persian Gulf until the arrival of the Portuguese,’ in Pferde in Asien: Geshichte, Handel und Kultur, eds. Bert Fragner, Ralph Kauz, Roderich Ptak and Angela Schottenhammer. Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2009. Keays, G.  A. V. ‘Note on the history of the Camel Corps.’ Sudan Notes and Records, 22, 1 (1939). Kelekna, Pita. The Horse in Human History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Law, Robin. The Horse in West African History: The role of the horse in the societies of pre-colonial West Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Machado, Pedro. ‘Awash in a sea of cloth: Gujarat, Africa and the western Indian Ocean, 1300–1800,’ in South Asian Textiles in the World, eds. Prasannan Parthasarathi and Giorgio Riello. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Government of Italy, Il Servizion Veterinario Nell’Africa Italiana. Rome, 1965.

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Mahoney, Daniel. ‘The role of horses in the politics of medieval South Arabia.’ Arabian Humanities, 8 (2017). Olsen, Sandra. ‘Insight on the ancient Arabian horse from north Arabian petroglyphs.’ International Journal of Archaeology and Social Sciences in the Arabian Peninsula, 8 (2017). Pankhurst, Richard. ‘Ethiopia’s economic and cultural ties with the Sudan from the middle ages to the mid-nineteenth century.’ Sudan Notes and Records, 56 (1975). Paul, A. ‘Horse breeding among the Shankhab.’ Sudan Notes and Records, 18, 1 (1935). Picquart, Agnès. ‘Le commerce des armes à Djibouti de 1888 à 1914.’ Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 58 (1971). Raulff, Ulrich. Farewell to the Horse: The final century of our relationship. London: Allen Lane, 2017. Reindel-Kiel, Hedda. ‘No horses for the enemy: Ottoman trade regulations and horse gifting,’ in Pferde in Asien: Geshichte, Handel und Kultur, eds. Bert Fragner, Ralph Kauz, Roderich Ptak and Angela Schottenhammer. Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2009. Rochet d’Héricourt, M. Second voyage sur les deux rives de la Mer Rouge dans le Pays des Adels et le Royaume de Choa. Paris: Arthus Bertrand, 1846. Schrader, S., S.  Smith, S.  Olsen, and M.  Buzon. ‘Symbolic equids and Kushite state formation: A horse burial at Tombos.’ Antiquity, 92, 362 (2018). Serels, Steven. ‘Food insecurity and political instability in the Southern Red Sea Region during the ‘Little Ice Age,’ 1650–1840,’ in Famines during the ‘Little Ice Age’ (1300–1800), eds. Dominik Collet and Maximilian Schuh. New York: Springer Science, 2017. Vallet, Éric. L’Arabie Marchande: État et commerce sous les Sultans Rasulids du Yémen (628–858/1229–145). Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010. Zeintara, S., C. T. Weyer and S. Lecollinet. ‘African horse sickness.’ Scientific and Technical Review of the Office International des Epizooties, 34, 2 (2015).

CHAPTER 6

The Donkey Trade of the Indian Ocean World in the Long Nineteenth Century William Gervase Clarence-Smith

Introduction Like other chapters in this collection, the story of the nineteenth-century donkey trade in the Indian Ocean World (IOW) in part reflects the impact of the ‘animal turn’ since the 1970s, which has led historians to stress the need to recover histories of non-human animals.1 Unfortunately, the banal ubiquity of the humble and often despised donkey makes it more difficult to recover this story than that of more prestigious and expensive horses and mules. Moreover, the region has been somewhat neglected in the few global accounts of donkeys that exist, or has been approached from the perspective of smaller, sometimes continentally defined, geographical units.2 This chapter thus attempts to approach the history of donkeys within the regional framework of the IOW. 1  For a seminal text, see: Richard W.  Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). 2  For insightful overviews, see: Anthony A. Dent, Donkey: The story of the ass, from East to West (London: George G.  Harrap, 1972); Denis Fielding and Patrick Krause, Donkeys

W. G. Clarence-Smith (*) School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, London, UK © The Author(s) 2020 M. Chaiklin et al. (eds.), Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42595-1_6

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While never on a large scale in comparative terms, exchanges of donkeys in the region serve to illuminate various facets of the IOW’s history. This is an exemplar of trades that were mainly regional in nature. Moreover, the business brings out tensions between ecological, economic, and cultural explanations for human choices in the field of material life. Global historians in the past have concentrated on the IOW’s trade with the West, but they are now increasingly considering commerce within the region itself. The story of the donkey trade thus resonates with a wider concern with long neglected ‘South-South’ links between different parts of the ‘Global South.’ That said, a newly assertive West in the long nineteenth century tended to set the rules of the game for regional trade. Furthermore, donkeys began to enter the IOW from beyond its boundaries in this period, whether for specialized breeding purposes, or in response to military crises. Exports to markets outside the region remained quite exceptional, however. To some degree, the IOW trade in donkeys fits the thesis that ecological variation has been the main driver of commerce in human history. Many of these animals were bred in dry or high zones in the northwest quadrant of the ocean basin, stretching from north-eastern Africa to north-western India. It was harder to raise animals in wetter and hotter climates, which favoured disease, and which may have negatively affected fertility. As a result, animals tended to move from surplus to deficit zones. A surge in the donkey trade in the long nineteenth century, roughly from the 1770s to 1913, can be explained as reflecting a wider regional economic boom, which stimulated demand. Donkeys carried riders and packs, and were increasingly harnessed to carts, and even to wagons. Indeed, they sometimes came to power light rail systems. They turned whims in mines and quarries, and transported ores from the rock-face. They ploughed, threshed, and powered irrigation facilities and mills. Their meat, milk, dung, hides, hoofs, and bones had varying commercial value. And yet, the donkey trade underlines the need for economic and ecological historians to give due weight to culture. Eating donkeys was taboo in most religious systems, negatively affecting the economics of breeding and owning the animals. Han Chinese, together with some Animists and Hindu outcastes, were unusual in partaking of donkey flesh. Even the possession of the beasts came to be restricted to lower Hindu castes and outcastes, as the donkey gradually became increasingly impure for the (London: Macmillan Education, 1998); Jill Bough, Donkey (London: Reaktion Books, 2011).

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twice-born. Southeast Asia, inheriting many Hindu cultural features, was an almost donkey-free zone, as was Japan, possibly because of Shinto notions of purity, although both of these stories require further research. In any event, donkeys exemplify the need to approach animals as part of the cultural life of the region, as well as reflecting evolving ecological and economic realities.

Sources in Relation to Types of Donkey Although a trade in donkeys in the region goes back at least to the second millennium BCE, Hittite sources, baked hard by fire on clay tablets, are unusually detailed.3 For later historical ages, transactions in common donkeys were poorly recorded, if at all. These mousy little creatures multiplied easily without human intervention, and often changed hands in small lots, and at very low prices. Moreover, they were either sold locally, or driven overland for short distances for sale. The ‘invisibility’ of the trade in common donkeys is encapsulated in a popular Islamic story about Nasreddin, a legendary Sufi teacher, who may have lived in Anatolia in the thirteenth century CE. He openly admitted to smuggling goods daily, but officials could never catch him out. Years later, Nasreddin explained that he had been smuggling donkeys, and that customs officials had not noticed that he returned every evening on foot.4 To be sure, military commanders sometimes gathered large numbers of donkeys from a wide area, for purposes of logistics, but even then donkeys were less well-documented than more valuable animals, such as mules and horses. The Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902 is a classic case of differential information being available about military animals. There is no specific number for the donkeys mobilized by the British in this conflict, as mules and donkeys were lumped together at just over 150,000 head.5 Figures for donkeys remaining in British military hands in 1902, at the end of the war, are contradictory, ranging from nearly 8000 to about 13,000.6  O. R. Gurney, The Hittites, 4th ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 84–5.  N. Hanif, Biographical Encyclopaedia of Sufis: Central Asia and Middle East (New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2002), 334–5. 5  Graham Winton, ‘Theirs not to reason why’: Horsing the British army, 1875–1925 (Solihull: Helion, 2013), 104; Bough, Donkey, 113. 6  Winton, ‘Theirs nor to reason why,’ 92–3; L. S. Amery, The Times History of the War in South Africa, 1899–1902, IV (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, & Co, 1900–1909), 419. 3 4

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The trade generated better sources when valuable donkeys were transacted, especially the large white beast that was considerably more expensive than the common type. This was because ‘large whites’ served as mounts for elite figures, and were traditionally progenitors of mules in the IOW.  According to prevailing sexist norms, jacks (male donkeys) were considered much more important for successful breeding than the mares with which they were mated. Indeed, a good jack for mule production might be worth as much as a fine horse. Hinnies, the product of a jenny (female donkey) and a stallion, were seemingly rarely bred outside the Mediterranean Basin and North China. In addition, transporting live donkeys by sea was somewhat better recorded than moving them by land. The distances were often greater than those involved in overland trade, and governments taxed the business more effectively. Moreover, transport by sea involved many of the same practical difficulties as the maritime commerce in slaves. Greater amounts of water and food had to be carried than usual, and larger crews were required, sometimes with skilled grooms to hand. Indeed, sailing ships bringing slaves into the Gulf might then transport live animals out of the zone.7

The Spread of Donkeys Across the IOW: Ecological Factors DNA analysis indicates that the domestication of the donkey occurred around 5000 BCE, somewhere in north-eastern Africa. The parent stock was a mix of Nubian and Somali wild asses. Contrary to what was earlier asserted by some scholars, there was no genetic contribution from wild Asian half-asses, notably the onagers of the Middle East.8 Wild asses did not thrive in humid and cold conditions, but patient breeding might overcome this problem for their domesticated cousins. Indeed, Ireland famously became a donkey stronghold in the nineteenth century.9 They gradually spread out across much of the IOW, albeit especially to drier and higher areas. Thus, there were about 1.5 million 7  Ahmad M.  Abu-Hakima, The Modern History of Kuwait, 1750–1965 (London: Luzac, 1983), 103, 105. 8  Albano Beja-Pereira, Philip R. England, Nuno Ferrand, Steve Jordan, Amel O. Bakhiet, Mohammed A.  Abdalla, Marjan Mashkour, Jordi Jordana, Pierre Taberlet, and Gordon Luikart, ‘African origins of the domestic donkey,’ Science, 304, 18 (2004). 9  Averil Swinfen, The Irish Donkey, 3rd ed. (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2004).

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donkeys in British India in 1915, clustered in the northwest, where rainfall is lower.10 Disease was a related barrier to the spread of donkeys, especially in Africa. African Horse Sickness, a virus transmitted by Culicoides midges and specific to equids, was enzootic in most of Sub-Saharan Africa. Equine piroplasmosis was another tropical scourge, albeit not one specific to Africa. Domesticated mammals in the continent further suffered uniquely from trypanosome parasites, of the type borne by tsetse flies. These three diseases together have been held responsible for the failure of donkeys to penetrate into southern Africa overland, unlike cattle, goats, and sheep.11 Equids in much of the rest of the IOW suffered from Trypanosoma evansi (surra), parasites that were spread by non-tsetse blood-sucking flies.12 Over time, donkey populations developed a degree of tolerance to various diseases, although the extent of this resistance remains hotly debated.13 While donkeys drifted overland in processes unrecorded for posterity, they were sometimes brought to new areas across bodies of water. Asian seafarers probably introduced them into parts of coastal East Africa at an uncertain date. European sailors definitely did so in South Africa and the Mascarene Islands from the seventeenth century.14 Similarly, European ships took the animals to Australia from the late eighteenth century.15

The Distribution of Donkeys: Cultural Constraints The uneven distribution of donkeys also reflected cultural attitudes, which were sometimes drawn from religious texts. For high-caste Hindus and Jains, donkeys were associated with ritually impure social groups. Ownership was thus typically concentrated among Muslims and Dalit 10  B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Africa, Asia and Oceania, 1750–1993 (London: Macmillan, 1998), 289. 11  Peter Mitchell, ‘Why the donkey did not go south: Disease as a constraint on the spread of Equus asinus into southern Africa,’ African Archaeological Review, 34, (2017). 12  William G.  Clarence-Smith, ‘Diseases of equids in Southeast Asia c.1800–c.1945: Apocalypse or progress,’ in Healing the Herds: Disease, livestock economies, and the globalization of veterinary medicine, eds. Karen Brown and Daniel Gilfoyle (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 129–45. 13  Fielding and Krause, Donkeys. 14  Roger Blench, ‘The history and spread of donkeys in Africa,’ in Donkeys, people and development: A resourcebook of the Animal Traction Network for Eastern and Southern Africa (ATNESA), eds. P. Starkey and D. Fielding (Wageningen: CTA, 2000), 22–30. 15  Jill Bough, ‘Value to Vermin: The donkey in Australia’ (Unpublished PhD diss., University of Newcastle (Australia), 2008).

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non-caste Hindus. Indeed, for some pariah groups of Hindus, donkeys were the only animals that they could possess.16 A religiously informed distaste for donkeys may have contributed to the extreme rarity of donkeys in Southeast Asia. Horses abounded in the northern mountains bordering China, and in the dry south-eastern islands close to Australia, so that ecological reasons cannot by themselves explain the absence of donkeys. Rather, there was a powerful Hindu substratum of beliefs in both Theravada Buddhism and Islam. As neither religion reproduced the Hindu caste system, however, there was no social niche for owners of donkeys.17 The case of Japan is equally intriguing, and has also been little investigated. Donkeys were imported by sea into Japan from as early as the end of the sixth century, but they never became established there, even though horses thrived.18 Japan appropriated large swathes of its culture from China, where donkeys and mules were crucial to life in the northern heartlands, and yet did not choose to adopt these two animals. Moreover, donkeys were prestigious in neighbouring Korea, acting as the mounts of choice of aristocrats and literati from the late fourteenth century.19 It is thus possible that Japanese Shinto cults, with their stress on purity and indigeneity, may have swung opinion against the beasts. North European cultural prejudices similarly constrained the recourse to donkeys in Southern Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Natural conditions were relatively good in these areas. Donkeys thus multiplied, and even became feral in certain places. And yet, they failed to achieve the economic prominence that such favourable circumstances might have

16  John L. Kipling, Beast and Man in India: A popular sketch of Indian animals in their relation with people (London: Macmillan, 1921): 76–83, 203; Dent, Donkey, 157. 17  William G. Clarence-Smith, ‘Horse breeding in Mainland Southeast Asia and its borderlands,’ in Smallholders and Stockbreeders: Histories of foodcrop and livestock farming in Southeast Asia, eds. Peter Boomgaard and David Henley (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004), 189–210. 18  Martha Chaiklin, personal communication, 6 February 2018; B. Ambros, email, 16 May 2013; Angela Schottenhammer, ‘Horses in late imperial China and maritime East Asia: An introduction into trade, distribution, and other aspects (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries),’ in Pferde in Asien: Geschichte, Handel und Kultur, eds. Bert G.  Fragner, Ralph Kauz, Roderich Ptak, and Angela Schottenhammer (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2009), 248. 19  Owen Miller, email, 14 October 2018.

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warranted.20 Indeed, donkeys came to be exterminated as vermin in Australia and South Africa during the twentieth century.21

The Trade in Valuable Large White Donkeys In terms of the ‘South-South’ trade in the IOW, most is known about the commerce in prestigious large white donkeys, which were bred in parts of the Middle East and north-western India. These animals sold for much higher prices than the more numerous ordinary variety.22 ‘Large whites’ served both to engender mules, and to provide mounts for ulama, merchants, elite women, and non-Muslims.23 They were swift, but were said to stumble easily, and to be somewhat delicate.24 Females generally fetched

20  William G.  Clarence-Smith, ‘Mules in the “English world”: Cultural rejection versus practical utility,’ Gallery 8: Animals and empire exhibition (Animal History Museum, Los Angeles, California, 2014). 21  I.  L. Mason and J.P.  Maule, The Indigenous Livestock of Eastern and Southern Africa (Farnham Royal: Commonwealth Agricultural Bureau, 1960), 16; Thelma Gutsche, There was a Man: The life and times of Sir Arnold Theiler, K.C.M.G., of Onderstepoort (Cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1979), 357; Nancy J. Jacobs, ‘The great Bophuthatswana donkey massacre: Discourse on the ass and the politics of class and grass,’ The American Historical Review, 106, 2 (2001); Emmanuel Kreike, Deforestation and Reforestation in Namibia: The global consequences of local contradictions (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2010), 95–100; Jill Bough, ‘From value to vermin: a history of the donkey in Australia,’ Australian Zoologist, 33, 3 (2006); Bough, ‘Value to Vermin.’ 22  G.  W. Murray, Sons of Ishmael: A study of the Egyptian Bedouin (London: George Routledge, 1935), 101–2; Henry H.  Ayrout, Moeurs et coutûmes des fellahs (Paris: Payot, 1938), 61–2. 23  Charles Hamilton Smith, Horses: The equidae or genus equus of authors (Edinburgh: W. H. Lizars. 1841), 345; Vital Cuinet, Syrie, Liban, et Palestine: Géographie administrative, statistique, descriptive, et raisonnée, III (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1896), 47–8; Isabella L. Bishop [Bird], Journey in Persia and Kurdistan, including a summer in the Upper Karun, and a visit to the Nestorian rayahs, I (London: John Murray, 1891), 190–1; S. Sidney, The Book of the Horse (thorough-bred, half-bred, and cart-bred): Saddle and harness, British and foreign (London: Cassell & Co, 1893), 169; W. Tweedie, The Arabian Horse: His country and people (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1894), 159; J.C. McCoan, Egypt, 3rd ed. (New York: Peter Fenelon Collier, 1898), 321–2; F.S. Bodenheimer, Animal Life in Palestine: An introduction to the problems of animal ecology and zoogeography (Jerusalem: L.  Mayer, 1935), 128. 24  Anne Blunt, Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates (New York: Harper & Bros, 1879), 157; J. G. Wood, Bible Animals (London: Longmans, Green, & Co, 1892), 267.

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a higher price than males as mounts, because they were considered to bray less.25 DNA tests would be required to establish the origins of large white donkeys, if indeed there was a single origin. The existing evidence points to al-Ahsa [al-Hassa; al-Hasa], a cluster of oases in eastern Arabia.26 Across the Ottoman Empire, and notably in Upper Egypt and Anatolia, ‘large whites’ were called ‘Hassawi.’27 Many were raised in neighbouring parts of the central and northern Arabian Peninsula, notably the island of Bahrayn, Najd, and the Hijaz.28 The Ottoman authorities, extending their control over the eastern Gulf from 1871, mounted some of their gendarmes on donkeys, which were probably local ‘large whites.’29 Fine white donkeys were also at times called Shahri, or Shami (Syrian).30 The Damascus plain was reputed as one of the best sites to raise fine donkeys in the 1890s.31 Indeed, good Damascene animals of this kind were worth almost as much as the best horses in 1907.32 When the Ethiopian emperor charged the French former poet Arthur Rimbaud with importing superior jacks to breed mules in the late 1880s, it was to the French consul

 Blunt, Bedouin Tribes, 157.  Ibid.; Great Britain, A Handbook of Arabia, I (London: Admiralty, War Staff, Intelligence Division, 1916–17), 301; Ameen Rihani, Around the Coasts of Arabia (London: Constable, 1930), 265; K.S. Twitchell, Saudi Arabia, with an Account of the Development of its Natural Resources (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 22–3; F. S. Vidal, The Oasis of alHasa (Dhahran: Arabian American Oil Co., 1955), 171, 174, 186. 27  Tweedie, The Arabian Horse, 31; I. L. Mason, A World Dictionary of Livestock Breeds, Types, and Varieties, 2nd ed. (Farnham Royal: Commonwealth Agricultural Bureau, 1969), 2. 28  Vital Cuinet, La Turqie d’Asie: Géographie administrative, statistique, descriptive, et raisonnée de chaque province d’Asie-Mineure, III (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1890–1895), 47–8; J. G. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia (London: [no publisher indicated], 1908–1915), Appendix T, 10–11; Rihani, Around the Coasts, 265–6; Great Britain, Arabia (London: Foreign Office, Historical Section, 1920), 72; J.S. McCall, ‘Farm animals,’ in A text-book of Egyptian agriculture, II, eds. G.P. Foaden and F. Fletcher (Cairo, National Printing Department, 1910) 802–3. 29  Frederick Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf: The creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar (New York: Columbia University Press 1997), 84, 212 (n. 159). 30  For Shami, see: McCall, ‘Farm animals,’ 802–3; Bodenheimer, Animal Life in Palestine, 128; Xavier de Planhol, De la plaine pamphylienne aux lacs pisidiens: nomadisme et vie paysanne (Paris: Librairie Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1958), 167. For Shahri, Hind, see: Suleiman, email, 20 February 2018. 31  Cuinet, La Turqie d’Asie, 91, 420. 32  Gertrude Bell, Syria: The desert and the sown, 4th ed. (London: Heinemann, 1919), 146. 25 26

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in Beirut that Rimbaud turned for help.33 These Shami donkeys also provided a rare example of exports to the West in the late nineteenth century, where they were employed as ladies’ mounts, as well as for breeding purposes.34 ‘Large whites’ were raised in other places in the IOW. Sennar [Sannar], astride the Blue Nile in the Sudan, was a reputed centre.35 In non-Arab lands, the Uzbek metropolis of Bukhara was famous for these animals, as was Merv in Türkmenistan.36 In northwestern India, there were Halar or Jhalavad donkeys in Kathiawar [Saurashtra], Gujarat, and similar types in parts of Baluchistan.37 The East African coasts and islands also produced a few.38 The inhabitants of the Mossuril Peninsula, opposite Mozambique Island, raised some at the dawn of the nineteenth century, when the Portuguese sent a few as gifts to Brazil.39 There was overland trade in ‘large whites.’ They were the chief animals of the despised Solubba (Slayb) ‘Gypsies,’ who ranged across the central and northern deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, and sold some of their fine donkeys to Bedouins and to sedentary peoples beyond the desert.40 From Sennar in the Sudan, similar animals were driven to Ethiopia, largely to engender mules.41 Over time, the Sennar type of donkey also came to be 33  Arthur Rimbaud, Correspondance, ed. Jean-Jacques Lefrère (Paris: Fayard, 2007), 538, 555. 34  Dent, Donkey, 131. 35  Frederick J. Simoons, Northwest Ethiopia: Peoples and economy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), 130. 36  O.  Olufsen, The Emir of Bokhara and his Country: Journeys and studies in Bokhara (London: William Heinemann, 1911), 362; Mason, A World Dictionary, 2–3. 37  J. H. B. Hallen, Horse and Mule Breeding Operations in India, 1880 (Simla: Government Central Branch Press, 1880), 11; E. H. Aitken, Gazetteer of the Province of Sind, volume A (Karachi: Printed for the Government, 1907), 252; George Watt, The Commercial Products of India, abridged ed. (London: John Murray, 1908), 751. 38  Heinrich Schnee, Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon, I (Leipzig: Quelle und Meyer, 1920), 586; Karin Pallaver, ‘Donkeys, oxen and elephants: In search for an alternative to human porters in nineteenth-century Tanzania,’ Africa: Rivista trimestrale di studi e documentazione dell’Istituto italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 65, 1–4: (2010) 296. 39  Henry Salt, A Voyage to Abyssinia, and travels into the interior of that country, executed under the orders of the British government, in the years 1809 and 1810, in which are included, an account of the Portuguese settlements on the east coast of Africa (Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1816), 73. 40  W.B. Seabrook, Adventures in Arabia, among the Bedouins, Druses, whirling dervishes, and Yezidee devil-worshippers (London: George G. Harrap & Co. 1928), 51. 41  Simoons, Northwest Ethiopia, 130.

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raised in Ethiopia itself, but without completely ending imports.42 Similarly, a few costly ‘Bokharan asses’ were sent by land to Afghanistan in the 1890s, again for the purpose of breeding mules.43 However, the ‘Bokharan’ jacks that were sent to British establishments in Punjab to engender mules seem to have arrived by sea, together with their more numerous companions from the Gulf.44 Indeed, the Arabian side of the Gulf remained the chief centre for significant maritime exports of ‘large whites.’ Many crossed the Gulf to Persia and Iraq.45 Going south, they transited through the port of Masqat, in ‘Uman.46 Confusingly, they were then called ‘Muscat asses’ around the Indian Ocean, and even as far away as the Maghrib.47 The East African coastal zone was a small but fairly constant outlet for ‘large whites’ from the Gulf, mainly for use as mounts.48 The sultans of Zanzibar themselves kept ‘large and graceful asses of Muscat’ as riding animals for their family.49 On one occasion, Sultan Barghash received a fine Bahrayni donkey as a present from an Arab from Lingeh, on the

42  Bernard Faye, Éleveurs d’Éthiopie (Paris: Karthala, 1990), 33; Alemayehu Lemma, ‘Case Studies of Reproductive Activity of Equines in Relation to Environmental Factors in Central Ethiopia’ (Unpublished PhD diss., Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, 2004), 10. 43  Fayz Muhammad Katib Hazarah, The History of Afghanistan: Fayz Muhammad Kâtib Hazârah’s Sirâj al-tawârikh, trans. and ed. R.D. McChesney and M.M. Khorrami, (Leiden: Brill 2013–2016), vol. III: 949, 1036–7, 1195; vol. IV: 399. 44  Hallen, Horse and Mule, 11–12. 45  William F.  Ainsworth, The River Karun: An opening to British commerce (London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1890), 194; Vidal, The Oasis, 172; Willem Floor, Agriculture in Qajar Iran (Washington (DC): Mage Publishers, 2003), 554; Dionisius A. Agius, Seafaring in the Arabian Gulf and Oman: The people of the dhow (London: Kegan Paul, 2005), 180. 46  Robert G.  Landen, Oman since 1856 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 147; R. J. Barendse, ‘Reflections on the Arabian Seas in the eighteenth century,’ Itinerario, 25, 1, (2001) 30. 47  Mason, A World Dictionary, 3–4; Frederick E.  Zeuner, A History of Domesticated Animals (London: Hutchinson, 1963), 378; Bianca Haussner, ‘The importance of working donkeys: The case of Ethiopia,’ (Unpublished MA diss., Humboldt University Berlin, 2005), 12. 48  Ch. Guillain, Documents sur l’histoire, la géographie et le commerce de l’Afrique orientale (Paris: A. Bertrand, 1856–57), 328; C. E. B. Russell, General Rigby, Zanzibar, and the Slave Trade (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1935), 338; C.  S. Nicholls, The Swahili Coast: Politics, diplomacy and trade on the East African littoral, 1798–1856 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971), 352. 49  Zeuner, A History of Domesticated Animals, 378.

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Persian side of the Gulf.50 Zanzibar thus became the chief market in the nineteenth century, re-exporting them up and down the coast, and into the interior.51 In the 1850s, a ‘Muscat ass’ cost about three times as much as a local donkey in Zanzibar.52 By 1905, the price differential had widened considerably, and a ‘Muscat ass’ was worth as much as a horse.53 Mule breeding in East Africa was only occasionally attempted, but Arab and Swahili entrepreneurs crossed ‘large whites’ with common donkeys, in an effort to upgrade the local breed of donkey.54 Europeans in the Mascarenes initially imported many ‘Muscat asses.’55 The ‘imam de Mascate’ sent some good specimens as gifts to the French governor of the Île de France [Mauritius] in 1800–03.56 At the end of the 1810s, a planter on Bourbon [Réunion] acquired a ‘Muscat ass’ to make mules. This cost him some 250 piastres, at a time when a fine horse was worth 200–400.57 Indeed, the French on Réunion at the time seem to have viewed these donkeys chiefly as generators of mules.58 In contrast, the British in Mauritius saw ‘large whites’ mainly as riding animals. A number of such animals, standing at up to 14 hands, arrived from Bushire on the Persian coast of the Gulf in 1859.59 Over time, attempts to breed

50  Robert N.  Lyne, Zanzibar in Contemporary Times (London: Hurst & Blackett 1905), 102. 51  Richard F. Burton, ‘The lake regions of Central Equatorial Africa, with notices of the Lunar Mountains and the sources of the White Nile,’ Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 29, (1859), 393; Oscar Baumann, Durch Massailand zur Nilquelle: Reisen und forschungen der Massai-Expedition des Deutschen antisklaverei-komite in den jahren 1891–1893 (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer 1894), 104, 251, Lyne, Zanzibar, 309. 52  Burton, ‘Lake regions,’ 393; Richard F. Burton, The Lake Regions of Central Africa: A picture of exploration (New York: Harper Bros, 1860), 116, 153, 184, 409. 53  Lyne, Zanzibar, 220. 54  Burton, ‘Lake regions,’ 393; Burton, Lake Regions, 409. 55  Landen, Oman since 1856, 147; Charles J. Boyle, Far Away, or Sketches of Scenery and Society in Mauritius (London: Chapman and Hall, 1867), 260. 56  M. J. Milbert, Voyage pittoresque à l’Île-de-France, au Cap de Bonne-Espérance, et à l’île de Ténériffe, II (Paris: A. Nepveu, 1812), 249. 57  Auguste Billiard, Voyage aux colonies orientales, ou lettres écrites des Îles de France et de Bourbon pendant les années 1817, 1818, 1819, et 1820 (Paris: Librairie Française de l’Advocat, 1822), 113, 151. 58  Michel Betting de Lancastel, Statistique de l’île de Bourbon (Saint Denis: Imprimerie de Lahuppe, 1827), 70. 59  T.  E. Palmer and G.T.  Bradshaw, The Mauritian Register, Historical, Official, and Commercial (Port-Louis: L. Channell, 1859), lxvi.

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mules locally were given up, as large numbers poured in from abroad, notably dark mules from the River Plate in South America.60 Europeans elsewhere in Southern Africa at first experimented with ‘large whites’ for breeding purposes, though they turned to dark jacks over time. Thus, in the 1900s, the Portuguese authorities imported ‘Muscat asses’ to their part of Manicaland in Mozambique, with the intention of breeding mules or hinnies for use in higher zones.61 In South Africa, however, dark Spanish jacks predominated from the outset. Similarly, when Australians began to experiment with mule breeding from the mid-nineteenth century, they initially placed the emphasis on ‘large whites’ arriving by sea. Gulf jacks were thus the staple of early Australian trials with breeding mules.62 In 1866, some donkeys, said to be from Kabul in Afghanistan, arrived for mule breeding, although they ended up in transport duties in the north.63 A similar pattern emerged from British imports of ‘Muscat asses’ into India from the mid-nineteenth century, where they served exclusively for the purposes of mule breeding. The British brought donkeys of the Hassawi type by sea to Punjab, which was the centre of mule breeding in the subcontinent. Over time, however, they switched to dark European jacks.64 The British sent on two stud jacks to the Shan States of Burma in the 1870s, to improve locally bred mules there.65 These ‘Persian’ jacks had failed by the 1900s, however, as they ‘did not prove popular.’66 The reasons for this unpopularity were not given, but it may be that local people were accustomed to the large dark Chinese jacks that were the staple of mule breeding in Yunnan, where donkeys to make mules had come from northern China since at least Ming times.67 Yunnanese were still importing such jacks from Shaanxi at great cost around 1900, and seem not to have 60  William G. Clarence-Smith, ‘Cape to Siberia: The Indian Ocean and China Sea trade in equids,’ in Maritime empires: British imperial maritime trade in the nineteenth century, eds. David Killingray, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), 57–60. 61  A. Freire de Andrade, Relatórios sobre Moçambique, IV (Lourenço Marques: Imprensa Nacional, 1907–1910), 255. 62  A. Despeissis, The Nor’-West and tropical North (Perth: Government Printer, 1921), 119. 63  Bough, ‘Value to Vermin,’ 164–5. 64  Hallen, Horse and Mule Breeding, 11; Tweedie, The Arabian Horse, 31. 65  Hallen, Horse and Mule Breeding, 14. 66  India, Imperial Gazetteer of India, XXII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907–1909), 258. 67  Andrea Janku, email, 26 April 2017.

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bred them in the area.68 By the 1930s, however, similar donkeys may have been locally raised.69 The question of the colour and type of jack employed for mule-­breeding might seem to be arcane, but it stemmed from both cultural attitudes and practical factors. The ancient popularity of large white donkeys as elite riding animals in Islamic lands spilled over into a preference for white or light-coloured mules, possibly reinforced by the notion that white was an auspicious colour. Moreover, the dual function of large white jacks, as both riding animals and progenitors of mules, was economically flexible. In contrast, Western and Chinese breeders employed specialized dark jacks, which served no other useful purpose than to produce larger and stronger mules than the light-coloured beasts of the IOW. Moreover, dark mules offered less of a target for snipers at night in times of war.

Imports of Valuable Western Dark Jacks for Mule Breeding Purposes The main exception to the ‘South-South’ nature of the Indian Ocean donkey trade therefore came to lie in growing maritime imports of dark Western jacks. The most renowned breed was the long-haired Baudet du Poitou, from west-central France. Other favourites originated in León, Catalonia, Apulia, Sicily, Malta, and Cyprus. In contrast, light-coloured jacks, such as those from Andalusia and Tuscany, lost favour in the nineteenth century. In the course of the century, US breeders also melded various European strains into the largest dark donkey of them all, the celebrated American Mammoth.70 China also had half a dozen reputed breeds of large dark donkeys for the production of both mules and hinnies, which were raised in the northern plains.71

68  H. R. Davies, Yün-Nan, the link between India and the Yangtze (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), 121. 69  Cornelius Osgood, Village Life in Old China: A community study of Kao Yao, Yünnan, (New York: Ronald Press Co., 1963), 173. 70  W. B. Tegetmeier and C. L. Sutherland, Horses, Asses, Zebras, Mules, and Mule Breeding (London: Horace Cox. 1895); L.W. Knight, The Breeding and Rearing of Jacks, Jennets and Mules (Nashville: The Cumberland Press, 1902). 71  Eric Teichman, Travels of a Consular Officer in North-West China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), 91; Ralph W. Phillips, Ray G. Johnson, and Raymond T. Moyer, The Livestock of China (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1945), 34–5;

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From the late eighteenth century, George Washington, ‘the father of the American mule,’ sparked off a global spending spree on dark jacks.72 By around 1900, speculation had pushed up prices to extraordinary levels, whereas mares employed in mule breeding generally remained of a passable and fairly cheap variety. As mules were sterile, it was necessary to begin the process anew at every generation. Breeders could set up a parallel operation, producing high quality donkeys. However, some mule-­ breeders simply purchased jacks as they needed them.73 Western techniques of mule-breeding gained little traction in the Middle East, where the prestige of large white donkeys, and their light-­ coloured mule offspring, remained high. Thus, on urban markets in Greater Syria in 1875, a superior ‘white ass’ might sell for 800 to 1000 dollars, whereas a fine black Cypriot jack would fetch only around 200, and a common donkey as little as 4.74 Europeans were thus the main importers of Western jacks for mule-­ breeding. In 1822, ‘a good Spanish jackass’ was already selling for more than a fine horse in Cape Town.75 In the 1860s, imports into both the Cape and Natal picked up, including Poitou jacks.76 By the late nineteenth century, however, the Poitou breed was deemed to engender mules unsuitable for local conditions, whereas those from Catalonia, Cyprus, and the United States were all the rage.77 Somewhat surprisingly, South Africa did not become self-sufficient in mules, which continued to be imported from South America, where they were bred with dark Spanish jacks. Occasional imports of Western donkeys into eastern Africa were intended both to improve local donkey types and to engender mules. Thus, Poitou jacks were brought to Réunion in mid-century for

H.  Epstein, Domestic Animals of China (Farnham Royal: Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux, 1969), 113–15. 72  Ron Chernow, Washington: A life (New York: Penguin, 2010), 183–4. 73  Tegetmeier and Sutherland, Horses, Asses, Zebras; Knight, The Breeding and Rearing. 74  Henry J.  Van-Lennep, Bible Lands: Their modern customs and manners, illustrative of scripture, (London: John Murray, 1875), 224, 230, 232. 75  William W.  Bird, State of the Cape of Good Hope in 1822 (London: John Murray, 1823), 99. 76  Tegetmeier and Sutherland, Horses, Asses, Zebras, 159–60. 77  Robert Wallace, Farming Industries of Cape Colony (London: King, 1896), 314–18; Tegetmeier and Sutherland, Horses, Asses, Zebras, 141; Great Britain, Reports on Horse, Mule and Donkey Breeding, 1901 and 1917 (London: Colonial Office, 1917); Gutsche, There was a Man, 189.

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mule-breeding.78 In German East Africa, Apulian jacks from Southern Italy were crossed with local donkeys.79 When the British brought Cypriot donkeys to Uganda in around 1900, it was to upgrade local donkeys.80 Similarly, in 1901, Joseph Gallieni, the French governor, ordered imports of 24 jacks and 266 jennies into recently-conquered Madagascar.81 Given this sex-ratio, the purpose was presumably to breed donkeys locally, albeit perhaps with the ulterior motive of fostering mule-breeding. The British authorities in India imported increasing numbers of dark Western jacks for mule-breeding, which gradually supplanted the older contingents of ‘large whites.’ By 1892, there were 312 stud jacks on the official register of the Civil Veterinary Department, of which 182 were from Europe, 100 from the Middle East and Central Asia, and 30 locally bred. Every Western origin was tried prior to the First World War, and some jacks were imported from East Africa and China. Given the spiralling costs of acquiring prize animals, and problems of adjustment to the local environment, the authorities also crossed imported jacks with local jennies, in an attempt to become self-sufficient in breeding jacks.82 In the nineteenth-century IOW, Australia tried hardest to achieve self-­ sufficiency in donkeys for mule breeding, with imported dark Western varieties replacing earlier ‘Masqati’ studs. Fine ‘Maltese asses’ had already arrived for this purpose in 1841.83 In 1866, one breeder acquired both a male and a female Spanish donkey, suggesting a precocious desire not to rely on imports.84 Declaring that ‘Muscat’ and ‘Persian’ donkeys engendered mules that were too small, Australians turned to Catalan and Kentucky sires, seeking to become self-sufficient in fine donkeys. They also experimented with putting jennies to local stallions to breed hinnies.85 Nevertheless, some imports of Catalan jacks for mule breeding continued at least into the 1930s.86  Louis Maillard, Notes sur l’île de la Réunion (Bourbon) (Paris: Dentu, 1862), 148.  Schnee Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon, I, 586. 80  Great Britain, Reports on Horse, 3. 81  Alfred Grandidier and Guillaume Grandidier, Histoire physique, naturelle et politique de Madagascar, IV (Paris: Hachette, 1928), 153. 82  India, Annual Administration Report of the Civil Veterinary Department (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1892–1911). 83  New Zealand Gazette and Wellington Spectator, 10 November 1841. 84  The Queenslander, 15 September 1866. 85  Despeissis, The Nor’-West, 118–20. 86  Morning Bulletin (Rockhampton), 21 December 1934. 78 79

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European mule breeders thus turned away from local ‘large white’ sires, in favour of Western breeds of dark jacks. Although this commerce involved a small number of animals, the costs could be extremely high. Indeed, a kind of ‘mania’ for dark jacks seized the world around 1900, with prices probably far exceeding rational expectations of economic returns. Local breeders generally resisted the trend towards large dark jacks, which was probably wise in economic terms.

Maritime Imports of Common Donkeys into Africa The regional commerce in common animals can best be grasped when they were transported in ships, as in the case of the Mascarene Islands. In the late eighteenth century, planters generally preferred small local donkeys to horses.87 There were not enough bred on the islands, however, leading Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to call for more imports to lessen the burden of labour imposed on slaves.88 Mascarene imports probably grew in the first half of the nineteenth century, as the abolition of slavery led to labour shortages, while the rapidly unfolding sugar boom left little land and labour available for pastoral enterprises.89 Mauritian imports of donkeys from the Gulf seem to have picked up from the late 1830s, following the British ending of slavery, although figures were unfortunately not recorded separately from those of mules. Most of these animals appear to have been small common donkeys, and they were essentially purchased for purposes of transportation.90 Between 1861 and 1910, Mauritius imported a total of almost 4000 donkeys, mainly from the Gulf, with a few from East Africa, India, and Argentina.91 In 1904, a cargo of donkeys even arrived from South Australia.92 People in Mauritius were using donkeys less for riding and

 Milbert, Voyage pittoresque, II, 154–6, 249.  Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Journey to Mauritius (Oxford: Signal Books 2002), 147. 89  James Backhouse, A Narrative of a Visit to the Mauritius and South Africa, I (Hamilton: Adams, 1844), 46; M. G. Imhaus, Île de la Réunion: Notice sur les principales productions naturelles et fabriquées de cette île (Paris: Imprimerie de E. Donnaud, 1862), 10–11, 58. 90  Palmer and Bradshaw, The Mauritian Register, lxvi. 91  My calculation from Blue Book(s) for the Colony of Mauritius (1858–1958; 1945–, annual). 92  The Sydney Mail, 30 March 1904; Bough, ‘Value to vermin,’ 180. 87 88

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pack by this time, and more to pull carts.93 That said, mules, largely from South America, and small horses from many places, came to dominate the island’s imports of equids in this period.94 Disease sharply reduced Mascarene demand for equids after the turn of the century. An epizootic of surra was introduced from India, and it decimated animals on Mauritius between 1901 and 1903. Rather than financing fresh imports of animals, the British authorities provided substantial loans for the purchase of light tramways and steam traction engines. This resulted from strong settler lobbying, combined with a belief, probably misplaced in this case, in the superiority of machines over animals.95 The East African coastal zone generally obtained common donkeys in dhows from ports to the north.96 Somali ports, also exporting donkeys to the Arabian Peninsula, were especially prominent from early in the century.97 In the 1890s and 1900s, a few hundred donkeys still came south every year from these origins.98 On the Somali coast, they sold for around 8–10 Maria Theresa dollars each in the 1890s, whereas little Somali ponies fetched 10–20.99 The people of Lamu Island, in northern Kenya, also sent a few donkeys to neighbouring islands, and to the port of Mombasa.100 These animals played a modest and under-investigated role in the development of clove plantations on the offshore islands of Zanzibar and

93  Mrs. Bartrum, Recollections of Seven Years’ Residence at the Mauritius, or Isle de France, by a lady (London: James Cawthorn, 1830), 124–5; Backhouse, Narrative of a visit, I, 46; Palmer and Bradshaw, The Mauritian Register, lxvi; Boyle, Far Away, 260; Macmillan Allister, Mauritius Illustrated, Historical and Descriptive: Commercial and industrial facts, figures and resources (London: W. M. and L. Collingridge, 1914), 179. 94  Clarence-Smith, ‘Cape to Siberia,’ 57–60. 95  Macmillan, Mauritius Illustrated, 66, 380; Great Britain, Report of the Mauritius Royal Commission, 1909, London: HMSO, 1910), I, 10, 48–9; William K.  Storey, Science and Power in Colonial Mauritius (Rochester (NY): University of Rochester Press, 1997), 95. 96  Guillain, Documents sur l’histoire, iii, 306; Burton 1859: 393. 97  William Milburn, Oriental Commerce, vol. 1 (London: Black, Parry, & Co., 1813), 68. 98  Luigi R.  Bricchetti, Somalia e Benadir: Viaggio di esplorazione nell’Africa Orientale (Milan: Carlo Aliprandi, 1899), 588; Gustavo Chiesi, La Colonizzazione Europea nell’Est Africa: Italia, Inghilterra, Germania (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1909), 350; Richard Pankhurst, An Introduction to the Economic History of Ethiopia, from early times to 1800 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1961), 440–3. 99  Bricchetti, Somalia e Benadir, 587–8. 100  Patricia W.  Romero, Lamu: History, society, and family in an East African port city (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 145.

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Pemba.101 Donkeys transported cloves by both pack and cart.102 Indeed, one of the richest South Asian magnates of Zanzibar, Tharia Topan, began his career by touring plantations with a donkey to purchase cloves from planters.103 Much larger numbers of donkeys were transported by sea for military operations. In 1888, the Italians purchased several thousand of them in Aden, for their expedition to take Massawa in Eritrea.104 Similarly, South Africa sent donkeys for British military operations in German East Africa in the First World War, although they nearly all died of disease. Of some 24,000 donkeys dispatched to East Africa in January 1916, only 1402 remained alive in October of the same year. That said, they fared marginally better than the horses and mules that accompanied them.105 Unusually, military considerations even prompted imports of large numbers of donkeys from Europe in the late 1890s. The British were gearing up to fight the Second Anglo-Boer War, as maladies of both bovids and equids wracked Southern Africa.106 The army therefore imported several thousand donkeys by sea, mainly from Ireland, for purposes of logistics. As so often with donkeys, no precise figures were given.107 Disease, poor care, and military operations took a heavy toll on these beasts, necessitating further imports, although at this stage donkeys appear to have been mainly purchased locally.108

 Lyne, Zanzibar, 248.  Erik Gilbert, Dhows and the Colonial Economy of Zanzibar, 1860–1970 (Oxford: James Currey, 2004), 89. 103  Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 139. 104  Rimbaud, Correspondance, 584. 105  G.  Tylden, Horses and Saddlery: An account of the animals used by the British and Commonwealth armies from the seventeenth century to the present day, with a description of their equipment (London: J. A. Allen & Co. 1980), 62–3. 106  Dent, Donkey, 124; Anthony Hocking, Kaias and Cocopans: The story of mining in South Africa’s Northern Cape (Johannesburg: Hollards, 1983), 52–4; Bruce Joubert, ‘An historical perspective on animal power use in South Africa’ (1995), at http://www.atnesa. org/sanat/Joubert-95-HistoryanimalpowerSouthAfrica.pdf [Accessed: 3 May 2012], 132, 136. 107  Freeman’s Journal, 18 July 1897, ‘The Irish donkey.’ 108  Sandra Swart, Riding High: Horses, humans, and history in South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2010), 104; Bough, Donkey, 113. 101 102

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Land-Based Trade in Common Donkeys Information becomes even sparser when turning to the overland trade in common donkeys. In South Africa, the animals certainly became more numerous in the nineteenth century, working in many sectors. The 1911 census for South Africa counted 336,710 donkeys.109 The diamond boom of the late 1860s, followed by the gold rush of the 1880s, led to surging demand for transport from Cape Town across the semi-arid Karoo, a terrain for which donkeys were well-adapted.110 Donkeys usually pulled light vehicles, such as two-wheeled Cape carts, but teams of 20 or more donkeys sometimes drew four-wheeled wagons, especially when oxen were decimated by disease in the 1890s.111 Donkeys became prominent in small mines and farms in arid parts of South Africa, in part to power water pumps.112 Encouraged by Christian missionaries, some Africans adopted donkeys to pull small carts.113 In 1904–05, in the disturbed conditions following the Second Anglo-Boer War, median prices of draught animals in the Transvaal were recorded as £10.5 for a donkey or an ox, compared to £22.5 for a horse, and £25 for a mule.114 As colonial occupation expanded, South Africa became a source of donkeys for surrounding territories. German South West Africa [Namibia] obtained some from the Cape, while Mozambique imported others from the Transvaal.115 British Central Africa probably also received most of its

109  South Africa, Official Year Book of the Union, and of Basutoland, Bechuanaland Protectorate, and Swaziland (Pretoria: Government Printing and Stationery Office, 1922), 496. 110  Wallace, Farming Industries, 316. 111  Ibid., 317; Dent, Donkey, 123–4; Gutsche, There was a Man, 105, 108, 131, 255; Tylden, Horses and Saddlery, 92–3; Joubert, ‘An historical perspective,’ 126, 132; Jacobs, ‘The great Bophuthatswana donkey massacre,’ 490; Phyllis Jowell and Adrienne Folb, Into kokerboom country: Namaqualand’s Jewish pioneers (Vlaeberg: Fernwood Books, 2004), 33. 112  Hocking, Kaias and Cocopans, 52–4, 63–4, 67; John Vince, Power before Steam (London: John Murray, 1985), 31; Swart, Riding High, 215; Bough, Donkey, 104. 113  Jacobs, ‘The great Bophuthatswana donkey massacre,’ 489; William Beinart, The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, livestock and the environment, 1770–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 274. 114  Kyle D. Kauffman, ‘Economic factors in the choice of an early form of capital: Draught animals in early twentieth-century South Africa,’ Applied Economics Letters, 7, 2 (2000), 70. 115  Schnee, Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon, I, 586; Andrade, Relatórios sobre Moçambique, I, Appendix, 18.

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donkeys from the south.116 High prices around 1900 reflected the exceptional mortality of cattle through disease at the time. In 1891, a donkey could be purchased for about £3.5 in Mashonaland, in modern Zimbabwe, whereas an ox was worth £7.5. At that time the price in the neighbouring Transvaal of a salted horse, that is one that had recovered from African Horse Sickness, was £60–80, while a salted mule fetched £20–30.117 In East Africa, donkeys predominated among transport animals, because the harsh disease environment limited numbers of other large domestic animals. In northern Kenya, donkeys were associated with the transport of maize meal.118 In the north of German East Africa in the 1880s, they typically carried soda from salt lakes to the coast.119 From 1897, the British bought Karamojong and Turkana donkeys as pack animals to supply their military columns operating in northern Kenya and Uganda.120 European explorers of East Africa purchased donkeys on the coast as pack and riding animals, even if they relied chiefly on porters.121 Burton and Speke preferred ‘large whites’ from the coast as mounts, but they had to transfer to small local donkeys when their more delicate large animals expired.122 The booming ivory and slave trades of the nineteenth century created a new demand for donkeys among Arab merchants, who liked to ride ‘large whites.’123 They also hung saddle-bags made of animal hide on

116  W.  G. L.  Randles, L’empire du Monomotapa, du XVe au XIXe siècle (Paris: Mouton, 1975), 46, 75. 117  Randolph H. L. Churchill, Men, Mines and Animals in South Africa, 3rd ed. (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, & Co., 1893), 192, 286. 118  David Anderson, Eroding the Commons: The politics of ecology in Baringa, Kenya, 1890–1963 (Oxford: James Currey, 2002), 150. 119  Helge Kjekshus, Ecology, Control and Economic Development in East African History: The case of Tanganyika 1850–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 94, 119. 120  Herbert H.  Austin, With Macdonald to Uganda: A narrative account of the Uganda Mutiny and Macdonald Expedition in the Uganda Protectorate and territories to the north (London: Edward Arnold, 1903), 169–70, 189, 197–202, 223–4. 121  Baumann, Durch Massailand, 7–11, 251; Lyne, Zanzibar, 25; C.  H. Stigand, To Abyssinia through an Unknown Land: An account of a journey through unexplored regions of British East Africa by Lake Rudolf to the kingdom of Menelek (London: Seeley & Co. Ltd., 1910), 22; Pallaver, ‘Donkeys, oxen and elephants,’ 296; Stuart Laing, Tippu Tip: Ivory, slavery, and discovery in the Scramble for Africa (Surbiton: Medina Publishing Ltd., 2017), passim. 122  Burton, Lake Regions, 27, 49, 51, 74–5, 128, 191, 195. 123  Baumann, Durch Massailand zur Nilquelle, 104.

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common pack donkeys, to carry some personal and valuable goods. Nevertheless, they employed porters to move elephant tusks.124 Nyamwezi entrepreneurs, living in what is now central Tanzania, thus took up donkey breeding and sales to service caravans penetrating ever deeper into the heart of Africa. Donkeys suffered greatly from disease and predators, so that there was much demand to replace lost animals by the time that caravans reached Nyamwezi territory.125 Some Nyamwezi farmers also sent donkeys for sale on the Mrima coast, where traders initially assembled their caravans.126 Transhumant cattle pastoralists had a longer tradition of breeding donkeys, and sometimes traded in them. The Maasai of the Rift Valley raised small donkeys as subsidiary stock, and women employed them to transport water, firewood, and household goods.127 At the southern end of their range, some Maasai both purchased donkeys from other local breeders, and sold them to Arab caravans.128 At the northern end of their range, other Maasai sold donkeys to highland farmers for transport and meat.129 The great Rinderpest epizootic of the 1890s, which devastated cattle herds, led famished Maasai to exchange donkeys for foodstuffs.130 In what are today north-western Kenya and north-eastern Uganda, other pastoralists kept and traded donkeys, notably the Samburu, Turkana, and

 Burton, Lake Regions, 192, 229, 241, 419.  Burton, ‘Lake regions,’ 393; Burton, Lake Regions, 192, 229, 241. 126  Guillain, Documents sur l’histoire, III, 328; Burton, Lake Regions, 299; Pallaver, ‘Donkeys, oxen and elephants,’ 296. 127  Fiona Marshall and Lior Weissbrod, ‘The consequences of women’s use of donkeys for pastoral flexibility: Maasai ethnoarchaeology,’ in Tracking Down the Past: Ethnohistory meets archaeozoology, eds. Gisela Grupe, George McGlynn, and Joris Peters (Rahden: Leidorf, 2009), 67, 71–2. 128  Burton Lake Regions, 216; J. F. D. Hill and J. P. Moffett, Tanganyika: A review of its resources and their development (Norwich: Government of Tanganyika, 1955), 574. 129  Priyanthi Fernando and Paul Starkey, ‘Donkeys and development: Socio-economic aspects of donkey use in Africa,’ in Donkeys, People and Development: A resourcebook of the Animal Traction Network for Eastern and Southern Africa (ATNESA), eds. Paul Starkey and Denis Fielding (Wageningen: CTA, 2000), 32, 35, 37. 130  Baumann, Durch Massailand, 16. 124 125

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Karamojong peoples.131 The commerce in these animals was reported to be especially ancient in Karamoja.132 Further north, there was a lively internal trade within the Somali zone, as some clans were reputed to breed better donkeys than others.133 Somali donkeys crossed overland into Kenya by the end of the nineteenth century, often passing through lands administered by Ethiopia, and facing quarantine on entering Kenya.134 There was also a market for these animals at Gildessa [Jaldessa] in Ethiopia, just inside the frontier with British Somaliland.135 Highland Ethiopia imported many donkeys, even though it also bred them for pack purposes.136 Harar, the capital of the Islamic region of eastern Ethiopia, was estimated to purchase 4300 donkeys a year in 1900, brought in from the surrounding Oromo lowlands.137 Observers at this time considered donkeys to be the main transport animals of the Oromo people.138 In southern Ethiopia, pack donkeys often carried coffee.139 Further north, pack donkeys, with other animals, had long brought slabs of salt from the Danakil Depression onto the Ethiopian Plateau, where the animals were frequently sold with their loads.140 131  Stigand, To Abyssinia, 59, 64, 80; H. Epstein, The Origin of the Domestic Animals of Africa, II (New York: Africana, 1971), 386–7; Paul Spencer, Nomads in Alliance: Symbiosis and growth among the Rendille and Samburu of Kenya (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 18; Anderson, Eroding the Commons, 97; Edward Paice, Tip and Run: The untold tragedy of the Great War in Africa (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007), 158. 132  Ben Knighton, The Vitality of Karamojong Religion: Dying tradition or living faith (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 30. 133  Bricchetti, Somalia e Benadir, 587–8. 134  Lotte Hughes, Moving the Maasai: A colonial misadventure (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 84–5. 135  Herbert Vivian, Abyssinia: Through the lion-land to the court of the Lion of Judah (London: C. Arthur Pearson Ltd., 1901), 96. 136  Earl of Mayo, [Dermot R. W. Bourke], Sport in Abyssinia, or the Mareb and the Tackazzee (London: John Murray, 1876), 26. 137  Richard Pankhurst, Economic History of Ethiopia, 1800–1935 (Addis Ababa: Haile Selassie I University Press, 1968), 411. 138  Pierre Mérab, [Petre Merabishvili], Impressions d’Éthiopie: l’Abyssinie sous Ménélik II, I (Paris: H. Libert, 1921), 117. 139  Hugues Le Roux, Ménélik et nous (Paris: Librairie Nilsson, 1901), 136, 140, 152. 140  Pankhurst, An Introduction, 190–1, 263–4; Pankhurst, Economic History, 241, 394; M. Abir, ‘Salt, trade and politics in Ethiopia in the “Zämänä Mäsafent”,’ Journal of Ethiopian Studies, 4, 2 (1966), 2–3; R. T. Wilson, ‘Distribution and importance of the domestic donkey in Circumsaharan Africa,’ Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 2, 2, (1981), 139.

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In the Middle East, pack camels dominated long-distance caravans, while horses, mules, and large white donkeys met much of the demand for mounts.141 Nevertheless, Egyptians of straitened means rode puny common donkeys, because they could not afford the large white variety.142 Moreover, the country’s little baladi (meaning local) donkeys were widely employed for pack over short and medium distances.143 For example, they helped to carry water in leather sacks from the Nile to consumers in Cairo.144 There was certainly a Middle Eastern market for small common donkeys, which were generally very cheap. In Greater Syria in the 1870s, one could be obtained for £2 sterling, whereas a fine large white donkey might fetch as much as £40.145 Another author reported an even greater price differential between the two at around the same time.146 In Bukhara in 1896–99, however, the price gap was less marked. Small grey donkeys sold for between 10 and 12 shillings, whereas the large white ones went for up to 30 shillings.147 Ordinary donkeys were similarly marginalised in South Asian markets. Pack and draught bullocks [oxen] dominated the long-distance transportation of goods, while elite figures rode horses, or harnessed them to vehicles. But donkeys had some part to play in Himalayan transport, together with mules.148 They most commonly served the special needs of urban artisan castes and construction workers, usually of very low social status.149 Whereas much information is available on horse and mule fairs in South Asia, despised ordinary donkeys were almost entirely left out of such accounts. Around 1800, a ‘good donkey’ sold for about 5 Rupees,  A.-B. Clot-Bey, Aperçu général sur l’Égypte, I (Paris: Fortin, Masson, et Cie, 1840), 128.  McCoan, Egypt, 321–2. 143  McCall, ‘Farm Animals,’ 802. 144  William Wittman, Travels in Turkey, Asia-Minor, Syria, and across the desert into Egypt, during the years 1799, 1800, and 1801 (London: Richard Phillips, 1803), 372; Edward W. Lane, An account of the manners and customs of the modern Egyptians, written in Egypt during the years 1833–1835, reprint of 1896 ed. (London: Darf Publishers Ltd., 1986), 331. 145  Blunt, Bedouin Tribes, 157, 300. 146  Van-Lennep, Bible Lands, 230, 232. 147  Olufsen, The Emir of Bokhara, 362. 148  Jean, Deloche, La circulation en Inde avant la révolution des transports, tome 1, la voie de terre (Paris: École Française d’Extrême Orient, 1980). 149  Watt, The Commercial Products, 751; Kipling, Beast and Man, 86; T. S. Randhawa, The Last Wanderers: Nomads and gypsies of India (Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 1996), 147–9, 180–5. 141 142

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compared to 15–50 for a packhorse, and 300–400 for a good saddle horse.150 In Punjab in 1907, ‘miserable little donkeys’ went for 5 Rupees apiece, whereas a local mule-breeding donkey fetched 100, and mules went for up to 500.151 Although Australia developed a trade in common donkeys from the 1860s, little is known about it. The market flourished in arid areas, for example in the northwest, where horses died from ingesting a local shrub.152 Donkeys pulled four-wheel wagons in flat areas. In one legendary case, a teamster harnessed 72 donkeys to a six-wheel dray, working out of the Western Australian port of Wyndham.153 The Beltana Pastoral Company of South Australia was unusual in breeding donkeys commercially for sale, and it shipped some experimentally by steamer to Western Australia in 1911.154 Overall, information on the commerce in donkeys is remarkably deficient, with Eastern Africa forming something of an exception. This was possibly because of their transport role there, especially in dry and steep areas. Moreover, they were quite widely eaten. In contrast, more expensive and prestigious animals tended to overshadow donkeys in Asia, where horses, mules, elephants, oxen, water buffaloes, and yaks competed for economic purposes, and where donkeys were rarely eaten. China was perhaps the Asian civilization most concerned with donkeys, despite some negative stereotypes about the animal. North China in particular bred half a dozen fine mule-engendering donkeys, made intensive use of the animals’ labour, and considered their flesh to be edible.

Conclusion Although sources on the topic are patchy, the donkey trade of the IOW was clearly of some significance in the long nineteenth century. Economically, donkeys were especially important for urban and peri-urban areas, regions of commercial agriculture, mining districts, and transport  Deloche, La Circulation, 234, 237.  Punjab, District Gazetteers, 1907 (Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette. Vol. 29A, 1909), 176. 152  Despeissis, The Nor’-West, 38, 116–19, 129–30; John Calaby, ‘Ecology and human use of the Australian savanna environment,’ in Human Ecology in Savanna Environments, ed. David R. Harris, (London: Academic Press, 1980), 328. 153  Bough, Donkey, 92–4. 154  Bough, ‘Value to Vermin,’ 163–5, 182–3. 150 151

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routes in arid zones. References to sales of these animals also spiked during military campaigns. Moreover, some were traded for their flesh. Nevertheless, it is somewhat surprising how little is known about the trade, even when it concerned valuable breeds, which were employed as progenitors of mules, or were ridden by elite figures. How animals were transported for sale around the IOW is a marked gap in the story, and not just for donkeys. For overland trades, this is perhaps understandable, given that animals walked to market. For maritime trades, however, the mechanics of moving animals by sea were complicated, making it a considerable challenge to keep them alive and well. In part, the paucity of information may reflect the regional and small-scale nature of the business, which tended not to feature in high-level Western reports. The ships that transported donkeys were often ‘native craft,’ such as dhows and praus, which left little trace in the official archive. However, given that the ‘middle passage’ of slaves has attracted so much scholarly attention, it would be good to have more research focused on the experiences of non-human animals. From this perspective, the late Sandy Yarwood’s research on the Australian horses that were exported around the IOW serves as an example of what could be achieved.155 Another absence in the scholarly literature concerns the interface between cultural attitudes towards donkeys and their use in everyday life. Something is known as to how different groups of inhabitants of the IOW conceived of donkeys, and the contrast between more Indic and less Indic cultures stands out. However, the practical effects of such ideas are rarely considered, let alone systematically correlated with use and commerce. These are not self-evidently problems of sources. Archives actually contain much information on donkeys, as soon as a researcher begins to look. Moreover, travel accounts were replete with references to every kind of animal, and included many pictures, as animals were popular as illustrations. While donkeys were not as prestigious as horses or camels—and were sometimes dismissed as stupid and stubborn—they were also often regarded as lovable and picturesque. They certainly figure in photographic records, which became increasingly abundant during the long nineteenth century. The lack of published analyses of the economic role of donkeys may thus reflect bias in the scholarly community. To put it bluntly, historians 155  Alexander T.  Yarwood, Walers: Australian horses abroad (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1989).

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have rarely considered the humble donkey to be worthy of their attention, demonstrating that some animals have proved to be more equal than others in the writings that have emerged from the ‘animal turn.’ However, there have been notable exceptions, and attitudes appear to be slowly changing. The contribution of the donkey to the history of the IOW may slowly be emerging from obscurity.

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CHAPTER 7

Commercialisation of Cattle in Imperial Madagascar, 1795–1895 Gwyn Campbell

Introduction This chapter examines the role of cattle in Madagascar during the Imperial Merina era from c. 1795 to 1895. It first discusses the traditional significance of cattle, then analyses in what ways, both ritually and commercially, their role changed with the rise both of the Merina Empire and of the sugar plantation economy on the neighbouring Mascarene Islands. The Merina, inhabitants of the small kingdom of Imerina in the central highlands of Madagascar, traditionally raised few cattle. However, military expansion permitted them to capture cattle from the pastoral peoples who occupied the plains at lower altitude, notably in the south and west of the island. This occurred simultaneously with the development of a plantation economy on the islands of Mauritius and Réunion, which expanded at the I wish to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada in this research. G. Campbell (*) Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Chaiklin et al. (eds.), Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42595-1_7

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expense of subsistence cultivation and required heavy labour investment. This was particularly the case on Mauritius which, from the 1810s, switched to almost wholesale sugar production. As a result, Mascarene demand for external sources of provisions expanded enormously, and Madagascar proved the nearest and cheapest source of both cattle for slaughter and, initially, rice. Malagasy cattle exports to the Mascarene Islands were supplemented by a regional trade in cattle from southwest Madagascar, largely independent of Merina rule, to South Africa—one that grew considerably from the 1870s. Nevertheless, the value of the regional bullock trade from Madagascar was, from mid-century, surpassed by a burgeoning demand from the industrialising west for hides—a trade in which European and American traders competed fiercely up to the French takeover of Madagascar in 1895. Hence, during the imperial Merina epoch, Madagascar’s cattle and cattle products were increasingly commercialised to meet demand in regional Indian Ocean economies.

The Traditional Significance of Cattle According to tradition, Malagasy cattle (Bos indicus), long-horned and single-humped, were originally called jamoka, but the name was changed to omby (from the Kiswahili ngombe) in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century.1 The Malagasy consider there to be four main types of cattle: omby mahery (‘strong cattle’) that were difficult to group into herds; haola, domesticated beasts that occasionally broke free; omby manga (‘blue cattle’) that were truly wild or feral beasts; and baria, cattle with small humps.2 Alfred and Guillaume Grandidier (1836–1921, 1873–1957), the father and son doyens of French historiography on Madagascar, claimed that Arabs first introduced zebu cattle to the island directly from Asia in the ninth century,3 although English missionary naturalist James Sibree (1836–1929) argued that they were introduced from East Africa—a view currently held by most academics.4 Prior to 1800, cattle raising was  Archives de l’Académie Malgache (hereafter: AAM) Raombana, Histoires, 16–17.  Raymond Decary, La Faune Malgache (Paris: Payot, 1950), 44. 3  Humped cattle of Indian origin (Bos taurus indicus). 4  British Library (hereafter: BL) Add.181282 Nicolas Mayeur, ‘Voyage au pays d’ancove, par le pays d’ancaye autrement dit des Baizangouzangoux,’ related by Dumaine (1785), 205; Rondeaux, ‘Mémoire’ in Jean Valette, ‘Un mémoire de Rondeaux sur Madagascar (1809),’ Bulletin de l’Académie Malgache, 44, 2 (1966), 120; Samuel Pasfield Oliver, Madagascar. An historical and descriptive account of the island and its former dependencies, I (London: 1 2

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c­ oncentrated on the southern and western plains of Madagascar where it constituted the chief occupation of the predominantly pastoral Malagasy, notably the Bara, Mahafaly, and Antandroy of the southern plains, the Sakalava of the western plains, and the Tsimihety of the northern highlands. Pastoralists fired the savannah every dry season to encourage the growth of fresh grass for their cattle. However, while total herd numbers were large, frequent episodes of drought and the consequent lack of fodder resulted in deaths of an estimated 25–33 per cent of newly born calves.5 Before 1820, the primary role of cattle was non-commercial. Utilisation of cow milk was uncommon except amongst the northern Sakalava,6 and cattle were deemed a marker of prestige and power rather than a source of meat. Thus, while vast numbers were slaughtered and eaten at festivals that signified important events in the life, or the death, of high-status individuals, or at primary community rituals, this was of social rather than economic importance (Fig.  7.1). The ‘nofon-kena mitam-pihavanana’ signified the flesh that permitted the perpetuation of ‘fihavanana,’ or social cohesion, of a given group or community.7 The heads of ritually Macmillan, 1886), 501 and II, 36; Samuel Copland, A History of the Island of Madagascar, comprising a Political Account of the Island, the Religion, Manners, and Customs of its Inhabitants, and its Natural Productions: With an appendix, containing a history of the several attempts to introduce Christianity into the island (London: Burton and Smith, 1822), 17–18; Alfred Grandidier and Guillaume Grandidier, Histoire Physique, Naturelle et Politique de Madagascar, IV, Ethnographie de Madagascar tomes 1 & 3 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1908), 231–4, 358, 360–1, and tome 4 (Paris: Hachette et Société d’Editions Géographiques, Maritimes et Coloniales, 1928), 14–15, 94, 111, 114, 116, 122–3, 127, 129, 131; James Sibree, A Naturalist in Madagascar: A record of observation, experiences, and impressions made during a period of over fifty years’ intimate association with the natives and study of the animal & vegetable life of the island (London: Seeley, 1915), 35; Louis Michel, Moeurs et coutumes des Bara (Tananarive: Imprimerie officielle, 1957), 15–19, 129–30, 170; Hubert Deschamps, L’Histoire de Madagascar (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1972), 35–6; Jacques Dez, ‘Eléments pour une étude sur les prix et les échanges de biens dans l’économie mérina ancienne,’ Bulletin de l’Académie Malgache, 48, 1–2 (1970), 21–2; Daniel Couland, Les Zafimaniry, un groupe ethnique de Madagascar à la poursuite de la forêt (Tananarive: Imprimerie Fanontam-Boky-Malagasy, 1973), 175; BL Add.18128 Dumaine, ‘Voyage à la côte de l’Ouest, autrement dite Pays des ésclaves,’ (January 1793), 256–7. 5  Gwyn Campbell, An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750–1895: The rise and fall of an island empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 29. 6  Madagascar Times II.42 (22 October 1884), 385. 7  Louis Molet, ‘Le boeuf dans la civilisation malgache,’ (Paris: ORSTOM, 1963); Lily Raharolahy, ‘Le Boeuf dans la société traditionnelle malgache’ (2004), at: http://www. naturevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/LE-BOEUF-DANS-LA-SOCIETETRADITIONNELLE-MALGACHE.pdf [Accessed: 21 October 2014].

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Fig. 7.1  Cattle horns ritually displayed. From: Louis Catat, Voyage à Madagascar (Paris: Hachette, 1895), 165

slaughtered cattle were often placed atop standing stones or, when the flesh had disintegrated, placed one on top of another on poles, with the horns facing east.8 Traditionally, cattle were left to roam freely during the day, although at night they were sometimes herded into stockades to prevent theft. This practice continued amongst pastoral people, and on open grasslands in the highlands, into the twentieth century.9 Cattle raiding, a highly discriminate and organised activity endemic amongst the pastoral peoples of the west and southwest, may be included under the ambit of ‘internal long-­ distance trade’10 because its frequency and reciprocity was such that, although there was no immediate and balanced exchange of goods, there  Louis Catat, Voyage à Madagascar (Paris: Hachette, 1895), 164.  Ibid., 217. 10  See: Lars Sundström, The Exchange Economy of Pre-Colonial Tropical Africa (London: C. Hurst, 1974), 19; Grandidier and Grandidier, Histoire (1908), 362. 8 9

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was a long-term, unbalanced, and delayed exchange, with cattle in constant circulation. The more cattle one possessed, the greater one’s perceived wealth, status, and influence; but also the more one was prone to attack from cattle thieves. Cattle raiding, considered an honourable pursuit, was immaculately planned. Gangs of up to 100 men seized herds of 200–300 cattle. Whereas most other long-distance commercial activities were confined to the April–October dry season, when routes were passable, cattle raiding occurred mostly during the summer, when rains could obliterate the tracks left by thieves.11 There also existed a long-distance internal trade in cattle based on regional specialisation. Herders on the western plains supplied Vezo Sakalava and Antankarana fishermen with cattle, rice, and maize in exchange for fish and salt; and they supplied the Merina with cattle in exchange for piastres and Merina staples such as slaves, cotton cloth, and especially iron goods.12 They also exported cattle and salted beef to meet traditional Muslim demand on the Swahili coast, and then, from the sixteenth century, to meet regular demand from the permanent Portuguese settlement in Mozambique, and irregular demand from the Dutch at the Cape and from European ships on the India and East Indies routes, both of which often obtained supplies from other sources.13 Additionally, from the mid-eighteenth century there developed growing demand for cattle from the Mascarene plantation islands of Réunion and Mauritius that stimulated a traffic in cattle from the northwest to northeast coasts.14 However, Jane Hooper’s recent claims that between 1600 and 1800 European ships in the region stimulated an intense export trade in provisions that then stimulated an integrated, island-wide system of intensive production and trade in cattle and rice, is not borne out by the evidence.15 All, bar the very northern regions of the island, were afflicted by serious recurring episodes of drought that caused sharp reductions in the quantity and quality of cattle stock. Nor can Hooper’s claim that the central highlands had ‘long engaged in regular trade with groups on both coasts, to whom they sold … rice, cattle, and slaves,’ be substantiated.16 11  Grandidier and Grandidier, Histoire (1908), 225; Copland, History, 17–18; Michel, Moeurs, 129, 137–41. 12  Campbell, Economic History, Ch. 2. 13  Grandidier and Grandidier, Histoire (1908), 324 and (1928), 298, 302–3. 14  Campbell, Economic History, 49. 15  Jane Hooper, Feeding Globalization. Madagascar and the Provisioning Trade, 1600–1800 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017). 16  Hooper, Feeding Globalization, 144.

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Traditionally, the inhabitants of the highlands were agriculturalists, and possessed few cattle. Indeed, the only regions that could have guaranteed regular supplies of cattle to meet external demand were the northwest of Madagascar and the Comoro Islands because they benefitted from plentiful rainfall.17 However, from 1769 in the extreme south of Madagascar, following the introduction of the prickly pear cactus that became an important dry season food supplement for cattle, the cattle population there also significantly increased.18 Another factor limiting foreign trade was the disease environment. Malaria was endemic on the lowlands of Madagascar and decimated visiting Europeans. Indeed, most Europeans looking for provisions in the region sailed instead to the Comoro Islands, which imported cattle from northwest Madagascar, benefitted from good rainfall, and was largely malaria-free until the second half of the nineteenth century.19

The Role of Cattle in the Imperial Merina Era, c. 1795–1895 A major economic shift occurred in the highlands from circa 1795 when Andrianampoinimerina (c. 1745–1810) emerged as victor in a series of internecine wars and proceeded to unify Imerina, regulate market activity, 17  J.M. Russell and T.C. Johnson, ‘Little Ice Age drought in Equatorial Africa: Intertropical convergence zone migrations and El Niño-Southern Oscillation variability,’ Geology, 35, 1 (2007), 23. See also: Dirk Verschuren, ‘Decadal and century-scale climate variability in Tropical Africa during the past 2000 Years,’ in Past Climate Variability through Europe and Africa, eds. R.W. Battarbee, Françoise Gasse, and Catherine E. Stickley (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004), 149–53. 18  Laurie R. Godfrey and Emilienne Rasoazanabary, ‘Demise of the Bet Hedgers: A case study of human impacts on past and present lemurs of Madagascar’ in The Anthropology of Extinction: Essays on culture and species death, ed. Genese Marie Sodikoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 172. 19  Huw Bowen, ‘Britain in the Indian Ocean region and beyond,’ in Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, c. 1550–1850, eds. H.V.  Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke, and John G. Reid (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 55–6; J. Julvez and S.  Blanchy, ‘Paludisme dans les îles de l’archipel des Comores, Aspects historiques et géophysiques. Considérations épidémiologiques,’ Bulletin de la Societe de Pathologie Exotique et de ses Filiales, 81, 5 (1988), 847–53; Ismaël Chakir, Ali Ibrahim Said, Bacar Affane, and Ronan Jambou, ‘Control of malaria in the Comoro Islands over the past century,’ Malaria Journal, 16, 1 (2017), 387.

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and promote production and trade. By 1800, Imerina had emerged as the island’s main distributive centre and its armies started subjugating neighbouring provinces, enslaving captives, and capturing significant numbers of cattle from conquered pastoralists.20 By 1810, cattle raising had spread to Antsihanaka, the Ankay, and parts of the uncultivated hilltops of Imerina and Betsileo. However, in Imerina, firing the grass resulted in such erosion ‘as to leave many acres totally inaccessible to cattle.’21 Therefore, while sheep, goats, pigs, and fowl were a common sight in Imerina, cattle continued to be relatively rare and valuable.22 At the same time as Imerina was being unified, the plantation economy on the neighbouring French-held islands of Mauritius and Réunion expanded significantly, stimulating demand for provisions and slaves from Madagascar. The Merina under Andrianampoinimerina and his son and successor Radama I (r. 1810–28) took full advantage of this. Radama I intensified Merina expansionism, annexing the neighbouring plateau regions of Imamo, Valalafotsy, and the populous cattle-country of Vonizongo, and launching devastating attacks upon the Bezanozano of the Ankay ‘in order to eliminate any intermediary between him and the European traders’ on the northeast coast.23 By 1814, Merina-ruled territory had quadrupled in extent and the core of the future Merina Empire been created. Cattle and slave raids continued on unsubdued peoples. In 1816, one such expedition returned from the southwest of Madagascar

20  R.  P. Callet, Histoire des rois: Tantaran’ Ny Andriana (Tananarive: Éditions de la Librairie de Madagascar, 1974), 296–97, 404; Campbell, Economic History, 24; Gwyn Campbell, ‘Environment and enslavement in Highland Madagascar, 1500–1750: The case for the Swahili slave export trade reassessed,’ Bondage and the Environment in the Indian Ocean World, ed. Gwyn Campbell (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018), 49–78. 21  National Archives, Kew (hereafter: NAK) CO.167/78 James Hastie, ‘Diary’ (1824–25), 11. See also: Adolphe Razafintsalama, ‘Les funérailles royales en Isandra d’après les sources du XIXe siècle’ in Les souverains de Madagascar, ed. Françoise Raison-Jourde (Paris: Karthala, 1983), 195. 22  BL Add.18128 Nicolas Mayeur, ‘Voyage au pays d’ancove, autrement dit des hovas ou Amboilamba dans l’intérieure des terres, Isle de Madagascar,’ (1777), 166, 175. See also: BL Add.18137 Hugon, ‘Aperçu de mon dernier voyage à ancova de l’an 1808,’ 11; BL.Add.18129 Chardenoux, ‘Journal du voyage fait dans l’intérieure’ (1816), 174; Grandidier and Grandidier, Histoire (1928), 117, 119, 127, 139–41, 143–4. 23  Campbell, Economic History, 66–7.

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with a booty of 2000 slaves and 4000 cattle.24 By then, Imerina had gained sufficient cattle-grazing land to become an exporter of cattle.25 Cattle in Imerina, as in the west, were initially most valued for status (Fig.  7.2). Thus, although by 1820 cattle were fattened by being kept closely constrained for several months in pits dug specially for the purpose—something their constant bellowing indicated was painful to them—then sold in domestic highland markets, they were often bought for ritual events.26 Hilsenberg and Bojer commented in 1823 on the role of cattle in funerals: After the tomb is closed, and the stones arranged above it, a great sacrifice takes place. The wealthy often slay twenty, thirty, fifty, and even a hundred oxen which are divided among the family, friends and guests. The horns of the beasts, with a kind of white drapery stretched along them, are arranged upon the tomb, to prove to the passers by the riches of the deceased.27

Again, for the Fandroana, or Royal Bath that marked the Merina New Year, an omby malaza—an ox of a single colour—and omby volavita—an ox with a white patch on the forehead, back, both sides and tail, as well as the four legs—were sacrificed in the royal courtyard, followed by a general  NAK CO 167/34 Hastie, ‘Diary’ (1817), 147, 211; AAM Raombana, Histoires, 21, 67; Raombana, ‘Texts’ in Raombana (1809–1855) l’Historien, ed. Simon Ayache, II (Fianarantsoa: Librarie Ambozontany, 1976), 13; Oliver, Madagascar, I, 221–2, 227–9; Callet, Histoire des rois, I, 441–2, II, 658, III, 120; Prud’homme, ‘Considérations sur les Sakalaves’ Notes, reconnaissances et explorations, 6 (1900), 414; Grandidier and Grandidier, Histoire (1908), 233, 235, 249–52, 268 and (1928), 235, 268, 335; C.  Savaron, ‘Contribution à l’histoire de l’Imerina’ in ‘Notes d’histoire malgache’ Bulletin de l’Académie Malgache, 14, (1931); G.S.  Chapus, ‘Le soin du bien-être du peuple sous le règne d’Andrianampoinimerina,’ Bulletin de l’Académie Malgache, 30 (1951–52), 1; Jean Valette, Études sur le règne de Radama I (Tananarive: Imprimerie Nationale, 1962), 19; Alain Delivré, L’Histoire des rois d’Imerina. Interprétation d’une tradition orale (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974), 208, 225. 25  BL.Add.18135 Chazal, ‘Notes’ (1816), 24; NAK CO 167/34 Le Sage, ‘Mission to Madagascar’ (1816), 61–2, 85, 91–139. See also: Chardenoux, ‘Journal du voyage fait dans l’intérieure’ (Tamatave, 17 août). 26  Catat, Voyage à Madagascar, 83. 27  Charles Theodore Hilsenberg and Wenceslaus Bojer, ‘A sketch of the province of Emerina, in the Island of Madagascar, and of the Huwa, its inhabitants; written during a year’s residence’ (1823) in Botanical Miscellany; containing Figures and Descriptions of such Plants as recommend themselves by their Novelty, Rarity, or History, or by the Uses to which they are applied in the Arts, in Medicine, and in Domestic Œconomy together with occasional Botanical Notes and Information, III, ed. William Jackson Hooker (London: John Murray, 1833), 259–60. 24

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Fig. 7.2  Fattening cattle. From: William Ellis, History of Madagascar. Comprising also the Progress of the Christian Mission Established in 1818; and an Authentic Account of the Recent Martyrdom of Rafaravavy; and of the Persecution of the Native Christians, vol. I (London: Fisher, Son, & Co., 1838), 46

celebration in which thousands of cattle were slaughtered.28 Louis Catat provides a vivid description of the ordeal cattle selected for the Fandroana underwent: Cattle fattened for the fandroana are generally very beautiful; the most privileged of Malagasy domestic animals, they are the only ones in which the native is interested, the only ones which he feeds rather than leaving to find its nourishment in nature. These cattle … are kept in pits made to extract 28  James Sibree, ‘The Fandroana, or New Year’s Festival of the Malagasy,’ Antananarivo Annual and Madagascar Magazine, 24 (1900), 494; Arthur Leib, ‘The mystical significance of colours in the life of the natives of Madagascar,’ Folklore 57, 3 (1946), 130; James Richardson, A New Malagasy-English Dictionary (Antananarivo: LMS, 1885), 460–1.

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clay to build a house; in these excavations, from which the animal cannot escape, and at the bottom of which it can only move with difficulty, it is fed, and fattens very quickly. A week or two before the fandroana, a trench is dug to allow the animal out and it is brought to Antananarivo, to the palace of the queen. Before the fandroana, there are more than 500 oxen thus brought into the enclosure of the royal rova. … At about two o’clock, these oxen, chased in small groups from the royal enclosure, quickly spread through the streets of the city … [where] they belong to any who can capture them … on this afternoon, on 21 November, a veritable cattle hunt occurs … maddened animals run down every street, every alleyway, they recognise no obstacles. Woe to the inoffensive passerby that a deranged bullock encounters in one of Antananarivo’s many high-walled narrow alleys. An army of slaves and children tries to seize the bullock, to tie a long rope to one of its hind legs, and pull it in order to master the fearful animal. The crowds, massed in the inner courtyards, squatting on the top of the walls, and huddled on balconies, provoke animals and hunters by their cries and shouting; [until] finally, around five o’clock, everything becomes calm, the last bullock has been taken and we can finally leave [the confines of] our home29

Coppalle described the New Year of 1826 which fell on 7 May: This day is a major festival for the Ambaniandres [Merina]; it is the first day of the year, which is lunar. … The morrow, at daybreak, a considerable number of cattle, assembled during the night in the palace court, receive the benediction of the king, after which the Ambaniandres disperse, taking with them the blessed cattle that they are going to kill. The entire town is nothing but a repulsive slaughter house. Here, a gang of locals greedily divide up the meat of an animal they have freshly slaughtered; further on some are already roasting its still pulsating innards. Over there, a bull that has just had a knife jammed into it, jumps up furious at the blow it’s been struck; despair gives it strength, it is going to revenge its death, it rushes upon its murderers; all flee at its approach, but soon it falls again; they jump on it; and though not yet dead are cutting its body into pieces. However, men arrive at the palace from every direction, each carrying on his head a quarter of the hind part of a bullock and its tail. These are the gifts that they offer to the king and the royal family. No Ambaniandre dares excuse himself from this homage; but not all offerings are accepted, for the intention is sufficient.30  Catat, Voyage à Madagascar, 270–1.  André Coppalle, ‘Voyage dans l’intérieur de Madagascar et à la capitale du roi Radame pendant les années 1825 et 1826’ (entry for 7 May 1826), quoted in Campbell, David Griffiths, 558. 29 30

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Fig. 7.3  Fandroana bullock c. 1896. From: 5.3 IMP-NMS-A02-104 in: Gwyn Campbell, David Griffiths and the Missionary ‘History of Madagascar’ (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 559

Porters, the exclusive carriers of passengers and freight in Madagascar until the French takeover of 1895, also established a significant demand for meat (Fig.  7.3). Originally drawn from free Betsimisaraka and Bezanozano of the eastern littoral and hinterland, most porters by the 1830s were slaves of the Merina elite who hired them out. Numbering some 60,000 by the late nineteenth century, most were employed on the main routes between Antananarivo and the chief commercial centres, notably the premier east coast port of Tamatave.31 Catat notes of the punishment they, in common with ordinary Malagasy, inflicted on a bullock chosen to be slaughtered: We stop at Ampasimbe; In the evening, there is a great din: it is the porters who exert their strength and their agility on an unfortunate ox which they lead to its death. One of them jumps on the back of the animal, clings to it with all his strength and tries to stay there. He is quickly thrown to the 31   Gwyn Campbell, ‘Labour and the transport problem in Imperial Madagascar, 1810–1895,’ The Journal of African History 21, 3 (1980), 341–56

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ground by his aggressive foe who makes enormous leaps into the air and races into the middle of the village. But soon he is stopped in his flight by a long rope attached to one of his hind legs and the innumerable blows he receives. Another porter takes over, and when he falls, another of his companions continues; the bullfight ends only when all the men, more or less battered and bruised, have participated in the adventure. The harassed animal is then attached to the torture post; the following day he will be killed. This very special preparation of the butcher’s meat could to some degree explain the after-taste of venison that Europeans, on arriving in the country, always experience with native beef.32

Sometimes, the meat was cut into strips and dried, in a manner similar to that used to make South African biltong.33 Also, from the late eighteenth century, cattle were increasingly used for utilitarian purposes. They were, for example, used to prepare fields for rice-cultivation. On smaller plots, 2–3 men drove between 20 and 30 cattle, and in larger fields up to 30 men drove 50–100 cattle to trample broken clay sods into liquid mud. However, cattle were barred from the Betsimitatatra plain in about 1800 because of the damage they could inflict upon its complex dyke system.34 Also, while most hide was consumed with the meat of slaughtered cattle, some was used to make door cords, belts, sandals, and drum and shield covers. Additionally, cattle-horn was made into kitchen utensils and powder and tobacco holders, bones were used to manufacture buttons, grease was used to shape hair (notably for southern Malagasy women and Sakalava men), or mixed with tamarind resin or clay and vegetable fibres to form a sort of pitch to caulk respectively boats and canoes, and tallow was used to make candles.35 A major commercial transformation in the way cattle were used followed an alliance with the British in 1820, whereby the British recognised Radama  Catat, Voyage à Madagascar, 41; see also: Ibid., 98.  Ibid., 167. 34  BL Add.18128 Lescalier, ‘Voyage à l’isle de Madagascar’ (1792), 320; Grandidier and Grandidier, Histoire (1928), 31; Oliver, Madagascar, II, 4–5, 53; NAK CO 167/34 Hastie, ‘Diary’ (1817), 187; Maurice Bloch, Placing the Dead: Tombs, ancestral villages and kinship organization in Madagascar (London: Seminar Press, 1971), 75–6, 93–4; Gwyn Campbell, ‘The Role of the London Missionary Society in the Rise of the Merina Empire, 1810–1861,’ (Unpublished PhD diss., University of Wales, 1985), 43. 35  NAK CO 167/34 Le Sage, ‘Mission’ (1816), 107; Oliver, Madagascar, II, 84; Grandidier and Grandidier, Histoire (1928), 133–5; Jacques Lombard, La royauté Sakalava: Formation, développement et effondrement du XVIIe au XXe siècle (Tananarive: ORSTOM, 1973), 73–4; Catat, Voyage à Madagascar, 168, 172, 202, 212–3, 222, 236, 332. 32 33

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as king of all Madagascar in exchange for free trade and a ban on slave exports. Additionally, the British supplied Radama with military aid to conquer non-Merina peoples of the island, as well as educational and artisanal expertise to promote industrial and agricultural development. The initial aim of British policy was to promote the export of staples that might generate greater revenues than slaves. However, from the mid-­1820s, when it became obvious that such attempts had failed, and that British compensation for the ban on slave exports was insufficient, the Merina crown rejected the British treaty and adopted autarkic policies aimed at stimulating import substitution in everything from soap to armaments. One major feature of the new policy was the development of industries related to leather and other cattle products. From the 1820s, the crown ordered that parts of slaughtered bullocks be delivered to foreign artisans for processing; notably skins for tanning, suet for soap manufacture, and hoofs for the extraction of oil and gelatine (used to produce gunpowder). Also, from 1822, cattle horns were used to make lanterns and cutlery for European residents of Antananarivo and elite Malagasy who adopted European habits.36 However, attempts from 1822 to harness oxen to ploughs for use in European-style farming on the tropical east coast foundered due to a failure to account for and adapt to local circumstances; notably high temperatures, sandy soils, and frequent oceanic inundations. Leather craft production for export also met with little success, despite the influx of skilled European and Creole artisans. As cattle were considered sacred and the Malagasy traditionally ate beef with the hide attached, John Canham, an LMS artisan, had to import from Mauritius leather taken from Malagasy cattle exported there. Moreover, he was initially prevented from tanning by the lack of lime—and in consequence was obliged to use bark as a substitute. When artisan wages were added to production costs, the price of the finished product was beyond the reach of ordinary Merina, while the local elite preferred imported luxury items.37  James Wills, ‘Native products used in Malagasy industries,’ Antananarivo Annual and Madagascar Magazine, 9 (1885), 123. See also: Hilsenberg and Bojer, ‘Sketch of the Province of Emerina,’ 264. 37  NAK CO 167/50 Hastie, ‘Diary’ (1817); NAK CO 167/50 Hastie, ‘Diary’ (1820); Council for World Missions/London Missionary Society Archive (Hereafter: CWM/LMS) B2.F1.JC Canham to Burder, 5 November 1824; Oliver, Madagascar, I, 307, 318–9; Grandidier and Grandidier, Histoire (1908), 33; Campbell, ‘Role of the London Missionary Society,’ 183. For transport, see: Campbell, ‘Labour and the transport problem.’ 36

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The only major success in leather production was for the military under Ranavalona I (r. 1828–61) in whose reign tanneries (under Canham) at Ambohimandroso, Andoharano, and Vodivato (near Antananarivo), manufactured military boots, belts, saddles, and pouches. By royal order, the hides, suet, and neat’s-foot oil of all slaughtered cattle were sent to Canham—over 16,500 hides being surrendered in 1828 alone. Also in 1837, Laborde constructed ‘a true industrial centre, a kind of Malagasy Creusot’38 at Mantasoa, some 40  km east of Antananarivo, which until 1859 produced, amongst other products, tanned leather.39 However, indigenous attempts at developing an industry based on the use of cattle parts remained limited, notably after 1862 with the abandonment of autarkic policies and the liberalisation of foreign trade. By contrast, from mid-century Madagascar responded to a burgeoning demand from the industrialising West for cattle hides.

The Cattle, Meat, and Hide Export Trades From the mid-1700s, the development of plantation economies on the Mascarene Islands of Réunion and Mauritius, respectively 650  km and 800 km east of Madagascar, initiated a swing in the balance of commercial power from western to eastern Madagascar. The Mascarenes imported an estimated annual average of 1350 Malagasy cattle from 1775 to 1800. Salted beef sold on Réunion for up to three  times its purchase price in Tamatave.40 The Sakalava and Tsimihety, of the northwest and north central Madagascar respectively, initially profited most from this development, redirecting sizeable quantities of slaves, cattle, rice, and maize to the east coast ports of Mahavelona and Tamatave for sale to Mascarene merchants.41 Mascarene demand for both live animals and salted meat greatly increased after devastating cyclones in early 1806 destroyed coffee plantations, causing Mauritian planters to turn to the cultivation of more storm-­ resistant sugar cane that transformed Mauritius into a monocrop sugar producer. Mauritian sugar production leaped from 11,000 tons in 1825 to 21,000 tons in 1826 to over 100,000 tons by 1854. Between 1855 and 1859, Mauritius was Britain’s main sugar-producing colony and produced 38  G.S.  Chapus, Quatre-vingts années d’influences européennes en Imerina (1815–1895) (Tananarive: Académie Malgache, 1925), 204. 39  Campbell, Economic History, esp. Chs. 3–4. 40  Ibid., 182 41   See, for example: Delivré, L’Histoire des rois d’Imerina., 225–6; Grandidier and Grandidier, Histoire (1928), 268, 335; Couland, Zafimaniry, 106–114.

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9.4 per cent of the world’s sugarcane.42 Thereafter, the global significance of Mauritian sugar declined. However, although production dipped sharply from 1870, it rose again to reach 140,000 tons in 1890. Sugar cane cultivation and sugar production, which was highly labour intensive, also resulted in an almost fivefold increase in the population of the Mascarenes from 1810 to 1900. As subsistence cultivation on the islands was sacrificed for plantation crops, imports of provisions, including meat and cattle for slaughter, increased exponentially.43 Additionally, following their capture of Mauritius in 1810, the British built good roads and introduced carriages along which horses, mules, asses, and occasionally Malagasy bullocks were used as draught animals to pull carts and carriages.44 In the 1810s, cattle exports from the coast between Vohimara and Cape Amber to the Mascarenes rose considerably.45 However, initial Merina attempts to enter the cattle export trade were frustrated by three core factors. First, the Bezanozano and Betsimisaraka peoples to the east of Imerina disrupted Merina utilisation of trade routes to east coast ports; second, the Swahili and Sakalava dominated west-east cattle trade routes across the north of the island to sell to Mascarene traders in the Antongil Bay region46; and third, the 1809–11 British blockade and occupation of the Mascarenes disrupted foreign trade notably from the east coast.47 Not 42  Anthony Toth, ‘Mauritius,’ in Indian Ocean. Five Island Countries, ed. Helen Chapin Metz (Washington: Library of Congress, 1994), 100. 43  Auguste Toussaint, Histoire de l’île Maurice (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), 74, 93, 106, 109. 44  James Backhouse, A Narrative of a Visit to the Mauritius and South Africa (London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1844), 46. 45  Campbell, Economic History, 55. 46  BL Add.18128 Nicolas Mayeur ‘Voyage au Pays des Séclaves, côte Ouest de Madagascar,’ (April 1774), 123; BL Add.18128 Nicolas Mayeur ‘Voyage dans le nord de Madagascar’ (1775), 62; Grégoire Avine, ‘Notes de voyage à Fort Dauphin (1804),’ in Raymond Decary, ‘Le voyage d’un chirurgien philosophe à Madagascar’ Bulletin de l’Académie Malgache, 36 (1958), 326; Rondeaux, ‘Mémoire’ (1809), 91–108; Grandidier and Grandidier, Histoire (1908), 171 and (1928), 38–9, 297; P.D.  Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 229; Gabriel Rantoandro, ‘Une communauté mercantile du nord-ouest: Les Antalaotra’ (Mahajanga: Colloque d’histoire de l’Université de Madagascar, 1981), 9–10. 47  NAK CO.167/34 Thomas Pye, ‘Summary of Proceedings at Madagascar’ (6–8 June 1817), 90. See also: BL Add.18128 Mayeur, ‘Voyage au pays d’ancove’ (1777), 171; Nicholas Mayeur, ‘Imerina and Antananarivo,’ ed. James Sibree, Antananarivo Annual and Madagascar Magazine, 20 (1896), 392; BL Add.18128 Dumaine, ‘Voyage au pays d’Ancaye, autrement dit des Bezounzouns, isle de Madagascar’ (juillet 1790), 279, 285; BL Add.18128 Dumaine, ‘Voyage à la côte de l’ouest’ (1793), 298, 308; NAK CO 167/34 Hastie, ‘Diary’

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until 1817–24, following accords with the British whereby the latter by 1820 recognised the king of Imerina as sovereign of all Madagascar and gave him the military hardware and training to conquer other regions of Madagascar, did Merina traders forge regular commercial outlets to the coast. However, larger non-Merina cattle herders reacted to the 1817–25 Merina conquest of the east coast by migrating to the western plains, and cattle exports from eastern Madagascar dropped significantly.48 Further, the 1820 Britanno-Merina treaty banning slave exports induced much Swahili and Mascarene commerce to transfer to the independent regions of Madagascar. Following the 1824 Merina conquest of Majunga, the predominant west coast port, Indian and Swahili agents and Mascarene traders dispersed to neighbouring, independent ports, as their duties were cheaper than those of controlled by Imerina (Table 7.1).49 Table 7.1  Mauritius: Malagasy cattle, meat and rice imports, 1824–26 (NAK CO 167/91 P. Salter, ‘Statement showing the number of Bullocks and quantity of Rice and Salt provisions imported from Madagascar, 1824–6,’ Customs House, Port Louis, 30 December 1826) Bullocks Year

Cattle

Rice Heifers Ground rice (sacks)

1824 2642 61 1825 4854 131 1826 4047 175 Total 11,543 367

25,368 93,178 39,696 158,242

Salt & provisions

Remarks

Straw Salted Dried rice quarters meat (sacks) (sacks) (lbs)

Salted (lbs)

118 662 140 920

3000 – – 24 21,000 118 24,000 142

2356 3619 3135 11,110

46,000 64,500 104,210 214,710

Fish Av. (sacks) weight of rice bag = 75 lbs

(1817), 147; NAK CO 167/50, Hastie, ‘Diary’ (1820), 500–1; NAK CO 167/63 Hastie, ‘Diary’ (1822); Grandidier and Grandidier, Histoire (1928), 297; NAK CO167/34 Farquhar to Stanfell, Port Louis, 28 September 1817, 112; Gwyn Campbell, ‘Debt and slavery in Imperial Madagascar, 1790–1861’ in Bonded Labour and Debt in the Indian Ocean World, eds. Gwyn Campbell and Alessandro Stanziani (London: Routledge, 2013), 46. 48  Campbell, Economic History, 52. 49  Micheline Rasoamiaramanana, ‘Aspects économiques et sociaux de la vie à Majunga entre 1862 et 1881’ (Unpublished PhD diss., University of Antananarivo, 1983), 10–11, 35, 54; Vincent Noel, ‘Ile de Madagascar: Recherches sur les Sakalava,’ Bulletin de la société de géographie (1843), 19, 27–38, 93, 99; Alfred Grandidier, ‘Souvenirs de voyages, 1865–1870,’ in Documents anciens sur Madagascar, VI (Tananarive: Association malgache d’archéologie, 1971), 28.

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From that time, there existed two major trading structures in Madagascar, one in Imperial Madagascar, and the other in the independent reaches of the west and south of the island. Within the Merina Empire, foreign trade was initially subject to few levies, courtesy of a Britanno-Merina commercial treaty in 1820. This concerned chiefly exports from eastern Madagascar, which Merina armies quickly overran. However, in 1825 the threat of bankruptcy led Radama I to seriously contemplate the advice of Nils Bergsten, a Swedish doctor resident on Mauritius, that a foreign trade monopoly would enable the Merina crown to bypass middlemen and raise significantly the price of staple exports— thus augmenting royal revenue.50 From 1826, the Merina court broke from the treaty, and declared the export of cattle from imperial territory to be a Merina court monopoly.51 From 1826 to 1828, Radama I granted a virtual monopoly of foreign trade on the east coast to Blancard & Cie, a commercial house based on Mauritius.52 This, and an augmentation of duties, caused excluded merchants to transfer to independent ports. By 1828, however, the Blancard project had crumbled, due to the difficulties they encountered establishing their customs posts, losses at sea caused by a hurricane, and the difficulty of selling what Blancard described as inferior quality cattle. In consequence, Blancard refused to advance more than a third of the promised $30,000 payment. In response, Radama confiscated merchandise belonging to Blancard (which Blancard claimed to be valued at $30,000) and attempted to enforce the monopoly using his own soldiers.53 This failed and he subsequently lowered duties in imperial ports to 10 per cent ad valorem. Rates in independent ports varied from port to port and over time, but were mostly imposed in kind and were almost invariably lower than rates charged in Merina-controlled ports before this reduction. Subsequent to it, therefore, the proportion of Réunionnais

50  Bergsten unsuccessfully applied for monopolistic trading rights on the East coast: Nils Bergsten, ‘Mémoire sur les moyens d’augmenter à Madagascar les revenus du gouvernement,’ ed. Jean Valette (1825), Bulletin de l’Académie Malgache 44 (1966), 5; Charles Robequain, ‘Une capitale montagnarde en pays tropical: Tananarive,’ Revue de geographie alpine 37, 2 (1949), 287. 51  AAM Raombana, Histoires, 3. 52  NAK CO 167/98 ‘Convention passé entre S.M. Radama, Souverain de Madagascar, et le Sieur Louis Blancard, agissant au nom de M.M. Blancard & Cie, négociants de Maurice, Tananarivou, 25 October 1826.’ 53  AAM Raombana, ‘Annales’ (March 1853), 298; L. Carayon, Histoire de l’établissement français de Madagascar pendant la restauration (Paris: Gide, 1845), 100.

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ships trading through imperial, as opposed to independent, Malagasy ports, rose from a low of 30 per cent in 1823 to 64 per cent in 1828.54 From her ascension to the throne in 1828, Ranavalona I similarly pursued a policy of seeking trade contracts with foreign concerns. This greatly concerned the Mauritius government and its settler community for whom Malagasy cattle and rice were considered ‘objects of the first necessity.’55 Following the French attack on northeast Madagascar in 1829–30, which disrupted the bullock and rice trade,56 India surpassed Madagascar as the chief source of rice for Mauritius. However, as the nearest alternative source of live cattle was Algoa Bay, from which their shipment to Mauritius was too expensive,57 Madagascar remained its chief source of cattle, one British merchant stressing in 1833: The very great benefit to be derived by the Mother Country at large, and the Colony of Mauritius individually by our keeping up a friendly intercourse with the Government of the Island of Madagascar—that immense country now beginning to use British Manufactures, and also being the source from whence Mauritius must always derive its supply of Cattle for fresh meat with many articles of food for the Negro population.58

In 1837, Ranavalona granted a monopoly over east coast exports of beeswax, gum copal, ebony and hides to Napoléon Delastelle (1802–56), a native of Saint-Malo, Brittany and associate of Julien de Rontaunay (1793–1863), also of Breton origin and head  of the most powerful Réunionnais firm of the epoch, after he had paid several thousand dollars to Rainimaharavo, a leading member of the imperial oligarchy. In 1843, Rontaunay also obtained a monopoly of the foreign trade of Mahela, Mananjary, and Mahanoro, in exchange for an annual payment of $6000 to the Merina crown.59 In the 1830s and 1840s, he controlled an estimated 40 per cent of the cattle and meat trade to the Mascarenes where  Campbell, Economic History, 166.  NAK CO 167/153 Robert Lyall, ‘Observations’ (1831). 56  NAK CO 167/152 R.W.H., ‘Madagascar,’ Colonial Office memo, 13 Mar 1830. 57  NAK CO 167/91 Lowry Cole to Bathurst, 31 January 1827. 58  NAK CO 167/173 Hunter to Colonial Office, 4 July 1833. See also: NAK CO 167/173 Viret, ‘Memorandum on the Expenses of Living at the Mauritius &c,’ (1832). 59  Rontaunay had in 1826 tried and failed to secure a monopoly over the foreign trade of Mahela and Mananjary: George-Sully Chapus with Gustave Mondain, ‘Un chapitre inconnu. Des rapports de Maurice et de Madagascar,’ Bulletin de l’Académie Malgache 30 (1951–2), 118; Campbell, ‘Role of the London Missionary Society,’ 294, 301. 54 55

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live cattle fetched an average of $30 each.60 This was highly profitable to him. For his Malagasy-Mascarene operations Rontaunay engaged a personal fleet of 19 ships, supplemented by 47 chartered boats, and over 1000 crew.61 Whereas in the early 1800s, the Mascarenes imported about 1350 Malagasy cattle annually; from 1821 to 1845, a minimum of 12,178 cattle (507 per annum) worth about $365,340 were exported to Réunion; and in 1835 alone, 11,261 live bullocks worth $123,875 were shipped to Mauritius. In 1843, John Marsall, captain of HMS Isis, reported on visiting Tamatave that the port exported annually: From 6 or 7000 bullocks, two thirds of which go to Mauritius and one third to Bourbon [Réunion], 30,000 salted hides to Bourdeaux  and Nantes, [and] about 5,000 tierces,62 of salt beef weighing 300 lbs each, the price of which is 15 dols. at Tamatave, and fetches 20 dolls. at Mauritius.63

By the 1850s, from 10,000 to 12,000 cattle were exported annually to the Mascarenes (between 3000 and 4000 to Réunion; and from 7000 to 8000 to Mauritius), rising to 15,000 by the early 1860s.64 Yet this was insufficient to meet demand: in 1863 it was estimated that Mauritius alone needed to import 10,000 to 12,000 head of cattle each year.65 On the Malagasy east coast, bullocks for slaughter cost from $7 to $8 each, Malagasy beef being sold on the Mascarenes for $10 (dried) and $12 (salted) a ton. From 1821 to 1845, 1410 tons ($16,920) of salted and 80 tons ($800) of dried beef was shipped to Réunion, while in 1835 alone, $15,840 worth of beef was shipped to Mauritius.66 In 1840, some 6184  Campbell, ‘Role of the London Missionary Society,’ 301.  Ibid. 62  A cask, usually 1/3 of a pipe, or about 35 gallons (156 litres). 63  National Archives of Mauritius (hereafter: NAM) HB 14 Report of Captain Sir John Marshall of the Voyage of Her Majesty’s Ship Isis to the Comoro Islands, Mozambique Coast and Madagascar, 24th March 1843. 64   Grandidier and Grandidier, Histoire (1928), 136, 297–8; House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (hereafter: HCPP) 47 ‘Foreign Trade – Mauritius (1835),’ (1837–8), 567; Campbell, ‘Role of the London Missionary Society,’ 297. 65  Anon, ‘Trade with Madagascar and Mauritius,’ The Mercury (23 November 1863), 3. 66  Raombana, ‘Manuscrit écrit à Tananarive (1853–1854),’ trans. J.F. Radley, Bulletin de l’Académie Malgache, 13 (1930), 10–11; Grandidier and Grandidier, Histoire (1928), 111, 127–8, 136, 297–9; HCPP 47 ‘Foreign Trade – Mauritius (1835),’ 567; Campbell, ‘Role of the London Missionary Society,’ 297. 60 61

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Malagasy cattle valued at $5163 were imported into Mauritius.67 In 1842, Mauritius customs returns indicated that some 20 vessels averaging 180 tons each were employed in trading with Madagascar to which they carried chiefly cotton cloth to a value of $20,000 per quarter in return for bullocks and beef valued at $65,000 per quarter.68 The differential in prices paid in interior Madagascar and on arrival in the Mascarenes was the cause of much complaint on Réunion and Mauritius. Thus in 1840, Edward Baker, missionary printer to Madagascar, exclaimed from Mauritius: The Bullock trade … is peculiarly disadvantageous to us; for bullocks purchased in the interior at $4 are after one year’s grazing, charged to the Europeans on the Coast $11, to which is added the duty of 10 pr. cent on the Exportation. A law exists making it punishable by Confiscation of the Cattle for any native to offer Bullocks on sale to a European before any previous offer he may have had made to him is disposed of. This Law, called the Law of “Manoa-bavotra” [“Be careful”] is intended to keep up the price; and has in a great measure the effect of a monopoly since none can offer their Cattle on Sale to the Europeans without express permission. There are other vexatious Laws designed to prevent the Europeans from grazing Cattle, and to secure all the profits of the trade to the native Officers, who wish to be the only merchants. These Laws, by raising the price of Cattle, at the fountain head, augment the loss sustained on those lost at Sea, and consequently are more injurious than would be a much higher Duty on them after their arrival here.69

The system was relaxed slightly from 1861, permitting greater foreign participation and the emergence of a civilian middleman group, the Ambohimalaza, who dominated hide exports—by then more valuable than live cattle exports—although foreign trade was still highly supervised by the imperial court.70 Malagasy investment in the cattle and meat trade was minimal, simply because profitability did not require large amounts of finance or labour. Cattle were obtained as battle booty or purchased on domestic markets at an average cost of from $3 to $5 each, vast grazing lands were seized, and 67  Charles Pridham, An Historical, Political and Statistical Account of Mauritius and its Dependencies (London: T. and W. Boone, 1849), 409. 68  Anon, ‘Commercial position of Madagascar, relative to India, Australia, and the Cape of Good Hope,’ Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal (28 May 1842), 3. 69  NAK CO 167/229 Edward Baker to Lionel Smith, 7 August 1840. 70  Campbell, Economic History, 168–9.

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slave or forced labour supplied herders. Profits from the cattle trade were so large that the Merina court banned live cow exports lest the Mascarenes expand their own stocks to the point of self-sufficiency. Weight lost on the arduous trek from the plateau necessitated a considerable delay to enable the cattle to be fattened up prior to embarkation; deka (aides-de-camp who acted as commercial agents for high-ranking Merina military officers) and other Merina agents used this period to supplement herd numbers through local purchases.71 Their monopoly on cattle exports enabled the Merina court to dictate a local sale price of $0.071 per bullock, which it resold to foreign merchants on the coast for an average of $11.0 until 1853 when the price was raised to $15.0. An export duty of $1.5 per bullock was also imposed.72 It is notable that, following the French conquest of 1895–96, the newly installed French authorities abolished the Merina monopoly, and the price of a bullock dropped to between five and six dollars on the domestic Merina market, and to between eight and nine dollars in east coast ports.73 However, the trade was inefficient and cattle mortality high. First, routes from the interior to the coast proved impassable during the rainy season from November to April, which was also the period when malaria prevailed, while cyclones frequently hit the east coast between January and March (Fig. 7.4). Thus, in the rainy season, maritime trade between the Mascarenes and Madagascar slumped dramatically.74 Again, there existed no port facilities for the loading of cattle aboard vessels. Thus, in 1854 William Ellis noted of the embarkation of cattle: The getting them on board is rather a noisy and bustling affair, and when the weather is at all rough, it is impracticable without loss. If the sea is tolerably calm, the vessels approach as near the shore as possible, perhaps within two hundred yards, and a strong rope is passed from the ship to the shore.  Campbell, ‘Role of the London Missionary Society,’ 297–9.  Raombana, ‘Manuscrit,’ 10–11; Grandidier and Grandidier, Histoire (1928), 111, 127–8, 298–9; Oliver, Madagascar, II, 196. 73  Georges Foucart, ‘L’Etat du commerce à Madagascar,’ Revue Générale des Sciences (1895), 87. 74  N. Malan, C.J.C. Reason, and B.R. Loveday, ‘Variability in tropical cyclone heat potential over the Southwest Indian Ocean,’ Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 118 (2013), 6734–46; Hubert Deschamps, Les migrations intérieures à Madagascar (Paris: BergerLevrault, 1959), 15; J.M. Filliot, La traite des esclaves vers les Mascareignes au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: ORSTOM, 1974), 13–14, 104–5, 222; Auguste Toussaint, ‘Le trafic commercial entre les Mascareignes et Madagascar de 1773 à 1810,’ Annales de l’Université de Madagascar (1966), 95–6 71 72

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Fig. 7.4  Embarking cattle at the port of Tamatave, Madagascar. From: Illustrated London News (17 September 1864), Neg No: 58_2303, National Maritime Museum Two large canoes are then fastened together by having strong poles tied across them, and projecting over the sides. The cattle, which perhaps have never been tied up before, are caught in the fold by having a rope passed round their horns, by which they are tied one by one to a strong post in the fold. To the rope round each animal’s head two other ropes are fastened, viz. one on each side, and extending in opposite directions along the sea beach. Each of these ropes is held by eight or ten men standing on the sand, or in the water. When all is ready the animal is driven out of the fold, and generally runs at the men on one side, but is held back by those on the other side, and both parties of men keep advancing towards deep water, still pulling with the ropes, until the bullock is beyond his depth. He is then drawn as he swims to the side of the canoe, where the long ropes are taken off, and he is fastened by the horns to the cross-bars projecting over the sides of the canoe. When about ten oxen are thus fastened, the canoes are drawn by means of a rope previously fixed to the ship, the bullocks being swung on both sides; a sort of canvas sling is then passed under the body of each animal, by which

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it is hoisted into the ship. By this manner, a hundred and fifty bullocks will sometimes be embarked in one day.75

This remained the method of embarking cattle into the early twentieth century.76 However, the exercise was detested by the animals, who resisted as hard as they could, as noted by Catat: The recalcitrant animal … demonstrates his absolute aversion to this kind of exercise and forced bath that we want him to take, he leaps wildly, kicking in every direction, makes furious charges often at his keepers who can only with great difficulty keep hold of him and who, as a precaution, at the first sign of resistance [by the animal] maintain the irritated animal at a distance with a great length of rope. However, after a mad rush, the fugitive is brought back; and tired by his vain attempts [to escape], the cries and shouts he hears from all sides, the blows he receives, the incessant tugging of which he is the object, ends up by allowing himself to enter the water.77

Moreover, considerable numbers of cattle drowned in the process of being taken to the waiting vessels and the voyage to the Mascarenes occasioned significant cattle weight loss and mortality.78 The latter was in part due to weather conditions, but chiefly to the state of the ships used. Termed ‘bullockers,’ they were often condemned trading ships considered good for a few short trips to the east coast of Madagascar to pick up live cattle.79 Most bullockers carried between 100 and 200 head of cattle, the trip to Mauritius taking anything between two and four days.80 In November 1829, Englishman James Holman (1786–1857), the ‘Blind Traveller,’ 75  William Ellis, Three visits to Madagascar during the years 1853–1854–1856 (London: John Murray, 1859), 123–4. 76  Sibree, Naturalist, 22–3, 35. 77  Catat, Voyage à Madagascar, 19–20. 78  Ibid., 20. 79  BL Add.18128 Mayeur, ‘Voyage au pays d’ancove’ (1777), 153; BL Add.18128 ‘Voyage au pays d’ancove’ (1785), 205; Copland, History, 15; Bergsten, ‘Mémoire,’ 16; Oliver, Madagascar, I, 265, 412, 414; Anon, ‘Some Betsimisaraka folk-tales and superstitions,’ trans. J. Sibree, Antananarivo Annual and Madagascar Magazine, 22 (1898), 217; Sibree, Naturalist, 20, 22–3, 35; Grandidier and Grandidier, Histoire (1928), 297; Robequain, ‘Capitale montagnarde,’ 287; Jean Valette, ‘Nouvelle note pour servir à l’étude des exportations de bœufs de Fort-Dauphin à Bourbon (1820),’ Bulletin de l’Académie Malgache, 50, 2 (1972), 33–6. 80  NAK CO 167/229 Edward Baker to Lionel Smith, 20 January 1841.

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met on Mauritius Capt. I.H. Southam, master of the Vittoria (284 tons),81 who, in his words, sustained several heavy losses in his speculations in the bullock trade, arising from the confinement to which the cattle are subjected on board the small vessels that bring them from Madagascar; the voyage from which place, occupies from a fortnight to a month or five weeks; and, during this time, the cattle lose so much flesh, that when they arrive at Port Louis, it is necessary to send them into the country to fatten, before they are fit for the market. The dry weather, this season, has also been very calamitous to cattle-­feeders, owing to the mortality it has occasioned among the animals.82

In all, an estimated 20 per cent of cattle died on the voyage to the Mascarenes, which in non-‘bullockers’ generally took about a week.83 A brisk export trade in cattle products also developed, initially as a by-­ product of the meat export trade, augmented by the industrial phase from 1828 to 1850 when the Merina crown commanded that all by-products of cattle slaughtered for ritual occasions be surrendered to imperial workshops. Nevertheless, not all was used for industrial purposes. For example, from 1821–45, de Rontaunay exported to Réunion 150 tons of tallow.84 The main cattle by-product for export, though, was hides. The western plains formed the largest grazing grounds in Madagascar and, following Merina military expansion into Iboina in the early 1820s, a large industry developed in Majunga and Marovoay producing raw and salted hides for export. East coast hide exports, possibly triggered by the industrial experiment in Imerina, developed later. In 1837, a monopoly over east coast exports of hides was granted to Delastelle  who, from 1821 to 1845, exported 14,719 hides to Réunion; in 1835, 92,442 hides valued at $3015

81  Campbell, David Griffiths, 860. Southam and the Vittoria subsequently shipped sugar to Australia where it engaged in regional (Australian and New Zealand) trade: ‘Vittoria,’ http://www.myancestorsstory.com/vittoria.html [Accessed: 23 July 2018]. 82  James Holman, Voyage Round the World, including travels in Africa, Asia, Australasia, America, etc. etc. from 1827 to 1832, III (London: Smith, Elder, 1835), 129. 83  BL 18128 Mayeur, ‘Voyage au pays d’ancove’ (1777), 153; BL 18128 Mayeur, ‘Voyage au pays d’ancove’ (1785), 205; Copland, History, 15; Bergsten, ‘Mémoire’ (1825), 16; Oliver, Madagascar, I, 265, 412, 414; Sibree, Naturalist, 20, 22–3, 35; Grandidier and Grandidier, Histoire (1928), 297; Robequain, ‘capitale montagnarde,’ 287. 84  Grandidier and Grandidier, Histoire (1928), 136, 297–8; HCPP 47 ‘Foreign Trade – Mauritius (1835),’ (1837–8), 567; Campbell, ‘Role of the London Missionary Society,’ 297.

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were also exported to Mauritius.85 However, the major expansion of hide exports occurred from the early 1870s when international demand proved so great that the indigenous practice, until then common, of eating beef with the hide attached, died out.86 The years 1873–74 witnessed a 300 per cent increase in east coast hide exports and great competition between European and American traders. Catat notes of the preparation of hides: As soon as the animal is slaughtered, the hide is removed without precaution and often it bears the mark of several knife cuts, which greatly reduces the market value. If the native is far from the buyer, he will not transport the hide in this state, for it would be too heavy and arduous; rather he crudely gets rid of the fatty matter and flesh that still adheres to it; then, after rubbing it with clay or ashes, he salts it and dries it in the sun.87

This meant that although the major cattle raising areas lay in western Madagascar, hides from the plateau interior were generally far cheaper than those prepared at Majunga, and thus were the main staple of the hide export trade via the less distant east coast ports.88 To compete more effectively with foreign merchants, primarily in the collection and export of hides in return for cottons, the Merina court established in the 1880s a ‘civilian’ middlemen group—the ‘Ambohimalaza’ cartel—comprising five Antananarivo-based ‘houses.’89 In 1888, the cartel’s two leading dealers, Raoelina and Andriampatra/Andriampatsa, were described as ‘very solid men … certainly the largest buyers of American cottons.’90 Much to the chagrin of foreign dealers, the ‘Ambohimalaza’ cartel largely controlled the price and distribution of major legitimate

 Campbell, ‘Role of the London Missionary Society,’ Ch. 8.  Emmerton & Co., and Arnold, Hines & Co., Partner and Agency Records (hereafter: EH/EIS) Dawson to Ropes, Emmerton & Co, and Arnold, Hines & Co, Port Louis, 29 January 1884; EH/EIS Robinson to Hunter, 30 December 1874 and 1 October 1877; EH/EIS Robinson to Hankey, 29 October 1877, United States National Archives (USNA), Despatches of United States Consuls in Mozambique, 1854–98; Oliver, Madagascar, II, 175, 188–9. 87  Catat, Voyage à Madagascar, 242. 88  EH/EIS Ropes, Emmerton & Co, to Dawson, 13 November 1884; Madagascar Times II, 41 (15 October 1884), 376. 89  EH/EIS Laborde to Dawson, 20 June 1885. 90  EH/EIS Whitney to Ropes, Emmerton & Co, 1 May 1888; EH/EIS Dawson to Ropes, Emmerton & Co, 27 April 1890. 85 86

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commodities in the interior.91 For instance, from June to July 1885, Malagasy exporters accounted for 16.86 per cent to 31.85 per cent of hide shipments to the coast. This percentage rose when hide prices fell because, unlike foreign traders, they enjoyed privileged access to cheap porterage.92 The Ambohimalaza cartel used their quasi-monopoly over domestic distribution to effect: In April 1888, in the midst of a cottons glut, they stockpiled imported cottons in Tamatave in order to maintain prices in Antananarivo.93 Again, in June 1890, they held out for such high hide prices that foreign purchasers attempted to go directly to the sellers, one American firm complaining that ‘for two weeks past [Duder] has been obliged to go into the weekly market to buy direct from the hide dealers in order to break up a ‘boycott’ of the Antø [Antananarivo] middle men.’94 By 1883, an estimated 8000 salted, dried, and folded bullock hides were being despatched each month from Antananarivo to the coast. Exports fell from the mid-1880s as foreign hide purchasers co-operated to force purchase prices down and,95 although competition from both foreigners and Merina dealers was too great for agreements to last,96 prices had fallen dramatically by 1892: Hides. The trouble with this produce is at your end [i.e. the USA and Europe]. The low price here is causing the supply to fall off, as the people cannot afford to sell at $250 (our present price) per 100 lbs. at Antananarivo. Salt costs $4.50 to $5.00 for 100 lbs and it takes about 25 lbs to properly cure 100 lbs of Hides the way it is done here, hence all the hides we are now getting are inferior.97

A deficient transport and communications infrastructure constituted a major commercial obstacle as poor roads limited the volume of trade and added substantially to the time and cost of transport.98 Additional p ­ ayments for the 91  EH/EIS Laborde to Whitney, 28 June 1886 and 1 November 1886; EH/EIS Whitney to Ropes Emmerton & Co, 2 April 1888; EH/EIS Edward P.  Duder to Whitney, 10 August 1889. 92  EH/EIS Bachelder to Dawson, 20 June, 10 and 17 July 1885. 93  EH/EIS Whitney to Ropes, Emmerton & Co, 1 May 1888. 94  EH/EIS Dawson to Ropes, Emmerton & Co, 8 June 1890. 95  EH/EIS Ropes, Emmerton & Co, to Whitney, 3 May 1883. 96  EH/EIS Ryder to Ropes, Emmerton & Co, 6 January 1893; EH/EIS Whitney to Ropes, Emmerton & Co, and Arnold, Hines & Co, 14 March 1884. 97  EH/EIS Duder to Ropes, Emmerton & Co, 20 March 1893. 98  Grandidier, ‘Souvenirs,’ 32.

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hirer included passports (in 1884, they cost $0.24 each),99 vatsy (food money), the amount of which varied (generally from 9 to 26) according to the size of the porter convoys,100 lighterage fees (generally $1 a load), and port labour wages.101 Poor routes, porterage costs and rising international competition also debarred from external markets all but the most valuable low-bulk exports. Thus, transport costs constituted roughly 50 per cent of the price of plateau hides at Tamatave.102 Nevertheless, hide exports continued to grow in volume. One late 1890s French source, for example, claimed total annual Malagasy hide exports to be in the order of 200,000.103 The bullock, meat, and hide export trades from Merina controlled territory also inevitably suffered heavily during times of European conflict or trade wars with the Merina. For instance, a combined Franco-British naval attack on Tamatave in 1845 led the Merina court to ban trade with the British and French. This provoked an economic crisis on the Mascarenes, as ‘the commerce of Madagascar is indispensable to the prosperity, almost to the existence of Mauritius.’104 It was commented: For the seven years immediately preceding the rupture in 1845 the average value of imports from Madagascar was £52,760 [$263,800] per annum, and the average annual value of exports £22,560 [$112,800]: from the date of the suspension of trade the imports have averaged only £11,058 [$55,290] and the exports £4,236 [$21,180], showing a falling off of £41,702 [$208,510] in the imports and £18,324 [$91,620] in the exports, or a total annual diminution of £60,026 [$300,130].105 99  H.E.  Clark, ‘How we travel in Madagascar,’ Antananarivo Annual and Madagascar Magazine, 8 (1884), 342. 100  EH/EIS Laborde to Whitney, 29 November 1886. 101  EH/EIS Dawson to Ropes, Emmerton & Co, and Arnold, Hines & Co, 10 October 1884, and 25 December 1884; EH/EIS Laborde to Whitney, 15 November 1886. 102  For example: Transport costs from the interior constituted at Tamatave 52.8 per cent of the price of hides in September 1884 and 41.8 per cent in February 1887. See: EH/EIS Bachelder to Dawson, 11 September 1884; EH/EIS Dawson to Ropes, Emmerton & Co, and Arnold, Hines & Co, 25 December 1884; EH/EIS Whitney to Ropes, Emmerton & Co, and Arnold, Hines & Co, 6 February 1887. 103  In early 1884, one US commercial house alone was collecting 1000 hides a month in Antananarivo for export via Tamatave. See: EH/EIS Dawson to Ropes, Emmerton & Co, and Arnold, Hines & Co, 29 January 1884; Oliver, Madagascar, II, 175, 188–9; Foucart, ‘L’Etat du commerce à Madagascar,’ 89; HCPP ‘Foreign Trade’ (1876–1900). 104  South Australian Register (21 February 1846), 6. 105  Anon, ‘Resumption of trade between Mauritius and Madagascar,’ Colonial Times (21 Jan 1854), 2. See also: Letter from the Mauritius Association to Grey, Secretary for the Colonies, London, 28 October 1847, in The Standard (8 November 1847).

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Although Mascarene merchants managed to obtain some cattle from independent regions of West Madagascar, Mauritius merchants also imported cattle from other sources including the Cape of Good Hope, Natal, Persia, India, and, allegedly, Arabia.106 The crisis initially jeopardized the position of pro-Merina merchants such as Rontaunay who by the close of 1845 had in stock in his east coast factories, awaiting export, a minimum of 3000 bullocks and 7,257,478  kg of rice.107 Ranavalona resolved this in 1850 by granting Delastelle a monopoly of cattle exports in return for a $15,000 payment.108 Following the transfer by Mauritius merchants of a $15,000 indemnity to the Merina court in October 1853, commerce was re-opened.109 However, relations remained strained until 1861 when the liberalisation of foreign trade attracted to the east coast large numbers of foreign traders.110 In 1884, during the 1883–85 Franco-­ Merina War, hides comprised 98.42 per cent of the value of Imerina’s exports.111 Following the conflict, the Merina ceded Antseranana, their only north coast port, to the French who established there a slaughterhouse and meat factory serving primarily Réunion.112 On the independent western and southern coasts, foreign trade was dominated by resident Indian and Swahili traders whose middleman services most Mascarene, European, and American firms were obliged to use. The Indians, in particular, seized the commercial opportunities offered by an expanding international economy, and incorporated Madagascar into a trading empire that embraced the entire western Indian Ocean, from Bombay to Zanzibar, and then to Natal. From the late 1870s, the pastoral Bara and Sakalava also drove cattle to southwestern ports of Tulear, 106  Morning Chronicle (7 September 1849); Leicester Chronicle (24 January 1846); Launceston Examiner (8 January 1863); Manchester Times and Gazette (28 May 1847); Daily News (14 December 1849). 107  Maitland Mercury & Hunter River General Advertiser (9 September 1846). 108  Morning Chronicle (20 November 1850). 109  Ellis, Three Visits, 97. 110  Archives Nationales de Madagascar (hereafter: ANM) G.M Razi, ‘Sources d’histoire malgache aux Etats-Unis, 1792–1882,’ Colloque des historiens et juristes (6 September 1977), 12, 23; Jackson to West, c. 1845–51, in New England Merchants in Africa: A History Through Documents, 1802–1865, eds. Norman R. Bennett and George E. Brooks (Brookline: Boston University Press, 1965), 439–50; Raymond K.  Kent, ‘How France acquired Madagascar’ Tarikh 2, 4 (1969), 16. 111  Campbell, ‘Toamasina,’ 552. 112  Foucart, ‘L’Etat du commerce à Madagascar,’ 89.

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St. Augustin, Belo, and Soalara for shipment to South Africa, to replace stock depleted by disease and natural blights.113 The first Malagasy cattle imports reached Natal in 1875 and, although halted in 1876/77, 1879, and 1892, due to the fear of infection, rarely accounted for less than 80 per cent of Natal’s cattle imports from 1875 to 1909.114 Indeed, Madagascar was the sole source of Natal imports of oxen in 1878–80, 1884, 1890/91–1891/92 and 1904. Cattle mortality on the ten-day return trip was 9 per cent in the period 1878–81.115 Again, in the 1870s, international demand led to European and American traders competing fiercely for Malagasy hides, stimulating exports from all cattle regions.116 By the late 1870s, the coast below Cape St. André had become an important source: Maintirano hides, described in 1878 as ‘the very best equal to the best Tamatave,’117 were exported to Nosy Be and Mozambique118; and from the 1880s hides were shipped from the southwest to Natal where cattle disease also caused acute shortages of hides.119 By the late 1890s annual west coast hide exports were estimated to total about 33,600 (Table 7.2).120 113  Although some oxen were also purchased from Tamatave: Natal Archives: ms.722/4521 (1879), 723/4636 (1879), 723/4679 (1879), 724/4750 (1879), 726/4955 (1879), 733/5626 (1879), Natal Blue Books. 114  Natal Archives: ms.614/3825 (1877), ms.718/4170 (1878), 719/4258 (1879), 732/5586 (1879), 733/5746 (1879), 736/145 (1880). 115  Cattle mortality would have been far higher for cattle exported from the east coast of Madagascar which was between 23 and 30 direct sailing days from Natal and Cape Colony. See: Natal Archives: ms.722/4521 (1879), 723/4636 (1879), 723/4679 (1879), 724/4750 (1879), 726/4955 (1879), 733/5626 (1879), Natal Blue Books. 116  In 1877, Arnold Hines, chief American rival of Ropes, exported 600,000 lb of Malagasy hides, worth approximately $60,000; Peabody Museum of Salem (hereafter: PMS) acc.11.584 Hathorne, ‘Letterbook’ (1878–80): Hathorne to Arnold, Hines & Co, 13 September 1878. The following year, the major Merina west coast entrepôt of Marovoay was said to produce only hides. See: PMS Hathorne, ‘Letterbook’ (1878–80): Thompson to Hathorne, 27 November 1878, encl.1 in Hathorne to Bertram, 11 December 1878. 117  PMS Hathorne, ‘Letterbook’ (1878–80): Thompson to Hathorne, Majunga, 27 November 1878, encl.1 in Hathorne to Bertram, Zanzibar, 11 December 1878. 118  PMS Hathorne, ‘Letterbook’ (1878–80): Hathorne to Arnold, Hines & Co, 26 July 1878, Hathorne to Bertram, 26 July 1878, Hathorne to Thompson, Zanzibar, 10 December 1878, Hathorne to Arnold, Hines & Co, Zanzibar, 18 September 1878; Hathorne to Geo. Thompson, 14 November 1878; EH/EIS Ryder to Ropes, Emmerton & Co, and Arnold, Hines & Co, 15 April 1884. 119  Gwyn Campbell, ‘Disease, cattle and slaves: The development of trade between Natal and Madagascar, 1875–1904,’ African Economic History, 19 (1990–91), 105–33. 120  Nèple, Guide de l’Immigrant à Madagascar, II (Paris: A. Colin, 1899), 308.

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Table 7.2  Morondava: Exports in October 1879–October 1880, & 1882 ($ Malagasy) (Gwyn Campbell, ‘Toamasina (Tamatave) and the Growth of Foreign Trade in Imperial Madagascar, 1862–1895,’ in Figuring African Trade, eds. Gerhard Liesegang et al. (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1986), 551) Commodity

1879–80

% Total

1882

% Total

Hides Beef Live cattle Rice Ebony India rubber Other Grand total

170,000 15,400 1500 87,500 78,000 46,000 125,000 523,400

32.5 2.9 0.3 16.7 14.9 0.8 23.9

138,000 – – – 2000 100,000 63,000 603,000

22.9 – – – 0.3 16.6 10.5

Conclusion The trade in cattle, meat, and cattle by-products played a central role in the economic history of nineteenth-century Madagascar. The highland kingdom of Imerina, traditionally deficient in cattle, captured large herds as a result of military expansion from the late eighteenth century. After the Merina court agreed to a slave export ban in 1820, cattle and cattle products became the staple exports from imperial Merina territory, responding initially to demand from the Mascarenes for live bullocks and meat, and increasingly, notably in the late nineteenth century, to international demand for hides. Foreign trade faced many obstacles, including a poor transport infrastructure, generally high export duties, and European aggression, but continued to be vibrant until a sharp depression in 1892, accentuated by external military threats that ended in the French takeover of Madagascar in 1895.

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Razafintsalama, Adolphe. ‘Les funérailles royales en Isandra d’après les sources du XIXe siècle,’ in Les souverains de Madagascar, ed. Françoise Raison-Jourde. Paris: Karthala, 1983. Richardson, James. A New Malagasy-English Dictionary. Antananarivo: LMS, 1885. Savaron, C. ‘Contribution à l’histoire de l’Imerina’ in ‘Notes d’histoire malgache.’ Bulletin de l’Académie Malgache. 14 (1931). Sibree, James, ed. ‘Imerina and Antananarivo.’ Antananarivo Annual and Madagascar Magazine, 20 (1896). Sibree, James. ‘The Fandroana, or New Year’s Festival of the Malagasy.’ Antananarivo Annual and Madagascar Magazine, 24 (1900). Sibree, James. A Naturalist in Madagascar: A record of observation, experiences, and impressions made during a period of over fifty years’ intimate association with the natives and study of the animal & vegetable life of the island. London: Seeley, 1915. Sundström, Lars. The Exchange Economy of Pre-Colonial Tropical Africa. London: C. Hurst, 1974. Toth, Anthony. ‘Mauritius’ in Indian Ocean. Five Island Countries, Helen Chapin Metz. Washington: Library of Congress, 1994. Toussaint, Auguste. ‘Le trafic commercial entre les Mascareignes et Madagascar de 1773 à 1810.’ Annales de l’Université de Madagascar, (1966). Toussaint, Auguste. Histoire de l’île Maurice. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971. Tyson, P. D., W. Karien, K. Holmgren, and G. A. Heiss. ‘The Little Ice Age and medieval warming in South Africa.’ South African Journal of Science, 96 (2000). Valette, Jean. Études sur le règne de Radama I. Tananarive: Imprimerie Nationale, 1962. Valette, Jean. ‘Un mémoire de Rondeaux sur Madagascar (1809).’ Bulletin de l’Académie Malgache, 44, 2 (1966a). Valette, Jean. ed. Nils Bergsten, ‘Mémoire sur les moyens d’augmenter à Madagascar les revenus du gouvernement (1825).’ Bulletin de l’Académie Malgache, 44 (1966b). Valette, Jean. ‘Nouvelle note pour servir à l’étude des exportations de bœufs de Fort-Dauphin à Bourbon (1820).’ Bulletin de l’Académie Malgache, 50, 2 (1972). Verschuren, Dirk. ‘Decadal and century-scale climate variability in Tropical Africa during the past 2000 years,’ in Past Climate Variability through Europe and Africa, eds. R.W.  Battarbee, Françoise Gasse, and Catherine E.  Stickley. Dordrecht: Kluwer 2004. Wills, James. ‘Native products used in Malagasy industries.’ Antananarivo Annual and Madagascar Magazine, 9 (1885).

CHAPTER 8

Ayutthaya’s Seventeenth-Century Deerskin Trade in the Extended Eastern Indian Ocean and South China Sea Ilicia J. Sprey and Kenneth R. Hall

Introduction From early times, deerskins and other deer products were widely circulated in the East Asian oceanic world. Deerskins were used for clothing and military outfitting; other deer products, such as antlers, hoofs, and organs, were often used for medicinal purposes. For example, 2000 years ago deer antler ‘velvet’ was used to negate body ailments, and medicines derived from deer parts (lujiao) were used to cure kidney, spleen, and

I. J. Sprey (*) School of Arts, Sciences & Education, Ivy Tech Community College, Lafayette Campus, Lafayette, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] K. R. Hall Department of History, Ball State University, Muncie, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Chaiklin et al. (eds.), Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42595-1_8

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blood flow diseases in Chinese traditional medicine.1 In the seventeenth century, the deerskin trade across maritime east and southeast Asia reached such significant proportions that it permanently impacted deer populations in multiple parts of the region. This trade focused on mainland Southeast Asia (present day Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam) and Taiwan as the primary suppliers, with Japanese samurai and urban dwellers as the primary consumers.2 When European merchants arrived in the Indian Ocean World (IOW) in the sixteenth century, they brought few goods of local interest or profit with them, even though they actively sought high-value and internationally in-demand products from the region. They thus attempted to join, direct, and dominate existing commercial systems to make a profit. The deerskin trade was particularly notable in this context.3 Japanese merchants paid for imported deerskins in silver. The potential of payment in silver combined with knowledge of these profitable exchange opportunities encouraged first the Spanish and then the Dutch East India Company (VOC) to seek to dominate the deerskin trade. The VOC understood that the acquisition of Japanese silver could go far in sustaining their economic, political, and military presence in Southeast Asia by using it to obtain spices and other Asian regional commodities for shipment to Europe.

1  Y. C. Kong, ‘Deer: The ultimate medicinal animal (antler and deer parts in medicine) in the biology of deer production,’ The Royal Society of New Zealand Bulletin, 22 (1985), 311–24. 2  Regional herds included the Sika (Taiwan), Eld’s (Thailand and Cambodia), Brow Antler (Eld’s) (Burma), and Sambar (Philippines). Deer herds were free ranging; there is no documentation of creation of domesticated herds to meet the eastern Asian marketplace demand for skins. 3  Recent works related to deerskin trade in Asia include: Takashi Nakamura, ‘Produce and export of Taiwanese deerskins in the seventeenth century,’ Heian shidai Taiwan shiyanjiu, 1 (1997), 81–120; Yoko Nagazumi, ‘Formosan trade in the seventeenth century: With Dutch sources,’ Zhongguohai yang fa zhanshilun wen ji, 7 (1999), 37–57; Ryuto Shimada, ‘Siamese trade in agricultural products with Japan and China in the 18th century,’ in Intra-Asian trade and industrialization: Essays in memory of Yasukichi Yasuba, eds. A.J.H. Latham and Heita Kawakatsu (London: Routledge, 2009), 52–75; Wei-Chung Cheng, ‘Emergence of deerskin exports from Taiwan under VOC (1624–1642),’ Taiwan Historical Research, 24, 3 (September 2017), 1–48; P. Heyns, ‘Deer hunting in Formosa under the Dutch occupation,’ in Missionary Approaches and Linguistics in Mainland China and Taiwan, ed. Ku Wei—ying. Louvain Chinese Studies, no.10. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001), 59–100; Tonio Andrade, ‘Pirates, pelts, and promises: The Sino-Dutch colony of seventeenth-century Taiwan and the aboriginal village of Favorolang,’ The Journal of Asian Studies, 64, 2 (2005), 295–321.

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The volume of the deerskin trade in that era is broadly associated with ecological decline. For example, in Taiwan, overhunting and destruction of habitats through deforestation for timber led to the near extinction of indigenous deer by the 1630s; and in Hokkaido and northern Honshu, Japan, overhunting in the eighteenth century led to reduced deer stocks, which contributed to famine amongst Ainu populations who depended on venison to survive. However, similarly destructive patterns do not appear to have occurred in Ayutthaya or elsewhere in the Southeast Asian mainland. While free-roaming deer herds were hunted in hinterland Thai and neighbouring Khmer (Cambodian) lands, and supplied a portion of what was needed in Ayutthaya’s ports to trade in Japan, the Japanese demand for these hides was not a sufficiently dominant factor in the local economies to lead to overhunting.4 In Ayutthaya, hides could be used by farmers and labourers to pay local taxes to the regional governor, who then passed them on to the capital as part of his administrative area’s tax payment. Japanese middlemen resident in the Thai capital also contracted for hides from Thai and minority groups living in the countryside to meet the Japanese domestic demand. However, the existence of corvée labour and other ways for the Thai king’s subjects to pay taxes, earn cash, or buy goods meant that those hunting deer were not excessive in their pursuit of hides. Deer herds, therefore, remained at a sustainable level and do not appear to have ever come close to being significantly diminished on mainland southeast Asia, let alone driven to near extinction. While the focus on supplying deerskins in Ayutthaya and Khmer lands was clearly present, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the lack of significant pressure on Thai and Khmer domestic supply lines was due in large part to the fact that, while these mainland Southeast Asia herds were sizeable, they were not nearly of a comparable size to those herds found in Taiwan and in Japan.

4  Presently known records from Thai, Khmer, Viet, Japanese, and VOC sources do not allow the number or percentage of Thai, Khmer, and Viet domestically obtained hides in any year or period to be determined. However, it is possible to get a sense of what domestic Thai and Khmer herds contributed. In 1623, the VOC reported that the Japanese community in Ayutthaya supplied 160,000 hides gathered from multiple domestic and foreign sources to Japan, whereas in 1624, VOC representatives on board the Noort Holland bound to Ayutthaya were ordered to obtain 40,000 deerskins directly from that port separate from any effort in relation to Taiwan. See: George Vinal Smith, The Dutch in Seventeenth Century Thailand, (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University, 1977), 55–56.

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The Ayutthaya Deerskin Trade This study focuses on the shifting relationship between the Ayutthayan realm (present-day Thailand) and the Dutch VOC within the context of the lucrative eastern Asia deerskin trade. It seeks to understand the consequences and legacies of the seventeenth-century Southeast Asia deerskin trade that the VOC attempted to join, direct, and dominate, wherein the VOC eventually  became the dominant source of the deerskin trade in Japan based on their Taiwanese and wider Southeast Asian marketplace dominance. In a wider view, the focal deerskin trade is framed within the eastern Indian Ocean-South China Sea ‘borderless’ maritime network in the global pre-imperial age. This chapter argues that during the period in question, East Asian commercial exchanges transitioned from centring on an ‘open’ marketplace to being one where chartered European trading companies attempted to assert and dominate interregional commerce in specific high-profit commodities. In other words, in the c.1500–1800 era, the terms of the South Asian and wider Asian marketplace were dictated by local Asian merchants who had and often continued to exercise agency successfully, and an international merchant diaspora, which was increasingly participated in by European traders.5 Prior to the European colonial era, the Asian trading realm post-1500 was transitioning to one where, increasingly Southeast Asian state and military officials working for themselves and/or on behalf of their court-­ based superiors, became participants as traders or commercial patrons in an emerging eastern Asia marketing network.6 Widespread regional elite engagements in international trade subsidised the development of new cosmopolitan, urban, and political centres in Southeast Asia, such as Ayutthaya (Thailand/Siam), Phnom Penh (Cambodia), and Hội An (Vietnam). The regional trade in deerskins helped to shape the geo-­ political and economic realities of the extended China Sea and eastern IOW c.1500–1750. The trade’s late seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury collapse was tied to increasing VOC influence over maritime 5  Kenneth R.  Hall, ‘Revisionist study of cross-cultural commercial competition on the Vietnam coastline in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and its wider implications,’ Journal of World History, 24, 2 (2013), 71–105; Roderich Ptak and Dietmar Rothermund, eds., Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs in Asian Maritime Trade, c. 1400–1750 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991). 6  Kenneth R. Hall, ‘European outheast Asia encounters with Islamic expansionism, circa 1500–1700: Comparative case studies of Banten, Ayutthaya, and Banjarmasin in the wider Indian Ocean context,’ Journal of World History, 25, 2–3 (2014), 229–62.

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commerce in the southeastern IOW at the expense of Ayutthaya’s and other regional monarchies, and by Japan’s restriction on deerskin imports in favour of deerskins domestically provided by Ainu populations in Ezo (Hokkaido).

The Early Seventeenth-Century Eastern Indian Ocean Deerskin Trade In seventeenth-century Japan, the demand for deerskin was driven by apparel and accessory-related consumer demand primarily from the upper and economically rising social classes. Deerskin clothing represented high social and economic status, and was worn extensively by the warrior class, but also increasingly within the growing urban populace (chō nin).7 Tanned deerskins were worn under armour to pad hard edges and to absorb body moisture. The most desirable imported deerskins first were smoked, which both preserved them and made them supple. Artisans then applied coloured designs to the surface, finally sealing them with a thin layer of lacquer that preserved the decoration and made the hide water-resistant. The decorated and lacquered deerskins (kō shūinden) were created in the Edo period (1603–1868) in response to contemporary imported Indian silk designs. Kō shūinden were used to produce a variety of small and large items including the bags that held samurai body armour (shingen-bukuro).8 Additionally, deerskins were used to produce split-toed socks (tabi) worn by Japanese samurai, as well as by merchants and craftsmen who could afford them. Traditional divided trousers (hakama) and sleeveless or short-sleeved military jackets (jinbaori) worn over armour were often made of tanned deerskin that was also treated with protective lacquers so that they could withstand bad weather and the hardships of travel. Hip or thigh-length jackets with sleeves (haori) were worn daily by the elite males, but more elaborately decorated ones of tanned and lacquered deerskins and other fibres (such as silk and cotton) were sometimes worn for formal or ceremonial occasions. Small coin purses (kinchaku or zeni-ire) and 7  Donald H. Shively, ‘Sumptuary regulation and status in early Tokugawa Japan,’ Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 25 (1964–65), 123–64. 8  According to Nihon-shoki (The Chronicle of Japan), Book XXX, section 9, Silla introduced deer hide objects to Japan around the late seventh century. From the eighth century until the Edo period, designs were drawn or ‘smoked’ onto hides. See: Okada Akio, ‘Kinsei niokeru shikagawa no yunyū nikansuru kenkyū [A study of the importation of deer-hide in the early modern age in Japan]’, pt. 1, Shakai keizai shigaku 7, 7, 1937, 119–21.

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tobacco pouches made of tanned and lacquered deerskin were also common. Records related to the Nagasaki trade show that other hides and skins were sold in Japanese marketplaces, as the two most in-demand were stingray and shark skins.9 While stingray and shark skins, scented sappanwood, and tin were highly desired commodities, based on the volume of trade and prices paid in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, deerskins were the primary item of marketplace interest, and among the most important commodities for sale based on profitable gain. Throughout the seventeenth century, they sold on average for the same price per unit of weight as Malay camphor, musk, and lacquer.10 As regional and European maritime traders in the eastern IOW recognised the potential profits of participation in the growing interregional and international trade in variable commodities, the rulers of Southeast Asian polities encouraged the creation of more secure supply lines from their hinterlands to their ports and from there to the ports of Japan. This was the case with contemporary Thai Ayutthaya kings and others in mainland southeast Asia, who increasingly claimed monopolies over various in-demand commodities that moved through their ports’ marketplace. Port authorities collected trade-derived income from port fees, marketplace taxes, surcharges on the sale of goods, and indirectly from the purchasing of commodities to meet the daily living needs of merchants, ships’ crews, and others who participated in the market. These collections went into royal treasuries in Ayutthaya and served as the foundation for funding respective contemporary court-directed military  activities and territorial expansion. The Thai monarchy partnered with various resident and diaspora communities, including both the Japanese diaspora and the resident Chinese. Consequently, leaders of many of these diasporic and resident groups became important members of their respective port and court administrations. These arrangements  allowed for linguistic and cultural awareness  and generally  eased 9  Stingray skins were shipped via India’s east coast ports between Sao Tome and Vaippar across the Bay of Bengal to Ayutthaya’s ports for resale in Japan and China in the seventeenth century. Mid-seventeenth-century Sadraspatnam averaged an annual export of 2000–3000 skins, and Nagapatnam 4000–5000. (Markus P.M. Vink, Encounters on the Opposite Coast: The Dutch East India Company and the Nayaka State of Madurai in the seventeenth century (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 268–9. 10  In that year, 76 Chinese junks carried to Nagasaki 13,200 stingray skins that sold for 21.7 taels of silver/100 cattie (2864.4 taels) and 23,430 deerskins that sold for 30 taels/100 catties (7029 taels). In this case, and not knowing the relative quality of skins offered, the stingray skins sold for an average of 0.217 taels/piece and the deerskin for 0.3 taels/piece, or approximately 38.2 per cent more than the stingray skins. Robert LeRoy Innes, ‘The Door Ajar: Japan’s foreign trade in the seventeenth century’ (Unpublished PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1980), 668–70.

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commercial engagements, which further attracted regional, interregional, and international trade. Meanwhile, the court utilised its own domestic ships and seafarers—and those of the Chinese and Japanese merchant diaspora— to move goods to other regional and interregional ports-of-trade, harnessing these foreign resources in both legal and non-legal (i.e. piracy) activities to further its maritime trade and military agendas. For example, non-Thai ships and profits acquired in ports-of-trade financed the Ayutthaya court’s century-­ long expansion into the decaying Khmer Angkor realm to the northeast, its seventeenth-century invasion into the strategic Pattani region on the upper Malay Peninsula, and against other rival Bay of Bengal entities. By such efforts, Ayutthaya’s rulers gained control over expanded fiscal and human resources in the Gulf of Siam (now known as the Gulf of Thailand) and increased access to the Indian Ocean, China Sea, and Java Sea worlds.11 European traders competed with established Asian trading entities to meet Japan’s consumer demand for Southeast Asian products, including skins. Multi-ethnic Asian networks acquired skins by trading in a series of coastal and riverine intermediary ports on their way to or from the major secondary regional ports, such as upstream Ayutthaya. The most notable of coastal and riverine intermediate ports-of-trade were on the Malay Peninsula (Pattani, Mergui, Tenasserim), the Vietnam littoral’s central coastal Cochinchina region (Hội An and Đà Nẵng), the Mekong River upstream around Phnom Penh, and the upstream Chaophraya River port of Ayutthaya.12 The merchants in these ports-of-trade included Chinese, South Asians, Southeast Asians, and Middle Easterners, who had historical and long established commercial ties with ports and trader  networks between the Western Indian Ocean and Japan. For example, mixed ethnic Viet, Chams, and southern Chinese communities who settled in coastal Cochinchina and the Red River acted as ‘middle men’ between China and Japan during the conveyance of goods from port to port  from the late 11  For a comparable case study, see: Ilicia J. Sprey, ‘Religious and marketplace networking in the Central Vietnam littoral under the Nguyen Lords (17th–18th centuries),’ Comparative Religious and Trade Networks in Southeast Asia, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore, July 14, 2015. 12  Charles J. Wheeler, ‘Cross-Cultural Trade and Trans-Regional Networks in the Port of Hoi An: Maritime Vietnam in the early modern era’ (Unpublished PhD diss., Yale University, 2001); Ilicia J. Sprey, ‘Gunpowder, pirates, monks, and books,’ in Vanguards of Globalization: Port-cities from the classical to the modern, ed. Rila Mukherjee (Delhi: Primus Books, 2014), 281–320; Ilicia J. Sprey, ‘International maritime-based trade in the Thai realm of Ayutthaya in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries: Deer hide trade as an access point for reevaluation,’ in Subversive Sovereigns Across the Seas: Indian Ocean ports-of-trade from early historic times to late colonialism, eds. Kenneth R. Hall, Rila Mukherjee, and Suchandra Ghosh (Kolkata: The Asiatic Society, 2017), 109–45.

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Fig. 8.1  Eastern Indian Ocean trade, c. 1600–1850, ‘Map showing the early European agencies, factories & Settlements [sic] in the Indian archipelago, to illustrate [the] Report of the India Office Records by Fered; Chas, Danvers, 1887. Collection of the British Library

fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, when direct trade between China and Japan was prohibited by the Ming administration (1368–1644).13 These relations and their long-established trading relations initially provided Asian maritime traders advantages over incoming Europeans. Nevertheless, European trading companies aimed to overtake them to gain the silver and gold needed to support their military and trade efforts, and to dominate the trade of in-demand luxury goods in Europe. In the eyes of first the Spanish and then the Dutch, the deerskin trade, which held interregional importance and had the ability to generate great profits and access to Japanese silver, was an essential financial source with which to fund local efforts to buy Asian spices, ceramics, silk, and South Asian cotton textiles for shipment to Europe’s growing consumer markets (Fig. 8.1).14 13  Innes, ‘The Door Ajar,’ 64–6; Kenneth R. Hall, ‘Contested agencies of the Ming in the Java Sea, Straits of Melaka, and Bay of Bengal,’ in The Ming World, ed. Kenneth Swope (London: Palgrave, 2019), 425–42. 14  See: Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Vol. 1: Integration on the mainland: Southeast Asia in global context, c. 800–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1650, Volume One: The lands below the winds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

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Development of the Japan-Focused Deerskin Trade in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries The Spanish were the first Europeans to participate in the Japan-focused deerskin trade. They arrived in the Philippines in 1521, using Manila as an urban marketing base for their initial trade efforts in Southeast Asia. Spanish commerce focused on mainland China, and they initially used the Chinese and Sulu Sea (Philippines) maritime diasporas as their trade intermediaries with Japan.15 With access to the large deer herds in the Philippines, the Spanish were the first significant European purveyors of deerskin into the Japanese marketplace, the venison being sold to local consumers.16 When the Japanese bakufu, due to concerns over Spanish Christian proselytising and the potential of religion-inspired rebellion taking place, severed all diplomatic and commercial ties with Spain and the Spanish Philippines in 1624, Japanese merchants needed other regional deerskin suppliers.17 The Portuguese, who had established a port-of-trade presence on the southern China coastline at Macao in 1557, were not an option for this role, as their initial focus was on the acquisition of Asian porcelains and silk rather than hides. Thus, it was the Dutch, in the form of the VOC, who seized the opportunity to fill  this vacuum, and they became the most prominent European player in the deerskin trade for the Japanese. At the start of the seventeenth century, the VOC governors instructed its representatives and merchants in the IOW to identify and gain control over regional low-cost commodities that would provide maximum profit via regional resale in what was known as the Asian ‘country trade.’18 Their initial action in the mainland Southeast Asian context was the 1601 establishment of a factory at Pattani, on the Gulf of Thailand coastline. From 15  Cynthia Chia, ‘The butcher, the baker, and the carpenter: Chinese sojourners in the Spanish Philippines and their impact on Southern Fujian (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries),’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 49, 4 (2006), 509–34. 16  Agoo (in Pangasinan on the Island of Luzon) was a major source for deerskins and served as a port for Japanese shipping. See: Rosario Mendoza-Cortes, Pangasinan, 1572–1800 (Manila: University of the Philippines Press, 1974); Innes, ‘The Door Ajar,’ 54; Andrew Christian Peterson, ‘Making the first global trade route: The Southeast Asian Foundations of the Acapulco-Manila Galleon Trade, 1519–1650.’ (Unpublished PhD diss., University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 2014), 72; Robert R. Reed, Colonial Manila: The context of urbanism and process of morphogenesis (Berkeley: University of California, 1978), 27–32. 17  Innes, ‘The Door Ajar,’ 634–35; Peterson, ‘Making the first global trade route.’ 18  C.R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire: 1600–1800 (New York: Knopf, 1965).

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this maritime periphery, VOC operatives quickly gained access to pepper and other profitable regional commodities via the Thai Chaophraya River core to the north. Building on this initial base on the maritime edge of the Thai realm, the Dutch increasingly became active in the lower Chaophraya River, first by sending out trading expeditions, and then by the establishment of trading posts. In 1604, two Dutch independent koopmen (‘merchants’) Cornelis Specx (died c.1608) and Lambert Jacobsz. Heijn (1598–1636) arrived in Ayutthaya on their way to China to establish overland trade. Instead they met with the Thai king and court and explored the trade potentials of the Thai kingdom. In 1608, Heijn established a trading post in Ayutthaya, and in 1611 the Dutch VOC followed with a permanent factory upstream at Ayutthaya, which provided them with wider access to a variety of Thai export commodities, including deerskins, for shipment to Japan.19 The VOC’s entrance into the Japanese marketplace coincided with two early interlinked Tokugawa-era maritime-trade-related policies. The first required Japanese merchants to sail only on officially permitted shuinsen (Red Seal) licensed cargo vessels to specific ports.20 This helped institute the second policy, which was for the Japanese government to exercise a monopoly over trade and sources of goods that were imported into its marketplace.21 These Japanese policies were designed both to restrict silk imports that were damaging the profitability of the Japanese silk industry, and to keep Japanese silver in-country. However, they also had the effect of creating a potential shortfall in imports of Indian Ocean products, and came hard on the heels of Japan’s severing of ties between Japan and Spanish representatives in 1624. The VOC’s participation in the deerskin 19  In 1613, the first chief of the trading post was named Cornelis van Nijenrode, but until 1620, the VOC office in Ayutthaya was under the authority of the Pattani office, which at the time was considered more important in regional trade due to its profitability in relation to South Asian/Indian Ocean trade. Koloniaal Archief (hereafter: KA) VOC 966: Janssen at Pattani to Tonneman and van de Perre, 1 February 1608; Sprinckel at Pattani to Tonneman and van de Perre, 1 February 1608; and, Heijn to Spinckel at Pattani, 7 May 1608. Includes an extract of the Ayutthaya Daghregister (journal) for 5 May to 9 June 1608. 20  The shuinsen system is thought to have started by 1592, but the oldest existing permit dates to 1604. It ended in 1635. 21  Iwamoto Yoshiteru and Simon James Bytheway, ‘Japan’s official relations with Shamuro (Siam), 1599–1745: As revealed in the diplomatic records of the Tokugawa Shogunate,’ Journal of the Siam Society, 99 (2011), 102–4; Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, A History of Ayutthaya: Siam in the early modern world (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 124.

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trade from Ayutthaya from c.1610 on and from Taiwan from the 1620s to 1661, therefore, helped to mitigate the potential shortfall of deer hides in Japan. By 1635, when the Japanese government limited the number of foreign ships and goods that were annually allowed to trade in its ports under kaikin (general maritime restrictions), the Dutch had a well-­ established trading presence. Consistent high demand for deerskins amongst the samurai and the growing urban populace in the seventeenth century assured the ongoing exchange of Japanese silver for goods brought by traders based around the Indian Ocean. As a result, for most of the seventeenth century, deerskins became the most valuable commodity in the VOC’s eastern IOW trade.22 The Japanese did not rely upon the VOC to meet their entire demand for imported hides. Instead, they continued to purchase hides from the numerous pre-existing Asian maritime trading diasporas with whom they had established commercial relations. Since the late sixteenth century Japanese shuinsen ships had borne Japanese merchants to wider regional ports and marketplaces, including Formosa (Taiwan), Ayutthaya (Thailand), Khmer lands (Cambodia), Đai Việt, and Cochinchina (present-­ day northern and central Vietnam, respectively).23 By the 1620s, the Japanese diaspora often worked as intermediaries to meet Japan’s increasing demand for deerskins. The kingdom of Ayutthaya was especially well-­ positioned in this context. Ports that were or came under Ayutthaya’s control in this century include Mergui on the upper northeastern shoreline of the Bay of Bengal, and Tenasserim on the upper western Malay Peninsula on the Andaman Sea (present-day southern Myanmar). Increasingly, however, over the course of the seventeenth century, Thai maritime and long-distance trade networking within Southeast and East Asia ran through the upstream capital and port-city of Ayutthaya. This port-city had been home to a Japanese diasporic community of an estimated 1500 individuals since around 1600. Japanese merchants wrote to the leaders of Ayutthaya’s Japanese community regarding what they wanted them to purchase for them so that it could be stockpiled and ready to be loaded onto Japanese vessels when they arrived in the Thai port the  Michael S.  Laver, Japan’s Economy by Proxy in the Seventeenth Century: China, the Netherlands, and the Bakufu (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2008). 23  Adam Clulow, ‘Like lambs in Japan and devils outside their land: Diplomacy, violence, and Japanese merchants in Southeast Asia,’ Journal of World History, 24, 2 (2013), 335–58. 22

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next season.24 This Japanese diaspora and their networked representatives then used the ‘off-season’ as defined by monsoonal patterns (late July to April) to travel into Ayutthaya’s and Cambodia’s hinterlands to purchase these goods, and in the case of deerskins, prepare them. This meant categorising deerskins by size and quality, and then tanning them in the way that would earn the greatest profit when finally sold in Japan. The influence of the Japanese diaspora maritime network and its effects on VOC policy is seen in a 1623 VOC report. This report notes that Yamada Nagamasa (1590–1630), the head of Ayutthaya’s Japanese diaspora community and a member of the Thai king’s guards, organised the purchase and shipment of 160,000 deerskins via three Thai vessels sailing to Japan.25 The VOC agent stated that he could purchase only 8000 smaller deerskins at Ayutthaya as Yamada had essentially locked him out of the market by contracting with Thai hunters and middlemen to acquire the majority of the previous hunting season’s skins, as well as by acquiring skins from other sources.26 Dutch records from the early 1620s are also filled with numerous reports that display the frustration of the VOC’s agents at being unable to acquire large quantities of Thai deerskins, the generally poor quality of those they could purchase, and at being forced to pay more than Yamada’s and other buyers for what little they could buy from intermediaries. Consequently, the VOC decided to implement a more aggressive approach to this trade. Its leadership in Batavia (present-­ day Jakarta) expanded the geographical scope of the VOC’s influence on the deerskin trade by turning to Taiwan’s deer herds from 1624 onwards as its primary source, and by placing demands on its representatives in Ayutthaya to provide more and higher-quality skins. In 1624, for example, one set of VOC’s representatives bound for Ayutthaya were ordered to obtain 40,000 deerskins, which represented a proposed 500 per cent

24  Iwao Seiichi, ‘Japanese foreign trade in the 16th and 17th centuries,’ Acta Asiatica, 30 (1976), 10; Shimada, ‘Siamese trade in agricultural products,’ 53. 25  Iwamoto Yoshiteru, ‘Yamada Nagamasa and his relations with Siam,’ Journal of the Siam Society, 95 (2007), 73–84. 26  KA VOC 1080 fol. 379r Leonard Camps to Pietr de Carpentier, 5 October 1623; Nederlandse Factorij in Japan (Archive of the Dutch Factory in Japan; hereafter: NFJ) 482 fol. 14 Letter to Pieter de Carpentier, 20 December 1623; Okada Akio, ‘Kinsei ni okeru shuyō na yunyū busshi ni tsuite’ [Major imported commodities in the early years of the early modern period],’ in Tōzai koshōshi ron [Historical studies of the East and the West], I, ed. Shigakkai (Tokyo: Fuzanbo, 1939), 583.

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increase on what they had been able to buy the previous year.27 Such a demand necessitated increasing their level of influence in the region at the expense of the Japanese trading diaspora and their locally networked contractors.

The VOC in Ayutthaya Records of the number of annual Dutch deerskin exports are patchy and, in some cases, unreliable  and inconsistent. For example, in 1625, the Dutch Governor General at Batavia, Peter de Carpentier, reported to the VOC board of directors that 250,000 deerskins annually were being exported on Dutch ships from Ayutthaya and Taiwan to Japan. This appears to have been an over-estimation based on regional figures.28 In 1624, Pieter van der Elst was sent as the permanent director of the Ayutthaya factory with revised instructions to provide 60,000 deer hides from Ayutthaya and neighboring lands; he was sufficiently successful that in 1626 and in the autumn of 1627 respectively, 46,000 and 97,875 hides were shipped.29 The difference between figures listed in instructions, regional figures of what was shipped and the one provided by the Dutch Governor General might be explained, at least in part, by differences in definition. It is unknown whether entire hides or individual pieces were being referenced, as both of these approaches were used as counting methods at the time, and whether other hides, such as stingray (which the local factory had been ordered to procure for the Japanese market), were included.  Smith, The Dutch in Seventeenth Century Thailand, 55–6; Pieter van Dam, Beschryvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie, eds. Frederik Willem Stapel and Carel Wessel Theodorus van Boetzelaer, (’s-Gravenhage: Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën, 1927–54), Boek II, Deel 1, 429; Xing Hang, Conflict and Commerce in Maritime East Asia: The Zheng family and the shaping of the modern world, c. 1620–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 173–74; Kenneth R. Hall, ‘The coming of the west: European Cambodian marketplace connectivity, 1500–1800,’ in Cambodia and the West, 1500–2000, ed. T.O.  Smith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 7–36. 28  W. Ph. Coolhaas, ed., General Missiven van Gouverneurs-General en Raden aan Heren XVII der Verendigde Oostindische Compagnie, 5 volumes (The Hague: Rijks Geschiedkundige Publication, 1960), Deel I: 1610–1638, Jan. 17, 1625. 29  Smith, The Dutch in Seventeenth Century Thailand, 55; KA VOC 854 fol. 61 Batavia, 10 May 1627; NFJ 482, fol. 272, 1 October 1627. 27

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The bulk of the skins the VOC acquired in the mid-1620s came from outside of Ayutthaya, most notably from Taiwan. While clearly the VOC’s ability to gain a foothold in Ayutthaya’s deerskin market was growing as evidenced by the increase from 1624 to 1627, there were also concerns expressed by VOC representatives in Japan regarding the quality and preparation of skins procured from Ayutthaya. On 30 November 1624, Jan van Haesel, the VOC merchant at Firando (Hirado), complained about the shipment of Thai procured deerskins to the Batavia-based Governor General of the Dutch East Indies: The deerskins were very small and all bitten by worms and cockroaches; I think it is because of the long journey. More than 100 pieces were sold for merely 1 tael per 100 pieces. Anyone can easily tell the differences when you see the deerskins brought by the Japanese junks that were ready to sell in the warehouse, which were cleaned and packed neatly, otherwise the Japanese buyers would not pay for them. … In the future it is very necessary to mark the deerskins to show how many pieces are in one pack. Besides the marks of the barigos [quality classifications], each kind of skins should be marked … otherwise, it would cost us great efforts to do it, especially when the sorting is so bad and they can hardly be accepted.30

The inferior quality and preparation of the Dutch-supplied deerskins resulted in their being forced to sell their wares at significantly lower prices than their competitors at Firando. Van Hessel reported that the Japanese merchants were selling deerskins for 35–36 taels/hundred while the Dutch were forced to sell what they could for 25.5 taels/hundred—and, even so, much of the Dutch stock reportedly went unsold. Thus, the Dutch received approximately 30 per cent less for the skins they provided than what was paid to their rivals. As imperfect as the first significant cargo of Dutch deerskins exported from Ayutthaya to Japan was, the VOC’s success at being able to obtain and ship deerskins to Japan at all gave them sufficient insight into the deerskin trade’s potential for providing future profits. The export of deerskins from Taiwan is important in this context. Taiwan’s relative proximity versus Ayutthaya’s greater distance to Japan meant that deerskins from Taiwan were less likely to suffer physical damage during transit. Japanese merchants and their representatives in Taiwan were already purchasing deer hides there for silver, having moved by the 1620s beyond the earlier pattern of  NFJ 482 fol. 32. Missive from Japan to Pieter de Carpentier, 30 November 1624.

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bartering for skins with daily use commodities, such as salt, rice, and iron. The average price paid for Taiwanese deerhides in Japanese silver in the early 1620s was 9–10 taels per hundred pieces of hide. To boost this trade, in 1625, the VOC approved the use of Japanese silver by its merchants in Taiwan to buy deerskins. The VOC representatives’ access to silver as a trade commodity gave them an advantage over some of their marketplace rivals because of the strong demand for silver in China, and amongst Taiwanese traders. This approach of buying hides and other goods with silver was soon after introduced in Ayutthaya, with the hope that the inclusion of silver in trade negotiations there would allow the Dutch to obtain significantly more deerskins. In response, Chinese diasporic competitors also began to use silver in exchange for Ayutthaya-­procured deerskins. By 1626, this increased exchange of silver for deerskins permanently altered the ways in which the regional deerskin trade was conducted. The Dutch transition to purchasing deerskins with silver, however, did not immediately alter their own market experience, as the quality of deerskins they were able to buy did not  begin to slowly improve until the 1630s.31 This was the same period in which overhunting in Taiwan was significantly and negatively impacting the VOC’s ability to supply a sufficient quantity of skins to Japan to meet both consumer demand and VOC governors’ expectations of these trading posts. While intended to preserve Taiwan’s deer herds with an eye to long-term trade, the locally-imposed Dutch restrictions on deer hunting hindered the VOC’s immediate ability in the 1630s–1640s to supply sufficient quantities of skins to Japan. The VOC’s response to this problem was to seek a monopoly on deerskin exports from Ayutthaya through ambassadorial missions to the Thai court. However, just as with the increasing use of silver as a currency, immediate successes from these attempts were limited. Dutch rights or access to deerskins did not change in the 1630s–1640s, despite a short-lived and ill-­ enforced agreement granted by the Thai king in 1634 that the Dutch could have a monopoly on purchasing that commodity. Another deer skin-related monopoly ‘in name only’ was achieved with the accession of King Narai (r. 1656–1688) to Ayutthaya’s throne in 31  In 1633, Ayutthaya was only able to supply 11,725 deerskins for sale in Nagasaki, but by 1638, 120,000–130,000 deer hides were reported as being exported to Japan by the VOC representative in Ayutthaya. See: KA VOC 113 fol. 344v. Joost Schoten at Siam to Hendrick Brouwer, 8 July 1633; Chris Baker, Dhiravat na Pomberja, Alfons van der Kraan, and David K. Wyatt, eds. Van Vliet’s Siam (Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 2005), 170–71.

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1656. Narai was eager to expand Ayutthaya’s international trade with the wider Bay of Bengal region, the Middle East, and Western Europe. He dispatched political and economic diplomacy missions to India, Persia, The Netherlands, France, and England. The international response was mixed. The English East India Company (EIC), which had been present briefly in Ayutthaya from 1612 to 1623, re-opened an office in 1659 only to close it in 1678, choosing instead to focus on its India factories. The French Compagnie des Indes Orientales (French East India Company) only had an Ayutthaya office between 1680 and 1699, and it was noted by its own leadership and others as being understaffed and under-financed throughout its brief existence.32 This left Narai with only the Dutch as viable partners in his international plans. As a result, and coupled with military failures and other economic pressures, in 1664 Narai conceded to the Dutch decades-long requests for a monopoly on his kingdom’s deerskin exports by way of a treaty. Again, however, the signing of monopoly rights in that year had a limited effect on Dutch marketplace experiences. On the one hand, King Narai’s designs on the expansion of Ayutthaya’s participation in international maritime commercial trade temporarily improved the VOC’s access to Thai deer hides. The year of Narai’s accession, 1656, was the most productive year of Dutch deerskin exports to Japan. In that year, the VOC shipped 195,576 hides combined from its Asian sources, including those of Ayutthaya.33 And between 1664 and 1694, the VOC exported a total of 1,453,000 deer hides from Ayutthaya.34 This  increase in trade took place despite the 1664 monopoly not being adhered to. Almost as soon as the treaty of 1664 was concluded, the king, his officials, and Thai merchants acting on his behalf regularly sold sizeable quantities of deerskins to Dutch competitors, most notably to Chinese traders.35 Thai officials found that doing so maximised the king’s profits, prevented the Dutch from dominating the marketplace, and prevented the king from becoming financially or otherwise dependent upon the Dutch. The Dutch 32  Michael Smithies, Three Military Accounts of the 1688 “Revolution” in Siam, Itineria Asiatica (Bangkok: Orchid Press, 2002). 33  Yamawaki Teijiro, Nagasaki no Orandashō kan (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1980), 79. 34  Smith, The Dutch in Seventeenth-Century Thailand, 80. 35  Kurihara Fukuya, ‘17, 18 seiki no Nihon Shamu bō eki nitsuite’ (‘On the trade between Japan and Siam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’), Tōkyo joshi daigaku shakaigakkai kiyō: Keizai to Shakai, 22 (1994), 16.

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experience of having ‘official’ monopolies granted only to be simultaneously and deliberately undermined by the monarch continued throughout the rest of the seventeenth century.

Ayutthaya’s Agency over the Deerskin Trade Since the foundation of the kingdom in 1351, Ayutthaya’s ports had slowly evolved into urban centres that had links across the IOW and the South China Sea. Until its collapse in 1767, two core concerns pervaded much of Ayutthaya’s history: Confronting the presence of hostile Burmese and Cambodian polities on its peripheries, and its own territorial expansionist ambitions to gain more human and economic resources by which to support itself. Trade of locally resourced raw goods (e.g. fragrant woods, timber, and animal products) and the intermediate importing of valuable finished goods, such as Indian cloth (cotton and silk), sappanwood, tin, lead, saltpetre, and deerskins to then resell to other Asian markets further east were crucial factors in addressing both of these concerns, particularly in the seventeenth century. They both brought income and potential military allies to Ayutthaya’s ports. Additionally, the height of the deerskin trade in the seventeenth century occurred alongside a growth in European influence in the region. It is in this context that the deerskin trade is a useful barometer to understand how Ayutthaya dealt with ongoing concerns about its peripheries, resources, and its people, while attempting to integrate the newly arrived European trading companies into a mutually beneficial partnership in its ports of trade. The upstream port of Ayutthaya, its immediate surrounding lands, and the kingdom’s other ports-of-trade were cosmopolitan, international, and ambitious in character. They served as temporary or permanent residences to the diverse multi-cultural populations involved in its commercial life. Non-Thai populations living in Ayutthaya’s ports included Japanese, Chinese, Malays, Chams, South Asians, Turks, and Arabs who were permanently resident or transiting based on the seasonal monsoons. Each ethnic group played an important role in Ayutthaya’s commercial and cultural growth. Due to their linguistic and cultural knowledge and noted skills in marketplace negotiations, Thai women were prominent buyers of goods in the hinterlands for their non-Thai husbands, who might be transient, diasporic, or resident commercial middlemen or traders, who then

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sold them downstream marketplaces.36 As each commercial or foreign diaspora group arriving at the port and capital city of Ayutthaya requested crown land on which to establish either a trading post or a community, the Thai king granted them a designated land sector within which they could build residences and warehouses. Each such group was granted the right to speak his/her preferred language, follow their own diverse customs, and have their own local leaders, so long as they obeyed the king’s laws. For example, the Japanese diaspora community was located south of the city along the Chaophraya River’s eastern bank. This residency was directly south of the VOC’s lodge and the English East India Company’s factory. Directly across the river the Portuguese, Chinese, Malay, and mixed Vietnamese, Cambodian, Cham, and Burma diasporas had residential clusters  (Fig.  8.2). Each ethnic group might have an economic or occupational specialisation that benefitted the city, which made them additionally welcomed by the Thai king. For instance, many of the Japanese diaspora community acted as local buyers for Japanese ships, and they travelled into the hinterland to negotiate with hunters to provide deerskins and other forest products. These products were seasonally collected and taken to Ayutthaya, where the Japanese tanned, prepared, and bundled deerskins in a manner that increased their value to both Japanese merchants and to their eventual consumers. They were then stored in godowns until the arrival of shuinsen or other chartered ships, which were charged with transporting them to Japan. Additionally, members of the Chinese diaspora community were suppliers of domestic and interregional goods for sale, and served in the Thai king’s military forces.37 The Viet, Chams, and Chinese merchant diaspora from East coast Cochinchina acted as intermediary buyers and sellers who brought or received a variety of acquired goods to the Ayutthaya marketplace, including deerskins that were shipped to Japan via the central Vietnamese coastal port of Hội An. Japanese consumer demand for deerskins and the VOC’s increasing use of silver as currency beginning in the 1620s contributed to Ayutthaya’s kings becoming increasingly interested in the deerskin trade. It therefore became essential that enough deer hides be found to keep Japanese silver 36  Alexander Hamilton, New Account of the East Indies, ed. Justin Corfield and Ian Morson (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), 457. 37  Craig, A.  Lockard, “Sea common to all’: Maritime frontiers, port cities, and Chinese traders in the Southeast Asian age of commerce, ca. 1400–1750,’ Journal of World History, 21, 2 (2010), 243.

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Fig. 8.2  French map of Ayutthaya (1686) showing the various resident communities. From: ‘A Map of the City of Siam,’ in La Loubère, A New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam (London: Thomas Horne, Francis Saunders, and Thomas Bennet, 1693), 7

flowing into royal coffers. Several domestic policies were created, aimed at both rural and hinterland populations and their local administrators. The French diplomat Simon La Loubère, sent to Siam by Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715), noted that commoners in the hinterlands provided corvée labour by supplying high-demand commodities to the crown, especially deerskins.38 Similarly, regional governors could pay taxes-in-kind by procuring deerskins.39 The rural population increasingly participated in the deerskin trade over the seventeenth century, seasonally hunting deer in the forest and open plains areas, as the marketplace  transitioned from one  Simon de la Loubère, Du Royaume de Siam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 49.  See: Kennon Breazeale, ‘Thai maritime trade and the ministry responsible’ in From Japan to Arabia: Ayutthaya’s maritime relations with Asia, ed. Kennon Breazeale (Bangkok: The Foundation for the Promotion of Social Sciences and Humanities Textbooks Project, 1999), 1–54. 38 39

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based on a bartering system to one driven by use of currency.40 These integrated approaches to procuring deerskins were part of an upstream-­ downstream interdependent relationship that provided raw products from the hinterland for Ayutthaya’s marketplace.41 At the same time, the marketplace’s need for currency (notably, silver) solidified a transition towards a new stage in the deerskin trade that enriched Ayutthaya’s kings. The institutionalisation of deerskin procurement and trade had the potential to infringe on profitability, especially when political control was prioritised. Evidence for this firstly comes from the reign of King Prasat Thong (r. 1629–1656). In 1630, the king sought retribution against the Japanese community resident in Ayutthaya whose leader, Yamada Nagamasa, two years previously had supported a rival claimant to the throne. That year, the king unleashed a force of 4000 Chinese soldiers against the Japanese resident in Ayutthaya looking to annihilate them. Warned ahead of time, the majority of the Japanese fled to Cambodia,42 taking with them their trade network relationships with hinterland hunters and with Japan-based merchants, as well as their skills in preparing deerskins for the Japanese market.43 The Japanese diaspora did not return to Ayutthaya until 1633, when only 75–80 families (approximately 300–400 individuals) of the original group returned. The absence of the Japanese from Ayutthaya for four trading seasons had a significant impact on the number of deerskins available to be shipped from there to Japan. In 1630–1632 Ayutthaya’s annual export of hides ranged from 150,000 to 200,000 as pieces obtained and prepared prior to the 1630 exodus and

40  Baker et  al. eds., Van Vliet’s Siam, 121; Baker and Phongpaichit, A History of Ayutthaya, 140. 41  For a general overview of how upstream-downstream relationships worked in this region, see: Kenneth R. Hall, ‘Ports-of-trade, maritime diasporas, and networks of trade and cultural integration in the Bay of Bengal region of the Indian Ocean: c. 1300–1500,’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 53 (2010), 109–45. 42  An unknown number of the Japanese refugees from Ayutthaya settled in Quinam and worked to strengthen the Cambodia-Japan trade in deerskins. In 1639, a trading arrangement between the Khmer king and the VOC allowed the later to purchase 125,083 deerskins. See: Wei-Chung, ‘Emergence of deerskin exports,’ 32; Hendrik P.N. Muller, ed., De Oost-indische Compagnie in Cambodja en Laos: versameling van bescheiden van 1636 tot 1670 (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1917), 141. 43  H.T. Colenbrander, ed. Dagh-Register Gehoudenint Casteel Batavia van Passerendedaerter Plaetseals over Geheel Nederlandts-India, II (1631–1634) (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1898), 53.

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stored in the seized local Japanese warehouses were still available for sale.44 By 1633, when this stockpile was gone, Ayutthaya was only able to accumulate 11,725 skins from its hinterland sources to send to Nagasaki.45 There also were international political and economic consequences to the Japanese community’s 1630 exodus. In 1634, the Japanese Shogun, for the first time officially acknowledged the reports of violence against Japanese residents of Ayutthaya initiated by the Thai king  in 1630. In retribution for this attack against them, the Shogun declared there would be no more shuinsen licenses issued to sail to Ayutthaya. His action was both political and economic, as it fell neatly into line with the soon-to-be-­ established Japanese sakoku or kaikin (maritime prohibitions) policies of 1635, by which Japan temporarily closed its borders to foreigners. In 1636, the Thai king sent an embassy to Japan to re-establish direct trade, but this goal was not achieved until 1647.46 Nevertheless, in common with other Indian Ocean and South China Sea rulers in this period, exercising political and military agency against potentially problematic communities or traders was often  seen as a necessity, even if it infringed on trade and resulted in loss of profits.47 Further evidence for this comes from actions taken against Ayutthaya’s neighbours. In 1634, tensions among Ayutthaya, Burma, and Cambodia were heightened due to territorial disputes and claims to tribute. Seeking to recover export-related profits that were lost in the absence of shuinsen vessels in Thai ports and facing military pressures on its peripheries, in 1634 Prasat Thong briefly granted the Dutch a monopoly on the deerskin trade from his kingdom to Japan. He aimed to boost trade and secure Dutch military assistance in the form of land-based and maritime forces against regional territorial threats. However, the six large vessels the Dutch  had promised  to send to assist the 50,000-man Thai army in its fight against the Sultanate of Pattani arrived more than a week after the  KA VOC 1113 fol. 347r. Joost Schotenuijt to Pieter van Santen, July 1633.  KA VOC 1113, fol. 344v. Joost Schouten to Hendrick Brouwer, 8 July 1633. 46  Dhivarat na Pombejra, ‘Ayutthaya at the end of the Seventeenth Century: Was There a Shift to Isolation?,’ Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, power, and belief, ed. Anthony Reid (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), 266. 47  Loss of profits from the deerskin trade was offset by royal junks being sent to both India and China from the 1630s on. By 1684, there was an average of one royal junk to Surat, five or six to China, one to Macao. Of the 234 junks that left Ayutthaya’s ports from 1629 to 1694, 153 belonged to the king or members of his family. See: Baker and Phongpaichit, A History of Ayutthaya, 139. 44 45

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Thais had left Pattani. The Thai king subsequently revoked the monopoly at year’s end. Instead, he offered (and the Dutch accepted) a grant of land to establish a factory in Ayutthaya, whose output neatly paired with Fort Zeelandia, their new prominent trading post in Taiwan.48 In the aftermath of the failed 1634 Dutch monopoly, the Chinese diaspora were the VOC’s best-organised non-Thai collaborators for the deerskins that the Thai procured from domestic and regional sources.49 The ability of Ayutthaya’s king to use the Chinese presence as both maritime and overland traders to keep the Dutch from dominating the regional deerskin trade was a source of ongoing aggravation for the VOC. In 1637, for example, the VOC resident chief in Taiwan reported to Batavia that he was unable to send more than 61,000 deerskins to Japan from Siam, due to a complete lack of cooperation from Ayutthaya’s political administration.50 Things grew more confrontational among the Dutch, Chinese, and Thai when by 1661 almost all Chinese junks travelling from Ayutthaya to Japan carried  goods that belonged to the king, members of his family, government officials, or merchants authorised as the king’s agents.51 The commercial relationship between Ayutthaya’s kings and Chinese traders who transported goods to Japan and elsewhere strengthened the kings’ authority over their territory, its products, and marketplaces in a way that a relationship with the VOC could not.52 By the middle of the seventeenth century, Dutch agents grew tired of what they considered unfair competition in trade.53 Hostilities escalated in 1661, when the Dutch flyboat Het Rode Hert seized a Portuguese ship near Hainan off the coasts of Macao and Canton that had been outfitted by King Narai, and which was carrying trade goods belonging to him. Narai claimed an indemnity from the VOC for the lost property and received 84,000 florins in compensation. The following year, to further 48  KA VOC 1030 ‘Ordinance defining customary feeds and the granting of land in Ayutthaya for a factory as decreed by the king 11 August 1634.’ 49  Smith, The Dutch in Seventeenth-Century Thailand, 78. 50  NFJ 483 fol. 333. Missive, 1 December 1637. 51  Iwao Seiichi, ‘Reopening of the diplomatic and commercial relations between Japan and Siam during the Tokugawa Period,’ Acta Asiatica, 4 (1963), 29; Pombeijra, ‘Ayutthaya at the end of the seventeenth century,’ 260–3. 52  Ryuto Shimada, ‘Economic links with Ayutthaya: Changes in networks between Japan, China, and Siam in the early modern period,’ Itinerario, 37, 3 (2013), 92–104. 53  John Anderson, English intercourse with Siam in the seventeenth century (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1890), 253.

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expand royal revenues, Narai introduced a royal monopoly that required all goods intended for sale in Japan to be sold to the crown before they were exported. The result was marketplace inflation of rice and various commodities sold to the Dutch and others for non-domestic sale and consumption. Whether done as a deliberate response to this new policy or as an unfortunate coincidence, that same year the Dutch seized another of Narai’s vessels at Pulo Ai (Banda Islands). In retaliation the Thai king used Thai and Chinese military forces at his disposal to raid the Dutch lodge in Ayutthaya. The VOC’s acting-factor there, Enoch Poolvoet, closed the factory and withdrew with his men and stores to Batavia. Seeking retribution, the Dutch deployed three military vessels to blockade the lower Chaophraya River, which prevented the Chinese and other traders from travelling upriver to Ayutthaya’s ports-of-trade or riverine markets. The resulting economic pressures forced King Narai to sign the Treaty of 1664, which among other concessions, restored the Dutch monopoly on deerskin exports.54 Even though this monopoly was never absolute in practice—Chinese traders remained prominent maritime deerskin traders in Ayutthaya throughout king Narai’s reign—at the time, it established the VOC as the most prominent exporter of Ayutthaya’s deerskins.

The Final Years of Ayutthaya’s Deerskin Export Trade After King Narai’s death in 1688, subsequent kings attempted to re-­ establish Ayutthaya’s prominence as a maritime supplier of deerskins for the Japanese market-place, but they were decreasingly successful in doing so. King Phetracha (r. 1688–1703) ended the ‘official’ Dutch monopoly on deerskins, while allowing them to still purchase a significant portion of what was available in his ports. The rest were sold primarily but not exclusively to the Chinese to maximise the crown’s related profits. The loss of the monopoly, incomplete as it was, both undercut the Dutch in the Japanese marketplace and re-introduced serious competition for the VOC relative to the Japan trade. Two external factors undermined the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-­century Ayutthaya’s kings’ efforts regarding their influence 54  Dhiravat na Pombejra, Court, Company, and Campong: Essays on the VOC presence in Ayutthaya (Bangkok: Ayutthaya Historical Study Centre, 1992), 27. For the text of the treaty, see: Smith, The Dutch in Seventeenth Century Thailand, 138–141.

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over the deerskin trade. The first factor was that the Japanese Tokugawa government increasingly sought ways to keep its precious metals, particularly silver, from flowing outwards to pay for imports. As early as 1604, it had granted the Matsumae merchant family a monopoly to trade with the Ainu people of northern Hokkaido and Honshu for deerskins and other products.55 Encouragement of domestic sourcing of deerskins grew and proved effective by the closing decades of the seventeenth century. Kurihara Fukuya has shown the only three Chinese junks to sail from Ayutthaya to Japan in 1690 carried a combined 142 deer hides, 1560 stingray skins, and 30 goat hides.56 In 1750, Japan imported only 860 hides, and by 1760, not a single one could be found listed on the manifest of any Chinese junk making port at Nagasaki. Thus, while the Japanese domestic consumer demand for deer hide products had not altered significantly, by the middle of the eighteenth century there was virtually no demand for imported deerskins. The second factor negating the Thai monarchs’ efforts related to the VOC’s retributive response to the ending of their monopoly in 1688. In 1689–1690, the VOC deliberately sold more than 100,000 deerskins from Ayutthaya in the Japanese marketplace at extremely low prices. Reducing the value of deerskins by such an act meant that any control that the Ayutthaya king managed to re-establish over his realm’s trade in deerskins would not be profitable. The decreasing value of the IOW’s deerskin trade resulted from both Tokugawa policies to meet consistent domestic demand with domestic supplies and by the VOC’s own reductive actions in the early eighteenth century. The export/import markets relative to deerskins in the IOW never recovered. This development, however, had no appreciable effect on the VOC’s wider export economy, as by then the Company had diversified, particularly in the period from 1688 to 1710, away from deerskins. They filled that void with other commodities, including tin, lead, South Asian cotton textiles, and Indonesian Archipelago-­produced pepper and spices that provided new or growing profitable opportunities.57 55  Brett L. Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 118–121. 56  Kurihara, ‘17, 18 seiki no Nihon,’ 16. 57  Kenneth R. Hall, ‘Textile reorientations: The manufacture and trade of cottons in Java c. 1600–1850’ in Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean, An Ocean of Cloth, eds. Pedro Machado, Sarah Fee, and Gwyn Campbell (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2018), 181–208; Pombejra, ‘Ayutthaya at the end of the seventeenth

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Conclusion The deerskin trade was a crucial facet of the relationship between Ayutthaya’s kings and the VOC during the seventeenth century. It was a significant source of income, most notably in Japanese silver, for Ayutthaya’s marketplace economy. The ability of most of Ayutthaya’s monarchs to avoid granting the Dutch a deerskin monopoly in absolute terms was a powerful example of effective local agency against European encroachments. Only when confronted by changing geo-political realities in 1634 and again in 1664 did Ayutthaya’s kings diverge from policies that maintained their economic independence at the heart of the deerskin trade. Even then, there were broader political motivations at play that led the Thai kings to grant to the Dutch, however temporarily, a monopoly on deerskin sales. In 1634, the Thai monarch sought the Dutch as a military ally against the rebellious southern Sultanate of Pattani, but when the Dutch failed to arrive on time, the monopoly was voided and substituted with something less ‘costly’ to the Thai crown—the granting of land to the VOC to build a factory to encourage mutually beneficial trade. Similarly, while the 1664 monopoly was instituted as the result of a VOC-­ imposed economic blockade, the monopoly was never absolute in practice and appears to have cost the Thai little loss of income. The real cause of Ayutthaya’s declining influence over the deerskin trade was the decreasing Japanese market demand for imported hides and the narrowing of profit to be gained from the sale of that commodity due to factors beyond Ayutthaya’s control. Japan’s policy to seek domestic sources of deerskins and Dutch actions that drove deerskin prices down in the early eighteenth century left no realistic opportunity for the Thai to recover significant economic advantage in the deerskin trade. The loss of related income combined with insufficient earlier efforts by the Thai to diversify what it could supply in its own markets, as well as a growing demand by its own growing urban population for imported luxury goods, weakened the Thai economy and the resources of the Crown. century,’ 266; Yoko  Nagazumi, ‘Ayutthaya and Japan: Embassies and trade in the seventeenth century,’ in From Japan to Arabia: Ayutthaya’s maritime relations with Asia, ed. Kennon Breazeale (Bangkok: The Foundation for the Promotion of Social Sciences and Humanities Textbooks Project, 1999);  Charnivit Kasetsiri, ‘The Early Settlement of Ayutthaya and its East Asian Trade,’ in From Japan to Arabia: Ayutthaya’s maritime relations with Asia, ed. Kennon Breazeale (Bangkok: The Foundation for the Promotion of Social Sciences and Humanities Textbooks Project, 1999), 55–79.

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Over the next several decades, growing economic and political dissatisfaction amongst ruling and urban elites, restlessness among rural populations who had come to rely on income from hunting, and military weakness against neighbouring powers due to lack of crown-controlled financial resources, all contributed to the collapse of Ayutthaya’s monarchy in 1767. While Ayutthaya’s previous role in eastern IOW trades subsequently was divided among other regional polities, increasingly the European trading companies operative in Southeast Asia came to dominate trade that met that era’s interregional and European consumer demand, even though deerskins were no longer on the manifests of their vessels.

Bibliography Archival Sources Koloniaal Archief (KA) VOC: National Archives of the Netherlands, The Hague, The Netherlands. Nederlandse Factorij in Japan (Archive of the Dutch Factory in Japan; NFJ): National Archives of the Netherlands, The Hague, The Netherlands.

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Cheng, Wei-Chung. ‘Emergence of deerskin exports from Taiwan under VOC (1624-1642).’ Taiwan Historical Research, 24, 3 (September 2017). Clulow, Adam. ‘Like lambs in Japan and devils outside their land: Diplomacy, violence, and Japanese merchants in Southeast Asia.’ Journal of World History, 24, 2 (2013). Colenbrander, H.T., ed. Dagh-Register Gehoudenint Casteel Batavia van Passerendedaerter Plaetseals over Geheel Nederlandts-India, II (1631–1634).’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1898. Coolhaas, W. Ph., ed. General Missiven van Gouverneurs-General en Raden aan Heren XVII der Verendigde Oostindische Compagnie, 5 Vols. The Hague: Rijks Geschiedkundige Publication, 1960. de la Loubère, Simon. Du Royaume de Siam. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Kurihara, Fukuya. ‘17, 18 seiki no Nihon Shamu boeki ni tsuite.’  To ̄ kyo joshi daigaku shakaigakkai kiyo:̄ Keizai to Shakai, 22 (1994). Hall, Kenneth R. ‘Contested agencies of the Ming in the Java Sea, Straits of Melaka, and Bay of Bengal,’ in The Ming World, ed. Kenneth Swope. London: Palgrave, 2019. Hall, Kenneth R. ‘Ports-of-trade, maritime diasporas, and networks of trade and cultural integration in the Bay of Bengal region of the Indian Ocean: c. 1300–1500.’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 53, 1–2 (2010). Hall, Kenneth R. ‘Revisionist study of cross-cultural commercial competition on the Vietnam coastline in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and its wider implications.’ Journal of World History, 24, 2 (2013). Hall, Kenneth R. ‘European Southeast Asia encounters with Islamic expansionism, circa 1500–1700: Comparative case studies of Banten, Ayutthaya, and Banjarmasin in the wider Indian Ocean context.’ Journal of World History, 25, 2–3 (2014). Hall, Kenneth R. ‘The coming of the West: European Cambodian marketplace connectivity, 1500–1800,’ in Cambodia and the West, 1500–2000, ed. T.O. Smith. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Hall, Kenneth R. ‘Textile reorientations: The manufacture and trade of cottons in Java c. 1600–1850,’ in Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean, An Ocean of Cloth, eds. Pedro Machado, Sarah Fee, and Gwyn Campbell. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2018 Hamilton, Alexander. New Account of the East Indies, ed. Justin Corfield and Ian Morson. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. Hang, Xing. Conflict and Commerce in Maritime East Asia: The Zheng family and the shaping of the modern world, c. 1620–1720. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

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Heyns, P. ‘Deer hunting in Formosa under the Dutch occupation’ in Missionary Approaches and Linguistics in Mainland China and Taiwan, ed. Ku Wei-ying. Louvain Chinese Studies, no. 10. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001. Kasetsiri, Charnivit. ‘The early settlement of Ayutthaya and its East Asian trade,’ in From Japan to Arabia: Ayutthaya’s maritime relations with Asia, ed. Kennon Breazeale. Bangkok: The Foundation for the Promotion of Social Sciences and Humanities Textbooks Project, 1999. Kong, Y. C. ‘Deer: The ultimate medicinal animal (antler and deer parts in medicine) in the biology of deer production.’ The Royal Society of New Zealand Bulletin, 22 (1985). Innes, Robert LeRoy. ‘The Door Ajar: Japan’s foreign trade in the seventeenth century.’ Unpublished PhD dissertation: University of Michigan, 1980. Laver, Michael S. Japan’s Economy by Proxy in the Seventeenth Century: China, the Netherlands, and the Bakufu. Amherst: Cambria Press, 2008. Lieberman, Victor. Strange Parallels: Vol. 1: Integration on the mainland: Southeast Asia in global context, c. 800–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Li Tana, ‘The Inner Region: The social and economic history of Nguyen Vietnam in the 17th and 18th centuries,’ Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation: Canberra Australian National University, 1992. Lockard, Craig, A. “Sea common to all’: Maritime frontiers, port cities, and Chinese traders in the Southeast Asian age of commerce, ca. 1400–1750.’ Journal of World History, 21, 2 (2010). Loubère, Simon La. A New Historical Description of the Kingdom of Siam done out of the French. London: Thomas Horne, Francis Saunders, and Thomas Bennet, 1693. Mendoza-Cortes, Rosario. Pangasinan, 1572–1800. Manila: University of the Philippines Press, 1974. Muller, Hendrik P.N., ed. De Oost-indische Compagnie in Cambodja en Laos: versameling van bescheiden van 1636 tot 1670.’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1917. Nagazumi, Yoko. ‘Ayutthaya and Japan: Embassies and trade in the seventeenth century,’ in From Japan to Arabia: Ayutthaya’s maritime relations with Asia, ed. Kennon Breazeale. Bangkok: The Foundation for the Promotion of Social Sciences and Humanities Textbooks Project, 1999. Nagazumi, Yoko. ‘Formosan trade in the seventeenth century: With Dutch sources.’ Zhongguohai yang fa zhanshilun wen ji, 7 (1999). Nakamura, Takashi. ‘Produce and export of Taiwanese deerskins in the seventeenth century.’ Heian shidai Taiwan shiyanjiu, 1 (1997). Okada, Akio. ‘Kinsei ni okeru shikagawa no yunyū nikansuru kenkyū.’ Shakaikeizaishigaku, 7, 7 (1937).

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Okada, Akio. ‘Kinsei ni okeru shuyō na yunyū busshi ni tsuite,’ in Tozai kosho shi ron [Historical studies of the East and the West], I, ed. Shigakkai. Tokyo: Fuzanbo, 1939. Peterson, Andrew Christian. ‘Making the First Global Trade Route: The Southeast Asian foundations of the Acapulco-Manila galleon trade, 1519–1650.’ Unpublished PhD dissertation: University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 2014. Pombejra, Dhiravat na. Court, Company, and Campong: Essays on the VOC presence in Ayutthaya. Bangkok: Ayutthaya Historical Study Centre, 1992. Pombejra, Dhivarat na. ‘Ayutthaya at the end of the seventeenth century: Was there a shift to isolation?,’ Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, power, and belief, ed. Anthony Reid. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Reed, Robert R. Colonial Manila: The context of urbanism and process of morphogenesis. Berkeley: University of California, 1978. Ptak, Roderich and Dietmar Rothermund, eds. Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs in Asian Maritime Trade, c. 1400–1750. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991. Reid, Anthony. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1650, Volume One: The lands below the winds. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Iwao, Seiichi. ‘Reopening of the diplomatic and commercial relations between Japan and Siam during the Tokugawa period.’ Acta Asiatica, 4 (1963). Iwao, Seiichi. ‘Japanese foreign trade in the 16th and 17th centuries.’ Acta Asiatica, 30 (1976). Iwamoto, Yoshiteru. ‘Yamada Nagamasa and his relations with Siam.’ Journal of the Siam Society, 95 (2007). Iwamoto, Yoshiteru and Simon James Bytheway. ‘Japan’s official relations with Shamuro (Siam), 1599–1745: As revealed in the diplomatic records of the Tokugawa Shogunate.’ Journal of the Siam Society, 99 (2011). Shimada, Ryuto. ‘Siamese trade in agricultural products with Japan and China in the 18th century,’ in Intra-Asian Trade and Industrialization: Essays in ­memory of Yasukichi Yasuba, eds. A.J.H.  Latham and Heita Kawakatsu. London: Routledge, 2009. Shimada, Ryuto. ‘Economic Links with Ayutthaya: Changes in networks between Japan, China, and Siam in the early modern period.’ Itinerario, 37, 3 (2013). Shively, Donald H. ‘Sumptuary regulation and status in early Tokugawa Japan.’ Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 25 (1964–65). Smith, George Vinal. The Dutch in Seventeenth Century Thailand. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 1977. Smithies, Michael. Three Military Accounts of the 1688 “Revolution” in Siam. Itineria Asiatica. Bangkok: Orchid Press, 2002. Sprey, Ilicia J. ‘Gunpowder, pirates, monks, and books,’ in Vanguards of Globalization: Port-cities from the classical to the modern, ed. Rila Mukherjee. Delhi: Primus Books, 2014.

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Sprey, Ilicia J. ‘International maritime-based trade in the Thai realm of Ayutthaya in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries: Deer hide trade as an access point for re-evaluation,’ in Subversive Sovereigns Across the Seas: Indian Ocean ports-of-trade from early historic times to late colonialism, eds. Kenneth R. Hall, Rila Mukherjee, and Suchandra Ghosh. Kolkata: The Asiatic Society, 2017. Sprey, Ilicia J. ‘Religious and marketplace networking in the Central Vietnam littoral under the Nguyen Lords (17th–18th centuries),’ Comparative Religious and Trade Networks in Southeast Asia.  Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore, July 14, 2015, unpublished paper. van Dam, Pieter. Beschryvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie, eds. Frederik Willem Stapel and Carel Wessel Theodorus van Boetzelaer. 7 vols. ’s-Gravenhage: Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën, 1927–54. Vink, Markus P.M. Encounters on the Opposite Coast: The Dutch East India Company and the Nayaka state of Madurai in the seventeenth century. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Walker, Brett L. The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and culture in Japanese expansion, 1590–1800. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Wheeler, Charles J. ‘Cross-cultural trade and trans-regional networks in the port of Hoi An: Maritime Vietnam in the early modern era.’ Unpublished PhD dissertation: Yale University, 2001. Yamawaki Teijiro, Nagasaki no Oranda shō kan. Tokyo: Chuō Koronsha, 1980.

CHAPTER 9

The Ivory Trade and Political Power in Nineteenth-Century East Africa Philip Gooding

Introduction Elephants from the East African interior were the innocent victims of their region’s increased connections to  oceanic commerce during the nineteenth century. Americans, Europeans, and South and East Asians all demanded East African ivory in increasing quantities over the time-period, and elephants were killed to fuel their demand. This was part of a process through which ivory ceased being an object reserved for elites and became consumed by a wider stratum of society in the form of, for example, billiard balls, piano keys, and bangles.1 Ivory’s increased commodification

The research for this article was partly funded by the Wolfson Foundation and by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 1  Paul J. Lane, ‘Developing landscape historical ecologies in eastern Africa: An outline of current research and potential future directions,’ African Studies, 69, 2 (2010), 308; John

P. Gooding (*) Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Chaiklin et al. (eds.), Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42595-1_9

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divorced elephants from most pre-existing cultural or symbolic associations that East Africans had of them, especially around prominent trade routes. Thus, the nineteenth-century history of East African elephants and ivory diverges from the history of elephants in West Africa, where they are frequently observed as being ‘a symbol in expressive culture,’ and from the history of Indian elephants, which were frequently tools of warfare and whose ‘awe-inspiring bigness … symbolised the primacy of the king.’2 Therefore, if in the following pages elephants and even ivory gradually become obscured behind a more human-focused history, it is for good reason. The history of the nineteenth-century East African ivory trade is one that predominantly focuses on human-centred processes, such as commerce and consumption. Moreover, analysis of these human historical processes speaks more to political power in nineteenth-century East Africa than it does to many prevalent themes in animal studies/histories, such as questions of animal ‘agency,’ ‘intentionality,’ and ‘resistance.’3 This is a history of animal exploitation for human commercial purposes because, although tuskers had certain symbolic capital, their tusks, separated from the beast, were a far more significant driver of international trade. There are two key reasons why animals are relevantly absent from this discussion of a trade in an animal product. The first of these is the sources. Almost all documentary sources pertaining to nineteenth-century East Africa were written by European explorers and missionaries. While Europeans often documented the flora and fauna they encountered, they rarely engaged with issues that pertained directly to the lives of animals— especially wild animals.4 Indeed, on a rare instance in which they addressed the movement and size of elephant populations, they made errors in their analysis. They claimed that an ‘ivory frontier’ existed, in which traders Frederick Walker, Ivory’s Ghosts: The white gold of history and the fate of elephants (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2009), Ch. 4; David H. Shayt, ‘The material culture of ivory outside Africa,’ in Elephant: The animal and its ivory in African culture, ed. Doran H. Ross (Los Angeles: Regents of the University of California, 1992), 367. 2  Doran H. Ross, ‘Imagining elephants: An overview,’ in Elephant: The animal and its ivory in African culture, ed. Doran H. Ross (Los Angeles: Regents of the University of California, 1992), 1; Simon Digby, War-horse and Elephant in the Delhi Sultanate: A study of military supplies (Oxford: Orient Monographs, 1971), 65; Thomas R.  Trautman, Elephants and Kings: An environmental history (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 68. 3  See, for example: Chris Pearson, ‘History and animal agencies,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies, ed. Linda Kalof (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 240–57. 4  Sandra Swart, ‘Animals in African history,’ Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (2019), 2.

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emanating from coastal regions headed further inland as the regions they had already encountered became hunted out. This idea, though, is not born out by the evidence—elephants were hunted throughout East Africa since before the nineteenth century and elephants continued to survive in sheltered locales throughout the region, including in regions where ivory traders were long-known to frequent.5 Secondly, humans predominate in this history because of the nature of the history itself. The nineteenth century witnessed East Africa’s increased integration with the world economy at a time of global capitalist expansion. Although conservationist ideologies emerged in Europe at a similar time, Europeans did not bring them to East Africa until the twentieth century, and their effectiveness and appropriateness for the region were limited.6 Prevailing (and highly racialised) European thinking vis-à-vis East Africa in most of the nineteenth century was concerned with the extent to which its humans were distinct from its wildlife.7 It was also concerned with commerce and the exploitation of East African resources for that purpose—elephants and the wider natural world included.8 In terms of human commercial processes, the nineteenth-century expansion of the East African ivory trade built on a centuries-long trade in the Indian Ocean World (IOW). The earliest known document referring to tropical East Africa, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, dated to the first millennium CE, refers to the sale of ivory from tropical East Africa.9 Archaeologists have since suggested that the ivory trade from East Africa to elsewhere in the IOW went through a significant increase in scale during the Medieval warm period (c.900–1300).10 South Asia was a major market for East African ivory by sometime in the seventh or eighth 5  Bernhard Gissibl, The Nature of German Imperialism: Conservation and the politics of wildlife in colonial East Africa (New York: Berghahn, 2016), 36–40. 6  Emmanuel Kreike, ‘Environmental history,’ Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (2018), 20–2. 7  Swart, ‘Animals in African history,’ 6. Based on a reading of the ‘Capitalocene’ in world history, this can be interpreted as part of a broader discourse in which European Capitalist expansion blurred the human/nature binary, dehumanising humans and putting them and the wider natural world  to ‘work’  for Capitalist production. See, for example:  Jason W. Moore, ‘The Capitalocene, Part I: On the nature and origins of our ecological crisis,’ The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44, 3 (2017), 594–630.  8  See: Moore, ‘The Capitalocene, Part I,’ 594–630. 9  Lionel Casson, The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with introduction, translation, and commentary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 61. 10  Jeffrey Fleisher, Paul Lane, Adria LaViolette, Mark Horton, Edward Pollard, Eréndira Quintana Morales, Thomas Vernet, Annalisa Christie, and Stephanie Wynne-Jones, ‘When did the Swahili become maritime?,’ American Anthropologist, 117, 1 (2015), 2, 8.

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centuries and it was imported into China during the Song dynasty (960–1279).11 By at least the sixteenth century, African ivory was being carved in western India into bangles that were worn by women of all of the region’s major religions—representing the beginning of a shift towards general rather than just elite demand for African ivory.12 By the nineteenth century, South Asians were carving it into toys, models, chess- and draughts-pieces, puppets, and elaborate boxes, amongst a large range of other ornamental objects.13 The vitality of this IOW trade continued throughout the nineteenth century, even as Europeans and Americans became heavily invested in it for the first time. Most of the finance for ivory caravans heading into East Africa originated in Western India, via Oman and Zanzibar.14 Consequently, British buyers found it more convenient to purchase East African ivory from India than from East Africa itself.15 In this way, East Africa’s nineteenth-century ivory trade was integral to creating linkages between long-standing and evolving IOW networks and emergent, global, capitalist systems. Some aspects of these IOW networks, though, are understudied for the nineteenth century. This chapter seeks to fill two of the resultant gaps in knowledge. The first pertains to consumption. Historians such as Jeremy Prestholdt and Pedro Machado have emphasised the importance of African consumer demand for shaping IOW networks.16 Their focus, though, is on goods that were imported into Africa, such as beads, cotton cloth, and firearms. Less is known about East African consumer demand for products of African origin. This has been acknowledged, most notably, for cattle, 11  Pedro Machado, Ocean of Trade: South Asian merchants, Africa, and the Indian Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 169; Martha Chaiklin, ‘Ivory in World History – Early Modern Trade in Context,’ History Compass, 8, 2 (2010), 533. 12  Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African commercial empire into the world economy, 1770–1873 (Woodbridge: James Currey, 1987), 78; Machado, Ocean of Trade, 170–1. 13  R.W. Beachey, ‘The East African ivory trade in the nineteenth century,’ The Journal of African History, 8, 2 (1967), 288. 14  Fahad Ahmad Bishara, A Sea of Debt: Law and economic life in the western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 24–57. 15  Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory, 85–6. 16  Pedro Machado, ‘Awash in a sea of cloth: Gujarat, Africa, and the western Indian Ocean,’ in The Spinning World: A global history of cotton textiles, 1200–1850, eds. Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 162–179; Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African consumerism and the genealogies of globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 59–87.

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but it is also true of ivory.17 The first part of this chapter thus analyses patterns of East African ivory consumption in the face of growing global demand. The second focuses on some of the principal ivory traders in the interior of Africa—the ‘coastal traders.’ Up to the present, coastal traders have largely been viewed as a monolithic group, often under the moniker ‘Arabs.’ However, this chapter sheds light on some of the deep-seated divisions between two sub-groups of the broader group: the Rima (people of the Mrima coast) and the Omanis (people who traced at least part of their lineage to Oman). It has long been understood that these two groups were often in conflict and competition with each other in coastal regions of East Africa, whether because of the ivory trade or otherwise.18 This chapter analyses how such conflicts and competitions played out in the interior, and so ceases to view the coastal traders as a monolith. Collectively, filling the two mentioned gaps in knowledge stresses the importance of the ivory trade to the construction of political power in nineteenth-century East Africa.

Ivory Consumption in Nineteenth-Century East Africa Within East Africa, the geographical scope of this chapter is focused on present-day Tanzania, Burundi, northern Zambia, and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This was the East African region that was most-affected by the ivory trade during the nineteenth century. For coastal traders, the eastern DRC (the western limit of their commercial networks) was the ‘El Dorado’ of the ivory trade, and the region between there and the coast was their networks’ ‘core.’19 The trade routes 17  Juhani Koponen, People and Production in Late Precolonial Tanzania: History and structures (Helsinki: Finnish Society of Development Studies, 1988), 124; N. Thomas Håkansson has more recently made some significant inroads into East Africa’s nineteenth-century history of cattle and ivory; see: N.  Thomas Håkansson, ‘Politics, cattle, and ivory: Regional interaction and changing land-use prior to colonialism,’ in Culture, History and Identity: Landscapes of Inhabitation in the Mount Kilimanjaro Area, Tanzania, ed. Tim A.R. Clark (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2009), 141–54. 18  Mark Horton and James Middleton, The Swahili: The social landscape of a mercantile society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 85–87; Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, rebellion and popular consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1994), 55–78; Thomas F. McDow, Buying Time: Debt and mobility in the western Indian Ocean (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018), 97–104. 19  Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory, 172–90.

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that traversed this region are collectively referred to as the ‘central commercial route.’ Trade routes through more southerly regions were just as focused on the slave trade as they were the ivory trade, and routes to the north received less outside investment.20 Around 400,000 lbs of ivory were exported from Zanzibar annually during the second half of the nineteenth century, most of which came via the central route. This represented about half of East Africa’s ivory exports—most of the other half headed northwards via Khartoum.21 Somewhere between 6000 and 12,000 East African elephants died annually to supply this export economy, according to historians and historical ecologists.22 From Zanzibar, ivory was exported to elsewhere in the IOW, Europe, and North America, where industrial manufacturers transformed it into everyday objects (Fig. 9.1). In contrast to this general trend of increased global consumption, East Africans gradually consumed less ivory over time during the nineteenth

Fig. 9.1  Sketch map of major commercial centres in nineteenth-century East Africa  Ibid., 158–72.  Beachey, ‘The East African Ivory Trade,’ 287. 22  Ibid.; Lane, ‘Developing landscape,’ 314; N. Thomas Håkansson, ‘The human ecology of world systems in East Africa: The impact of the ivory trade,’ Human Ecology, 32, 5 (2004), 573. 20 21

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century. East Africa’s divergent history in this context is intrinsically tied to its role as a global supplier. The increased value of ivory as a tradable item on the world market meant that, for most East Africans, it became an object to sell rather than one to consume.23 East Africans instead gradually sought the goods that could be purchased with ivory or with supplying ivory traders with food or their labour. These included beads (from, for example, Venice), cotton cloths  (mostly  New England and South Asia), and firearms  (mostly Europe).24 This transaction defined human-­ elephant interactions in the region. Also, in a related development, access to and control of ivory’s sources and its trade became increasingly integral to the assertion of political power. Political leaders exchanged ivory for weapons and objects of symbolic value that could be used to carve out a domain. Imported weapons could be used to assert political authority through violence, and goods of symbolic value included elaborate, patterned cloths, and firearms.25 The display, ownership, and distribution of such goods to loyal followers were key to the assertion of political authority. Thus, expanding the extent and control of the ivory trade in East Africa was of vital importance to political leaders. Access to ivory and its trade became an increasingly important mark of political authority.  Returning to ivory consumption itself, changing fashions indicate its declining prominence amongst East Africa’s populations over time. Reporting on his journey to Lake Tanganyika in 1858–59, the English explorer Richard Burton wrote that both Nyamwezi and Ha populations in present-day west-central Tanzania frequently wore armlets and

 Ross, ‘Imagining elephants,’ 23.  David M. Gordon, ‘Wearing cloth, wielding guns: Consumption, trade, and politics in the South Central African interior during the nineteenth century,’ in The Objects of Life in Central Africa: The history of consumption and social change, 1840–1980, eds. Robert Ross, Marja Hinfelaar and Iva Peša (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 17–38; Karin Pallaver, ‘What East Africans got for their ivory and slaves: The nature, working, and circulation of commodity currencies in nineteenth-century East Africa,’ in Currencies of the Indian Ocean World, eds. Steven Serels and Gwyn Campbell (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Karin Pallaver, ‘From Venice to East Africa: History, uses and meanings of glass beads,’ in Luxury in Global Perspective: Commodities and practices, c.1600–2000, eds. Bernd-Stefan Grewe and Karin Hofmeester (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 25  Richard Gray and David Birmingham, ‘Some economic and political consequences of trade in central and eastern Africa in the pre-colonial period,’ in Pre-Colonial African Trade: Essays on trade in central and eastern Africa before 1900, eds. Richard Gray and David Birmingham (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 1–19. 23 24

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bracelets made of ivory.26 Verney Lovett Cameron, another English explorer, made similar comments about Nyamwezi fashions in 1874.27 Yet by the 1880s, these kinds of fashions were less prevalent. By this time, Nyamwezi populations generally favoured copper and iron armlets and anklets.28 These ornaments, which were imported from other East and Central African regions, had been symbols of prestige since at least the beginning of the nineteenth century, though trade had made them more ubiquitous by the 1880s.29 Only one-centimetre-high bracelets from the hollow part of a buffalo horn or elephant tusk and the occasional single piece of carved ivory as ornamentation to items of other materials were common.30 Other populations, most notably the Jiji living on Lake Tanganyika’s shores, favoured imported glass and coral beads brought by ivory traders from the coast.31 Along with cotton cloth, these beads became a currency.32 Cotton cloths, meanwhile, replaced locally-made barkcloth as some East Africans’ customary clothing of choice.33 The implication is that glass beads and other goods replaced ivory as material for armlets and anklets. As ivory became more valuable as a trade good, other goods and imports replaced its ubiquity in East African fashion. Indigenous uses of ivory declined over time in parts of present-day eastern DRC as well. David Livingstone, the Scottish explorer and missionary, reported in 1871 that ivory was so abundant and little-valued 26  Richard F. Burton, The Lake Regions of Central Africa: A picture of exploration (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1860), 213, 242, 328. 27  Verney Lovett Cameron, Across Africa (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1877), 108, 153. 28  Victor Jacques and Emile Storms, Notes sur L’Ethnographie de la Partie Orientale de L’Afrique Équatoriale (Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique, 1886), 24. 29  Andrew Roberts, ‘Nyamwezi trade,’ in Pre-Colonial African Trade: Essays on trade in central and eastern Africa before 1900, eds. Richard Gray and David Birmingham (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 56, 66; Edward C.  Hore, ‘On the twelve tribes of Tanganyika,’ The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 12 (1983), 10. 30  Jacques and Storms, Notes sur L’Ethnographie, 24–6; Jerome Becker, La Vie en Afrique ou Trois ans dans l’Afrique Centrale, II (Paris: J. Lebègue & C, 1887), 187. 31  Roberts, ‘Nyamwezi trade,’ 64–6; Beverly Brown, ‘Muslim influence on trade and politics in the Lake Tanganyika region,’ African Historical Studies, 4, 3 (1971), 621; Burton, Lake Regions, 320, 347, 372; Archivio Generale dei Missionari d’Africa (hereafter: A.G.M.Afr.) C.16–7. Journal du P. Deniaud, 7 October 1880; Hore, ‘Twelve Tribes,’ 12. 32  Pallaver, ‘What East Africans Got,’ 72. 33  Philip Gooding, ‘Lake Tanganyika: Commercial frontier in the era of long-distance commerce, East and Central Africa, c. 1830–1890,’ (Unpublished PhD diss., SOAS, 2017), 113–4; Hore, ‘Twelve tribes,’ 10.

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trade-wise in Manyema that it was used as door posts and house pillars.34 When the ivory used for these purposes rotted, it was simply replaced by other pieces. Livingstone’s reports were written just as coastal traders were first establishing themselves in this region. It is thus notable that Cameron and Henry Morton Stanley (the journalist who found Livingstone in Ujiji in 1871), who respectively travelled through Manyema in 1874 and 1876—when coastal traders were more established—did not note these kinds of uses for ivory.35 Similarly, further west in 1876, on a journey through Stanley Falls (present-day Kisangani) and its environs, Stanley noted the use of ivory horns in times of war and festivity, and in everyday items such as pestles for pounding cassava, pillars for housing structures, balls on the heads of canoe paddles, and as a shelter for an idol.36 Ivory was so abundant that much of it was left to rot.37 At this time Kisangani was at the very frontier of coastal trader penetration. It is thus notable that by the time of Stanley’s and others’ return in the mid-1880s, ivory was rarely used for anything other than as a trade good and in exchange for political allegiances.38 As the structures of global commerce became established in the interior, demand for ivory as a trade good contributed to the gradual decline in East African ivory consumption. There were, however, at least two notable continuities in ivory consumption in the interior of East Africa over the nineteenth century. Firstly, elephant hunters used and displayed ivory throughout the period, even though the demographic who comprised the primary elephant hunters 34  David Livingstone, The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa. From eighteen hundred and sixty-five to his death. Continued by a narrative of his last moments and sufferings, obtained from his faithful servants Chuma and Susi, ed. Horace Waller (New York: Harper Brothers, 1875), 373. See also: Henry Morton Stanley, How I Found Livingstone: Travels, adventures, and discoveries in Central Africa including four months’ residence with Dr. Livingstone (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Company, 1872), 380–1. 35  See: Cameron, Across Africa; Henry Morton Stanley, Through the Dark Continent or The Sources of the Nile Around the Great Lakes of Equatorial Africa and Down the Livingstone River to the Atlantic Ocean, II (London: Sampson Low, Marston Searle & Irvington, 1878). 36  Stanley, Dark Continent, II, 179–80, 193, 254, 260, 271–3. 37  Ibid., 254. 38  Henry Morton Stanley, The Congo and the Founding of its Free State: A story of work and exploration, II (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1885), 148–9, 175, 177; Hermann von Wissmann, My Second Journey Through Equatorial Africa from the Congo to the Zambesi in the Years 1886 and 1887, trans. Minna J.  A. Bergmann (London: Chatto & Windus, 1891), 196–248; A.G.M.Afr. Dromaux to White Fathers, 4 June  1882, Chronique  Trimestrielles, 16 (October 1882). See also: Keith Somerville, Ivory: Power and poaching in Africa (London: Hurst & Company, 2016), 41–2; Gordon, ‘Wearing cloth, wielding guns,’ 31.

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shifted. During the first half of the nineteenth century, most East African elephant hunters were members of secret societies or part of age-grade systems that brought boys into manhood.39 Depending on region and time-period, the members of elephant hunter societies hunted elephants by stabbing them with long spears with wooden handles and iron shafts, by constructing pitfalls, or by shooting them with poisoned arrows.40 Elephant hunters also displayed and used ivory and other elephant products to distinguish themselves from other members of the population. Burton, for example, noted that Gogo ivory hunters’ wore ‘disks and armlets of fine ivory’ in 1858.41 He also wrote of how, before heading on a hunt, there was a ceremony that included placing several elephant tails around a central drum.42 Cameron, meanwhile, reported meeting an old man between Ugogo and Unyamwezi who had six circlets made from elephant hide on his left wrist.43 Up to around the 1870s, elephant hunters used ivory and other elephant products to symbolise their role and position in society. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the prominence of elephant-hunting secret societies declined. The importation of firearms was key to this transition. Although the usage of guns did not entirely replace older methods of hunting elephants, their ubiquity in most of present-day west-central Tanzania and the eastern DRC gave young men access to tools that could be used to hunt elephants in ways that were not possible under secret society or age-grade regimes.44 The most prominent demographic of young men in this context (at least in Unyamwezi and its 39  Edward A. Alpers, Ivory & Slaves in East Central Africa: Changing patterns of international trade to the later nineteenth century (London: Heinemann, 1975), 11, 17–18; Edward I. Steinhart, ‘Elephant hunting in 19th-century Kenya: Kamba society and ecology in transformation,’ The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 33, 2 (2000), 338–9; Doran H. Ross, ‘Elephant the animal and its ivory in African culture,’ African Arts, 25, 4 (1992), 79. 40  Burton, Lake Regions, 213, 472; Cameron, Across Africa, 69; Becker, Vie en Afrique, II, 176. See also: George Frederick Kunz, Ivory and the Elephant in Art, In Archaeology, and in Science (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1916), 197; Steinhart, ‘Elephant hunting,’ 337; Somerville, Ivory, 29; Ross, ‘Imagining elephants,’ 60. 41  Burton, Lake Regions, 213. 42  Ibid. 474. 43  Cameron, Across Africa, 81. 44  Edward A. Alpers, ‘The ivory trade in Africa: An historical overview,’ in Elephant: The animal and its ivory in African culture, ed. Doran H. Ross (Los Angeles: Regents of the University of California, 1992), 356.

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surrounds) were the ruga ruga. The ruga ruga were militarised young men who were often employed as soldiers by militarised political leaders, such as Mirambo (1840?–84) and Nyungu ya Mawe. (d.1884; hereafter Nyungu), but the ruga ruga were also elephant hunters.45 The distinction between who was an elephant hunter and who was a ruga ruga soldier became blurred to the extent that observers could not tell them apart.46 Crucial for this discussion are observations that the ruga ruga had a distinct material culture that included ivory products. A representative account of their appearance from 1886 to 1887, for example, stated: Their [the ruga ruga’s] arms consist of a gun and a hand spear. Their clothes are in rapport with the resources of chiefs. They are habitually composed of a comb and a red cloth attached at the neck and floating on the back [and] a turban of the same colour. Their most-liked ornaments are big ivory bracelets, iron or brass circlets worn on the wrists and ankles, and feathers and zebra manes that they adorn their heads with; bells are also highly sought after. Their long, finely woven hair descends to the shoulders. Those who have short hair usually wear a wig made with strings handled in the form of braids.47

This account of the ruga ruga wearing ‘big ivory bracelets’ is notable for its timing. Being written in the mid-1880s, it was written at a time when ivory products were less prominent in Nyamwezi bodily ornamentation. Ivory’s usage in ruga ruga fashion, therefore, distinguished the ruga ruga from their contemporaries. Just like the members of secret societies in previous years, the ruga ruga sought to distinguish themselves and their appearance through the display of ivory. The second key nineteenth-century continuity in ivory consumption in East Africa pertains to the assertion of political authority. Even towards 45  See: Ibid.; Richard Reid, War in Pre-Colonial Eastern Africa: The patterns and meanings of state-level conflict in the nineteenth century (Oxford: James Currey, 2007), 64; Aylward Shorter, ‘Nyungu-ya-Mawe and the “empire of the ruga-rugas”,’ The Journal of African History, 9, 2 (1968), 235–6; Michael Pesek, ‘Ruga-ruga: The history of an African profession, 1820–1918,’ in German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences, eds. Nina Berman, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Patrice Nganang (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2016), 85–100. 46  A.G.M.Afr. C.16–7. Journal du P.  Deniaud, 4 March 1880; A.G.M.Afr. Diaire de Karema, 27 August 1889. 47  Jacques and Storms, Notes sur L’Ethnographie, 68. See also: Shorter, ‘Nyungu-ya-Mawe,’ 241; Becker, Vie en Afrique, II, 158.

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the beginning of the nineteenth century, many East African chiefs claimed the right to one tusk from a dead elephant if it died on their territory. The other tusk was the property of the hunter who killed the elephant, or the one who discovered it.48 This transaction was one of the means through which secret societies of elephant hunters were connected to a broader political hierarchy. These  connections were often  augmented by rituals, festivals, and/or ceremonies before the hunt.49 It is unknown where or when the chiefly right to one tusk originated, but it is likely that chiefs attempted to assert it more as the value of the ivory trade increased during the nineteenth century. Controlling ivory’s sources and its trade was a way to gain access to valuable imports, the distribution of which demonstrated their power.50 Yet many pre-existing authorities failed to assert such rights to ivory found on their land effectively. The rise of gun-wielding ruga ruga challenged their role and their position. The ruga ruga tended to acquire their guns from markets or from new and militarised sources of authority, such as Mirambo or Nyungu. They had little sense of obligation to elder chiefly structures, whose power was perceived through territorial rights and ritual power.51 The ruga ruga’s source of militarised power decreased the perceived need to give territorial chiefs a tusk from a dead elephant. Mirambo, Nyungu, and other militarised state-builders adapted some of the pre-existing chiefs’ practices vis-à-vis ivory and its circulation. They, too, sought control over ivory’s distribution. They partly achieved this through influence over markets and caravans. They obliged traders to pay taxes (hongo) for passing through their territories, often in the form of guns and powder. They then distributed these goods to the ruga ruga, who used them to hunt elephants, collect tribute (often in the form of ivory), quash rebellion, and expand territorially.52 The transaction by 48  Giacomo Macola, ‘Reassessing the significance of firearms in Central Africa: The case of North-Western Zambia to the 1920s,’ The Journal of African History, 51, 3 (2010), 311; Ross, ‘Imagining elephants,’ 23; Alpers, Ivory and Slaves, 18. 49  Alpers, Ivory and Slaves, 18. 50  Gray and Birmingham, ‘Some economic,’ 3. 51  This was part of a process through which political power in the wider East African region  was increasingly ‘militarised.’ See for example: Steven Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom: A history (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), 171; Andrew Roberts, ‘Political change in the nineteenth century,’ in A History of Tanzania, eds. I.N. Kimambo and A.J. Temu (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969), 58. 52  Macola, ‘Reassessing the significance,’ 311; Pesek, ‘Ruga-ruga,’ 86–8.

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which the ruga ruga acquired guns obliged them to provide a share of the ivory they hunted to the militarised state-builders. In a pattern that was continuous with forms of political power from the first half of the nineteenth century, the new militarised state-builders often demanded at least one tusk of a fallen elephant from ruga ruga elephant hunters; some, including Mirambo, claimed a monopoly on all ivory in their domains.53 Similar patterns occurred in regions of the present-day eastern DRC. There, coastal traders sought to oblige pre-existing chiefs to pay tribute to them in the form of ivory in exchange for military allegiance and protection. Tippu Tip (Hamed bin Mohammad  al-Murjebi; 1832–1905), who was the most prominent coastal trader in this region, also demanded that the tusks of elephants that fell within his commercial reach be returned to him.54 Acquiring ivory tusks remained an important demonstration of political power throughout the nineteenth century despite shifts in the nature and loci of political authority. The patterns of ivory consumption in nineteenth-century East Africa indicate that it became a product that was increasingly tied to chiefly status. Control of its distribution and trade were the functions of chiefs. Although this was true at the beginning of the nineteenth century, its ubiquitous usage by the general populace at this time meant that it was part of a broader history of ivory consumption that transcended different strata of society. Ivory’s declining presence in everyday fashions and products during the second half of the nineteenth century mean that, over time, this broader history became condensed into one that largely applied only to chiefs and their militaries. Chiefs came in different forms. Some were members of long lineages that existed before the nineteenth century; others rose through military power during the nineteenth century; and coastal traders in Manyema sought the powers of chiefs by claiming tributary rights. The most powerful chiefs were those who were able to control 53  Norman Robert Bennett, Mirambo of Tanzania 1840?–1884 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 73. Buganda’s kings made similar claims: Apolo Kagwa, The Customs of the Baganda, trans. Ernest B.  Kalibala, ed. May Mandelbaum (New York: AMS Press, 1969), 92; Somerville, Ivory, 31–2. 54  Wissmann, My Second Journey, 210, 218; Tippu Tip, L’autobiographie de Hamed ben Mohammed el-Murjebi Tippo Tip (ca. 1840–1905), trans. and ed. François Bontinck (Brussels: Académie Royale des Science d’Outre Mer, 1974), 96; Reid, War in Pre-Colonial, 113. For more on the life and role of Tippu Tip, see for example: Stuart Laing, Tippu Tip: Ivory, slavery and discovery in the Scramble for Africa (Surbiton: Medina Publishing, 2017); McDow, Buying Time, 197–241.

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the ivory trade in their domains. The ruga ruga’s role as elephant hunters and as militarised young men meant that they were intrinsically tied to the rising militarised powers. The expansion of the global ivory trade took ivory out of everyday usage in East Africa while making access to it increasingly important for the assertion of political authority. As ivory and ivory products passed into evermore hands in the wider IOW, Europe, and North America, its circulation became increasingly restricted in East Africa.

Competition for the Ivory Trade Between Coastal Traders The importance of the ivory trade to political power in East Africa’s coastal and island regions has been interpreted though alternate dynamics to its importance in the interior. On the coast, access to and control of the ivory trade is often linked to understandings of the power dynamics between Omani and Rima populations.55 In the interior, meanwhile, it has been seen to shape the relationships between pre-existing chiefs, rising militarised chiefs, and coastal traders.56 In the interior context, therefore, people emanating from the coast have been treated as a uniform group. Historians such as Richard Reid and Norman Bennett have acknowledged that coastal trader communities were beset by rivalries, intrigue, and disunity, but the dynamics of these apparent divisions have yet to be fully unpacked.57 This section looks to coastal competitions between Omani and Rima populations to explore these divisions. Competitions between Omani and Rima populations for access to and control of the ivory trade are observable in the interior, just as they are in histories of East Africa’s coast and islands. Moreover, access to and control of the ivory trade was a key determinant of political power amongst coastal traders in the interior, and within their broader networks that stretched to the coast and beyond into the wider IOW. The East African interior became a site in which long-standing competitions from the IOW’s coastal and island regions played out in robust and sometimes violent ways.  Horton and Middleton, The Swahili, 87; Glassman, Feasts and Riot, 55–78.  See, for example: Roberts, ‘Political change,’ 58; Gordon, ‘Wearing cloth, wielding guns,’ 17–38. 57  Reid, War in Pre-Colonial, 115–7; Bennett, Mirambo, 53. See also: Karin Pallaver, ‘Muslim communities, long-distance traders and wage labour along the central caravan road: Tanzania, 19th Century,’ Storicamente, 8 (2012), 2. This is notwithstanding recent advances. See: McDow, Buying Time, 87-116. 55 56

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The definition of ‘Rima’ and ‘Omani’ is necessarily blurred. The Rima are elsewhere referred to as ‘Swahili-speaking patricians,’ ‘Swahili,’ and ‘Shirazi.’58 ‘Rima’ is a more exclusive and geographically valid demarcation than these terms. It refers to a point of origin on the Mrima coast— the coastal region that roughly corresponds to the region between the present-day Kenya/Tanzania border and just south of Dar es Salaam. ‘Swahili,’ meanwhile, includes cultural phenomena associated with Omanis and other maritime western IOW populations, and Shirazi refers to a mythical heritage that some Rima traced to Shiraz, present-day Iran. Conversely, Omanis were people who had kinship links with people in Oman. This includes people of Omani descent who were born on the East African coast or its islands, including on the Mrima. Thus, this group includes Hamed bin Mohammad al-Murjebi, (Tippu Tip), whose patrilineal and matrilineal lines can be traced to Oman, and it includes Mohammed bin Khalfan al-Barwani, also known as Rumaliza, who was born in Lindi, but whose clan was heavily intertwined with Omanis in support of Sultan Barghash of Zanzibar in the 1870s.59 The fact that some Omanis were born on the Mrima clearly blurs the lines between who was Omani and who was Rima. Conversions between denominations of Islam, cultural exchange, and intermarriage did this further.60 However, the existence of two broadly-conceived and competing groups is observable. Among coastal traders, there were those who traced their kinship lines to Oman (Omanis), and those who did not (Rima).61 Neither the Rima nor the Omanis among the coastal traders were united—on East Africa’s coast/islands or otherwise. Each town on the Mrima had its own internal Rima hierarchy and internal  structures.62 Evidence written by European explorers suggests that Rima traders who had roots in Saadani and its environs were particularly prominent in the deep interior. Mwinyi Kheri (the most prominent Rima trader in Ujiji)  Glassman, Feasts and Riot, 3–4, 34; Horton and Middleton, The Swahili, 52–6.  McDow, Buying Time, 204–5, 219–20; B.G. Martin, Muslim Brotherhoods in NineteenthCentury Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 166. 60  Randall L. Pouwels, Horn and Crescent: Cultural change and traditional Islam on the East African coast, 800–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 110–11; Martin, Muslim Brotherhoods, 169. 61  For more on the importance of kinship to understanding commercial networks between the East African interior, coast, and the wider IOW, see: McDow, Buying Time, 197–241. 62  Steven Fabian, Making Identity on the Swahili Coast: Urban life, community, and belonging in Bagamoyo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 9. 58 59

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and Mwinyi Dugumbi (Mwinyi Kheri’s equivalent in Nyangwe) were both born in Saadani’s vicinity, for example.63 The possibility of kinship or cultural connections between these traders may have contributed to Nyangwe becoming the principle destination for Ujiji’s Rima traders who headed to Manyema in the 1860–90s.64 Evidence for connections and competitions between Omani traders is clearer, but by no means complete. Rivalries between broad-based Omani factions of the elite in the wider IOW and on the East African coast  (e.g. between  Busaidis/Hinawis and Mazruis/ Gharifis) are well-known.65 However, it is hard to establish whether ­rivalries along these lines existed in the East African interior. Broadly speaking, the Busaidis, which included the Zanzibari Sultans,  predominated. Moreover, those Omani traders who disagreed and competed with the most prominent traders amongst their kin, such as Tippu Tip and Rumaliza (both Busaidis), had material reasons associated with the conduct of the ivory trade for doing so. One does not have to look for factional rivalries between Omanis that stretched across the western Indian Ocean to comprehend at least some of the reasons for disunity among them in the interior of East Africa.66 Competitions between Rima and Omani traders for access to the ivory trade in the interior are particularly observable from 1870 onwards. This is when Said Barghash (1837–88) became Sultan of Zanzibar. With the help of the British, Barghash imposed Omani liwalis (governors) on Mrima towns, such as Pangani, Tanga, Saadani, Bagamoyo, and Dar es Salaam. The liwali system represented a parallel hierarchy that governed alongside pre-existing Rima political structures. In general, Omanis and Rima governed their domestic affairs separately and they did not interfere with each other’s jurisdiction.67 However, there were conflicts when it  Stanley, Dark Continent, II, 8, 118; Tippu Tip, L’autobiographie, 240.  Edward C.  Hore, Tanganyika: Eleven years in Central Africa (London: Edward Stanford, 1892), 69; Council for World Missions/London Missionary Society Archive (hereafter: CWM/LMS) 06/02/006 Hutley, ‘Mahommadanism in Central Africa: Its professors,’ August 1881. 65  Martin, Muslim Brotherhoods, 166; J.M. Gray, ‘Zanzibar and the coastal belt 1840–1884,’ in History of Africa, I, eds. Roland Oliver and Gervase Mathew (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 212–3. 66  Further examination of legal documents in Oman and Zanzibar may help to tease out the potential role of long-standing rivalries amongst the Omani elite. See: McDow, Buying Time, 41–45; Bishara, Sea of Debt. 67  Horton and Middleton, The Swahili, 86; Glassman, Feasts and Riot, 150–1; Pouwels, Horn and Crescent, 106, 109–11; Fabian, Making Identity, 78–96. 63 64

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came to the ivory trade, which was a key factor behind the increased Omani presence in Zanzibar and elsewhere in East Africa during the nineteenth century.68 The Omani liwalis, through Gujarati and other western Indian customs agents and tax collectors, sought to tax ivory-laden caravans as they reached the coast, and this reduced the Rima elites’ capacity to do likewise.69 Coupled with Zanzibar’s 1873 abolition of the slave trade, the early years of Barghash’s reign significantly affected the Rima’s income from trade through their towns.70 Subsequently, many Rima patricians became heavily indebted, which reduced their ability to act as creditors to caravans heading into the interior. This inability to supply credit had a two-fold effect. Firstly, it reduced the sense of the Rima’s prestige and authority, as kinship ties amongst coastal populations were often made on the basis of the exchange of credit and debt.71 Secondly, their inability to fund caravans heading into the interior undermined their influence over long-distance commercial networks that linked them to the sources of ivory in the interior.72 Histories of the nineteenth-century coast point to rivalries and shifting power dynamics between Omani and Rima traders in the interior, even if historians of the interior have yet to analyse them. Competitions between Rima and Omani traders in the interior may have been overlooked in the past partly because of a high degree of cooperation as they left coastal regions. Rima and Omani traders travelled in the same caravans, exchanged credit, and shared news about the conditions of trade and security on the road.73 There was, to a degree, a ‘pioneer ethic’ that bound the coastal traders together, certainly in the first half of the nineteenth century when the ivory trade was still being established.74 Also, coastal traders shared certain cultural characteristics that distinguished them from interior populations. For example, Rima and Omanis were Muslim, urban, maritime, and mercantile; and, from their  Somerville, Ivory, 31.  McDow, Buying Time, 97. 70  Horton and Middleton, The Swahili, 86–7. 71  Glassman, Feasts and Riot, 24, 57–8, 71–4, 173; Thomas F.  McDow, ‘Arabs and Africans: Commerce and kinship from Oman to the East African interior, c.1820–1900,’ (Unpublished PhD diss., Yale, 2008), 136–52. 72  Glassman, Feasts and Riot, 153. 73  Beverly Bolser-Brown, ‘Ujiji: The history of a lakeside town, c.1800–1914,’ (Unpublished PhD diss., Boston University, 1973), 164–5; Tippu Tip, L’autobiographie, 42, 49. These are notwithstanding conflicts between Omani and Rima traders within at least some caravans; see: McDow, Buying Time, 99–103. 74  A.G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London: Longman, 1973), 65. 68 69

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perspective, interior populations were none of these things.75 There were, therefore, probably more phenomena that bound than divided coastal traders versus the people they encountered. Nevertheless, focusing solely on the differences between coastal and interior populations obscures some deep-seated divisions within the coastal traders themselves. These competitions are observable in the interior from when coastal traders became established in various regions. Once coastal traders founded settlements in the interior, members of different kinship groups were no longer so reliant on cooperation to secure their commercial interests. In other words, the ‘pioneer ethic’ ceased to bind coastal traders together once they began consolidating their networks’ respective positions. Consolidation necessitated competition for access to and control of the ivory trade. Discord between Rima and Omani traders is partly observable through analysing their settlements in the interior. Rima and Omani traders tended to inhabit distinct towns within the same region or different districts within the same town. In Unyamwezi, Omanis dominated Tabora and Rima dominated Msene.76 The Rima in the latter settlement were known to have ‘a natural antipathy to their brethren of Oman,’ and so abandoned Tabora to establish themselves there.77 A similar dynamic existed in Manyema, where Rima dominated Nyangwe and Omanis dominated Kasongo.78 According to Tippu Tip, the Rima of Nyangwe invited him to settle among them with a view to bringing his trade under their observation, but he rejected them in favour of settling at Kasongo with a majority-­ Omani following.79 Tippu Tip had numerous encounters with the Rima at Nyangwe, and often referred to them in scathing terms. He once claimed that the ‘men from the Mrima coast [in Nyangwe] have not much sense.’80 He also never referred to the Rima as his kinsmen. He always referred to them with the impersonal ‘kinsmen from the coast,’ and reserved personal pronouns (‘my kinsmen’) for Omanis.81 This builds on the idea of a  Horton and Middleton, The Swahili, 115; Glassman, Feasts and Riot, 2.  See also: McDow, Buying Time, 104–7. 77  Burton, Lake Regions, 269. 78  Cameron, Across Africa, 263, 273; Stanley, Dark Continent, II, 117–8. 79  Tippu Tip, Maisha ya Hamed bin Muhammed El Murjebi yaani Tippu Tip kwa maneno yake mwenyewe, trans. W.H.  Whitely (Dar es Salaam: East African Literature Bureau, 1974), 81. 80  Ibid., 135. See also: A.G.M.Afr. C.16–7. Journal du P. Deniaud, 25 March 1881. 81  This is translated from Swahili. My kinsmen: jemaa yangu; kinsmen from the coast: jemaa za Mrima. Note, François Bontinck, who wrote the French translation of Tippu Tip’s 75 76

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certain cultural commonality associated with the coast between Omanis and Rima, while it also displays differences between them. Also, in Ujiji, most Rima and Omanis lived in separate districts. They lived in the centre of present-day Ujiji (referred to contemporaneously as either Kawele or Ugoy; hereafter:  Kawele-Ugoy) and Kasimbo (to present-day Ujiji's south)  respectively.82 In 1878, Mwinyi Kheri of Kawele-Ugoy and Abdullah bin Suleiman of Kasimbo were described as ‘the leaders of two opposing factions among the Arabs [coastal traders].’83 The divisions between Rima and Omani traders in interior settlements show commonality with settlements on the coast, which had Rima and Omanis governing them in parallel hierarchies. Political divisions between Rima and Omanis on the coast were mirrored in coastal trader settlements in the interior. Rima and Omani traders competed for access to the ivory trade from their respective districts and settlements. They did so through commercial and political means. For example, in Itawa (to the southwest of Lake Tanganyika) in 1867, Omani traders bought all the available ivory and refused to sell it to representatives of Ujiji’s Rima traders, except at heavily inflated prices.84 The Rima traders’ representatives returned to Ujiji empty-handed, and commercial routes across Lake Tanganyika in this direction soon fell into disuse.85 Also, in Manyema in 1874, Tippu Tip forced some Rima traders based in Nyangwe to compensate local populations for raiding them.86 He did this to establish his political position through claiming rights to ivory in the region at the expense of the Rima.87 Thus, it was not just the establishment of coastal traders in a region that contributed to the increased politicisation of ivory’s uses; rather it was also the competition between them. Elsewhere, competition between Omanis and Rima resulted in bloodshed, most notably on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in 1884–87. Here, Rumaliza accused chiefs in Urundi of autobiography, translates jemaa za Mrima as gens de la Côte (men of the coast). Such terminology takes the kinship element out of Tippu Tip’s discussion about Rima populations entirely. 82  Stanley, Dark Continent, II, 1, 8–9; Hore, Tanganyika, 68; Norman Robert Bennett, ‘Mwinyi Kheri,’ in Leadership in Eastern Africa: Six political biographies, ed. Norman Robert Bennett (Boston: Boston University Press, 1968), 153. 83  CWM/LMS/06/02/003 Hore to LMS, 9 December 1878. 84  Livingstone, Last Journals, 189. 85  Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory, 188; Brown, ‘Muslim influence,’ 619. 86  Cameron, Across Africa, 270, 273. 87  Tippu Tip, L’autobiographie, 96.

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infringing on the ivory trade across the north end of the lake.88 These chiefs were supported by Rima traders based in Ujiji, and had been so since their own military campaigns in 1881.89 On hearing of Rumaliza’s accusations, Tippu Tip sent 500 men armed with guns to subdue any resistance to the Omanis’ commercial aims.90 Their arrival sparked three years of armed struggle between the Rima and Omani traders’ respective followings in Urundi’s lakeshore regions.91 The eventual result of the battles was an Omani victory, with Ujiji’s Rima traders recognising Rumaliza’s political prominence in Urundi in exchange for the right to trade in his name.92 Political competitions between Rima and Omani traders in the interior were inherently tied to each group’s demand for ivory. The result of the 1884–87 war in Urundi’s lakeshore regions is representative of the broader trajectory of Rima-Omani power dynamics in the late nineteenth century. Omanis became increasingly prominent over the Rima politically and in regard to the ivory trade in the interior, just as they did on the coast. The rise of Omanis in the interior is heavily intertwined with the career of Said Barghash, though his indirect influence on the interior was felt before he became Sultan of Zanzibar in 1870 and imposed liwali on coastal towns thereafter. Barghash’s influence in the interior became established in 1856, when he attempted (and failed) to topple his half-brother, Sultan Said Majid, in a coup. Barghash was exiled to Bombay, and many of his supporters fled into the interior, most notably to Tabora, to escape Sultan Majid’s retribution.93 In terms of the coastal trader population, Tabora remained an Omani-dominated settlement for the rest of the nineteenth century. Msene—the Rima-dominated settlement in Unyamwezi that Burton commented on—fell into obscurity during the 1860s. Its decline was not a result of decreasing influence of Rima versus Omani rivals in Tabora, per se. Rather, Msene became located in a particularly militarised zone in which Mirambo was prominent.94 All coastal traders—Rima and Omani—had been forced to retreat from this region by the beginning of the 1870s. A side-effect of Mirambo’s rise was that he  A.G.M.Afr. C.16–133. Charbonnier to White Fathers, 30 April 1886.  Brown, ‘Ujiji,’ 164–9; A.G.M.Afr. Diaire de Massanze, 24–29 April 1882. 90  Tippu Tip, Maisha, 123. 91  A.G.M.Afr. Diaire de Kibanga, 4 February 1887, 2 April 1887. 92  A.G.M.Afr. C.16–133. Charbonnier to White Fathers, 30 April 1886; A.G.M.Afr. C.19–439 ‘Voyage à Oujiji,’ 1888; Brown, ‘Ujiji,’ 178. 93  Tippu Tip, Maisha, 31; John Hanning Speke, Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1864), 107; Burton, Lake Regions, 229; Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory 212; Martin, Muslim Brotherhoods, 166–8. 94  Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory, 183. 88 89

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contributed to Omanis becoming the most prominent coastal traders in Unyamwezi. Omanis became increasingly entrenched in other East African regions during Said Barghash’s reign. Key to this process was Barghash’s incorporation of Gujarati and other western Indian  financiers into his court. Barghash became a key player in a network of credit that spanned the Western Indian Ocean between the Indian sub-continent, Oman, Zanzibar, and the East African mainland. Tharia Topan was the most prominent South Asian financier in this context.95 He was Tippu Tip’s most notable creditor even before Barghash became Sultan. The relationship between the Tharia Topan, Tippu Tip, and Barghash was augmented when Tippu Tip arrived in Zanzibar in 1881, having been recalled by Barghash to repay his debts to Tharia Topan. Tippu Tip was then sent back to the interior in 1883 with more credit from Tharia Topan and a mandate from Barghash to take greater control over the ivory trade.96 Around Lake Tanganyika, this manifested itself in the wars in Urundi in 1884–87. Rumaliza, acting as one of Tippu Tip’s associates, became the most prominent political actor and ivory trader in the lacustrine region.97 His influence was such that he presided over the Rima traders in Ujiji, who were more numerous than their Omani counterparts. In Manyema, meanwhile, Tippu Tip and his Omani associates continued to push westwards into the region around Stanley Falls. The Rima traders at Nyangwe were less prominent in this westward drive, even if they maintained a sizable network around their central station.98 By the 1880s, Omani traders and coastal liwalis associated with Said Barghash dominated long-distance ivory networks that stretched across East Africa.99 There were some Omanis who were resentful of Barghash, Tippu Tip, and Rumaliza’s influence in the interior, however. It is in this context that 95  Ibid., 84, 107–9; Glassman, Feasts and Riot, 57; John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 46. 96  Zanzibar National Archives (hereafter: ZNA) AA1/36 Kirk to Earl Granville, 23 October 1884, Tipo Tipo to Barghash, undated; Heinrich Brode, Tippoo Tib: The story of his career in Central Africa, narrated from his own accounts, trans. H.  Havelock (London: Edward Arnold, 1907), 160. 97  CWM/LMS/06/02/015 Swann to Thompson, 1 August 1890. 98  Tippu Tip, L’autobiographie, 241. 99  See also: Alison Smith, ‘The southern section of the interior, 1840–84,’ in History of East  Africa, I, eds. Roland Oliver and Gervase Mathew (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 292.

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the missionary William Griffith’s 1881 observation that, ‘there are endless feuds between the Arabs [Omanis] and the Wamrima [sic.] … and there are besides endless feuds between the various clans of Arabs [Omanis] themselves,’ comes into view.100 Some Omanis who were long-established in the interior were averse to Barghash’s attempts to influence their communities and the ivory trade. For example, Barghash appointed a liwali to Tabora from 1872 onwards, but was forced to recall his first two appointees because of their inability or unwillingness to carry out his instructions.101 Tabora’s liwalis struggled to reconcile Barghash’s aims for the ivory trade with those of individual traders already resident there. Rumaliza, as one of Barghash’s representatives, was also affected by dissent from at least one older Omani trader. In 1894, he was deposed of his role in Ujiji by Msabah bin Njem al-Sheheni, who had been resident on Lake Tanganyika’s shores since the 1840s but was marginalised by Rumaliza’s rise.102 Msabah claimed an opportunity to enhance his position that arose from the arrival of Belgian and German colonial forces in the early 1890s. Instead of resisting—as Rumaliza did—he cooperated with the Germans and was appointed as Ujiji’s district chief under the new colonial regime while Rumaliza was fighting the Belgian incursion near Stanley Falls.103 On returning to Ujiji defeated, Rumaliza was forced to continue travelling eastwards and to seek refuge in Zanzibar. Barghash’s aims for the ivory trade during his reign clashed with the aims of some Omani traders who were already established in the interior. Herein lies a key difference between increased Omani influence on the coast and in the interior. On the coast, Omani influence over politics and the ivory trade was supported by institutions, such as customs houses. Tax collection, through systems of tribute, was much more ad hoc in the interior, and was tied much more closely to individual traders than to the Sultan of  Zanzibar. Moreover,  traders had to continually assert and re-­ assert their authority to ensure tribute payments, and the cost of doing so had the capacity to offset the potential profits.104 Lacking a formal tax  CWM/LMS/06/02/006 Griffith to Thomson, 12 August 1881.  McDow, ‘Arabs and Africans,’ 112–21; Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory, 194–5; Brode, Tippoo Tib, 156, CWM/LMS/06/02/009 Hore to Whitehouse, 23 April 1884; Tippu Tip, L’autobiographie, 128–9. 102  Brown, ‘Ujiji,’ 176; Tippu Tip, L’autobiographie, 259. 103  Brown, ‘Ujiji,’ 204; C.T. Brady, Commerce and Conquest in East Africa: With particular reference to the Salem trade with Zanzibar (Salem: Essex Institute, 1950), 206–7. 104  Brown, ‘Ujiji,’ 165. 100 101

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system, Sultan Barghash relied on credit to ensure his influence. This allowed his associates to be the most prominent ivory traders and political actors from amongst the coastal traders, but it did not give them a monopoly. Other Omani traders continued to support themselves through their own credit networks extending to Zanzibar and elsewhere in the western IOW, and by making their position in the interior sustainable in its own right. Nevertheless, Barghash’s aims for the ivory trade had the potential to infringe on the status and position they acquired in the interior through the conduct of their trade. As the potential came to fruition, some long-­ standing Omani traders became resentful of Barghash and his associates’ network. Infringements by Barghash’s representatives on long-standing Omani residents in the interior appear to have been at the heart of intra-­ Omani competitions.

Conclusion The global ivory trade was increasingly integral to the construction of political power in nineteenth-century East Africa. In the interior of this region, chiefs, state-builders, warlords, and prominent traders sought control of ivory and its trade to buttress their political authority, symbolically, economically, and militarily. Such a conclusion is not novel. However, this chapter adds further dimensions to this generally accepted scenario. As ivory became increasingly important as a trade good, East Africans ceased using it in everyday activities and objects. Declining ivory consumption amongst East Africans during this period was in marked contrast to patterns of ivory consumption in the wider IOW, Europe, and North America during this period. This divergence was tied to East Africa being a global supplier rather than a consumer of ivory. Within East Africa itself, though, few members of the general populace sold ivory directly to the global market. Instead, political leaders and prominent traders established controls on the ivory trade to reinforce their ability to assert and display their authority. The importance of controlling the ivory trade was such that political power became increasingly militarised. There was an aura of competition between the wealthy and powerful for access to and control of ivory and its trade. The idea of competition for access to and control of the ivory trade between power-holders informs analysis of the relationship between Rima and Omani populations in East Africa’s coastal and interior regions. The wealth garnered from the ivory trade has long been known to have been

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tied to power dynamics between Rima and Omani hierarchies on the coast. This chapter shows that such dynamics existed in the interior as well. Omani traders gradually undermined and usurped Rima traders in the interior in processes that were concurrent with Omani liwalis becoming increasingly influential in Mrima towns. There is a sense, therefore, of the ivory trade integrating the interior of East Africa into long-standing competitions occurring in coastal and island regions of the western IOW. Moreover, East Africa’s interior may have been a site in which more Indian-Ocean-based competitions developed. Resentment at Sultan Barghash’s influence grew amongst Omani traders who were not within his network and who were long-established in the interior. Barghash’s commercial and political aims endangered their positions vis-à-vis the ivory trade and their resultant political position. How these were linked (or not) to broader Omani divisions in the western IOW is a topic for further study. From elephants’ perspective, the key theme of this history is their destruction for the commodification and exchange of their ivory at the hands of humans. The lives of elephants in nineteenth-century East Africa were increasingly perilous as ivory was consumed by American and European middle classes, and as coastal traders established themselves further into the interior. Ivory and its trade were the central drivers of the human-elephant relationship in the  nineteenth century.  Consequently, this chapter builds more on one of the long-standing themes in IOW history—that of commerce—than recent developments in animal histories. In this instance, humans exploited elephants for a product that was central to nineteenth-century global trade, and for the IOW’s gradual integration into growing capitalist markets centred on Europe.  The importance of IOW networks here is notable. While Capitalist demand  in the North Atlantic may have fueled elephants’ destruction, the mechanisms through which this process occurred were distinctly IOW in origin. Omani and African traders, South Asian financiers, African elephant hunters, statebuilders, and labourers were integral to the nineteenth-century ivory trade. This speaks to the robustness of IOW networks in the face of European  Capitalist  expansion, even in the late nineteenth century  when  the forces of European imperialism and colonialism were strengthening significantly. Despite wider, global factors at play in this history, there is a distinct, IOW element at its core.

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CHAPTER 10

The Flight of the Peacock, or How Peacocks Became Japanese Martha Chaiklin

Introduction In 1635, the rich seafaring traditions of Japan were nearly petrified with the issuance of proclamations that forbade Japanese citizens from travelling abroad and those already abroad from ever returning. With the expulsion of Portuguese traders in 1639, Japan’s exposure to the rest of the world was severely limited. While few scholars still think of Japan as closed, the extent and nature of this self-imposed isolation is still under exploration. It is for this reason, however, that early modern Japan (c. 1639–1854) is a useful canvas for the examination of motivations for consumption and its consequences, calling into question the so-called rational optimisation framework, which suggests that logic, need, and safety control economic decisions. In this political environment, imports, while not necessarily luxuries, had at least a certain deliberation in their selection. The shogunate controlled foreign trade as tightly as it was able and did on occasion limit or ban specific imports. Therefore, introduction of finished objects

M. Chaiklin (*) Historian, Columbia, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Chaiklin et al. (eds.), Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42595-1_10

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and raw materials into early modern Japan underlines Georg Simmel’s proposition that distance enhances value, not just in monetary terms but in emotional response as well.1 Many products tie quasi-closed Japan to the Indian Ocean World (IOW), and they profoundly affected the material environment of the Japanese people. Tortoiseshell became the standard substance for women’s hair combs even though the hawksbill turtles that provided the raw material mostly came from the Indian Ocean.2 Ivory was in demand for personal seals or chops (hanko or inkan), musical instrument parts, and personal ornamentation. Each of these materials became so integral to Japanese culture that they lost their sense of foreignness. They thus affirm Japan’s integration with the IOW. This is not to suggest that Japan was actively integrated into a global network, economic or intellectual, but rather, that human desires and actions impacted animal populations and animals impacted human perceptions of the world. Feathers make an interesting case study, because like ivory and tortoiseshell, their function and their appeal could be divorced from the living animal, but unlike ivory or tortoiseshell, they exist almost everywhere, hence the demand for specific feathers seems almost the epitome of capricious luxury. Certainly, the existence of imported feathers challenges the notion of Japanese isolation in the early modern period, not only because they are foreign but also because they contain in them a kernel of knowledge about the greater world. Feathers also provide an exploration of the aesthetics of decontextualisation and cultural appropriation. In other words, Indian Ocean feathers show how a thing, desirable because of its novelty and exoticism, can be absorbed and appropriated into another culture without the usual negative implications of power and domination in a process that expands the geographic boundaries of the Indian Ocean. The exploration of trade in the feathers of the IOW has many potential subjects such as, for example, kingfishers and egrets, but peacock feathers are examined here because they are clearly an import from the IOW region and, as peacocks are flightless, they did not migrate to Japan without human intervention.3 Additionally, the feathers of the peacock train are so 1  Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London: Routledge, 1978), 76. 2  See: Martha Chaiklin, ‘Imports and autarky: Tortoiseshell in early modern Japan,’ in Luxury in Global Perspective, eds. Karin Hofmeister and Bernde Grewe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 218–41. 3  Peacocks can fly short distances but, like chickens, are considered ground birds.

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distinctive they can easily be identified even in black and white line illustrations drawn by artists with no training as naturalists. This allows the historian to use visual materials as evidence. Finally, peacock feathers represent a stark and complete cycle of import, absorption, appropriation, and re-appropriation.

What Is a Feather? The evolutionary purpose of feathers is still debated. They are not necessary for flight—bats, for example, don’t have feathers. Nor does having feathers equate with flight—ostriches don’t fly at all. Most scientists now believe that birds evolved from dinosaurs, but, because feathers generally deteriorate before they fossilise, there are few examples and no generally accepted evolutionary arc.4 The Archaeopteryx, which was found by a quarryman in England and used to pay for medical treatment in 1861, is seen as a ‘Rosetta Stone’: a transitional form between birds and reptiles that led to an investigation of this question.5 In any case, early dinosaurs did not have feathers; feathers were an evolutionary result. Today, feathers are the single characteristic that separates birds from all other species. Other traits like flight (e.g. insects) and laying eggs (e.g. reptiles) are present in other life forms (Fig. 10.1). In simple terms, feathers are epidermal appendages of birds. There are five basic feather types and their uses both by the animal and by humans are defined by their characteristics. Contour feathers are what cover most of the bird. Flight feathers are found on the wing or tail. Their shape makes them aerodynamic and they also tend to be the most durable. In flightless birds like peafowl, these feathers are primarily for display. The peacock train is comprised of covering feathers known as coverts. The semiplume has plumey barbs that do not interlock, like the breeding plumes of the great egret (aigrettes). Then there is the down feather, which is insulative for birds and humans. There are two other feathers which have no commercial, utilitarian, or decorative value to humans: bristles and filo plumes, which are both sensory.6 4  For a summary of theories of evolution, see: Carl Zimmer, ‘The long curious extravagant evolution of feathers,’ National Geographic, 219, 2 (February 2011), 32–57. 5  Thor Hanson, Feathers: The evolution of a natural miracle (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 14–21. 6  Ibid., 275–8.

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Fig. 10.1  Archaeopteryx. The Thermopolis specimen found in Bavaria. Jurassic Period. Photograph by Dr. Burkhard Pohl. Collection of the Wyoming Dinosaur Center

Feathers were probably one of the earliest animal materials utilised by man because they are so easily available. They do not require weapons or tools to obtain because they could be found on the ground after birds lost them through shedding or moulting. Nor do feathers require any tanning, drying, weaving, or any other form of processing for most applications. Feather use is documented across time and region, from Aztecs to Zanzibaris. Human use can broadly be defined in two categories: functional and ornamental. The birds that supply the first are generally common species like chickens, geese, and ducks. Their feathers are used for feather dusters, upholstery, stuffing, and insulation. In early modern times, quill pens were made from geese, crow, and swan feathers which were also primarily sourced domestically.7 Common feathers like these were not 7  There were some imports of wild Canadian geese and swan feathers to England. See: Stuart Houston, Tim Ball and Mary Houston, Eighteenth Century Naturalists of Hudson Bay

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generally exported great distances in premodern times because their value was too low to recoup transportation costs. European international trade in common feathers was limited to established trade routes between the Baltic and Western Europe.8 Even when transportation costs came down, other factors inhibited the trade in functional feathers. As Sir George Watts explained in 1908 in The Commercial Products of India, ‘In India the feathers of the domestic fowl are almost universally destroyed through the habit of removing them after immersion in hot water.’ But Watts went on to comment that, ‘Were an effort made to remedy this defect, India might supply a large quantity of upholstery feathers. The same remark is applicable to the supply of down.’9 Thus, cultural factors could affect the suitability of feathers for export as much as price. The transportation revolution made the export of the feathers of domestic species across significant distances more profitable. For example, insulating feathers and down became a major business for China. By the 1910s China exported 15,000 tons of duck, goose, and other feathers primarily from around the Canton area. Foreign establishments cleaned, graded, and packed the feathers for shipment. Hydraulic presses were used to form bales of 200 pounds each.10 Much of the down found in coats and comforters today still comes from China. Most feathers traded east or west from the Indian Ocean in the early modern period were ornamental rather than common feathers. Luxury is a fluid concept—even a highly functional item like an eiderdown quilt is a kind of luxury because its qualities make it perform better than other alternatives. In premodern times, feathers from the IOW were in demand more for their form rather than any utilitarian function. Ornamental feathers have long been used to ‘convey sexual and economic supremacy.’11 They have often been seen to have totemic properties, which led to their

(Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2003), 194. 8  See, for example: Henryk Zins, England and the Baltic in the Elizabethan Era, trans. H.C.  Stevens (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), 273; Michael Shrub, Feasting, Fowling and Feathers: A history of the exploitation of wild birds (London: T & AD Poyser, 2013), 26–7, 77, 87–8. 9  Sir George Watts, The Commercial Products of India (London: John Murray, 1908), 139. 10  Julean Arnold, Commercial Handbook of China, II (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920), 271–2. 11  Andrew Bolton, Wild: Fashion untamed (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005), 81.

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incorporation into the dress of many primitive societies. As one mid-­ century sartorial historian wrote: Feathers of birds have always formed a part of the decorative dress of races of a low order of civilization. Primitive peoples have as a rule an innate sense of color and a keen sense of arrangement.12

These associations are not limited to ‘primitive peoples’ as can be seen by the strong feather presence in burlesque costumes and the popularity of fan dancers. The connection of sexuality and feathers was so strong that when designer Richard Blackwell decided to incorporate feathers in his designs in the 1960s, the press dubbed him ‘a costume maker for strip shows.’13 It was also probably for this reason that one of Elvis Presley’s favourite jumpsuits was embroidered with mirrored peacocks, one on the front and back, with feather trains that went all the way down the legs.14 Imported feathers used in dress were usually easily identifiable and therefore heightened the effect. It is also this visual prominence that make feathers a desirable luxury for conspicuous consumption. They are beautiful decoration of a type that J.C. Flugel defined as ‘directional’ because they emphasise the movements of the body. In ancient Greece and Rome, ostrich plumes, aigrettes, peacock feathers, and other exotic bird feathers were used to signify rank or affiliation.15 Similarly, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, men of rank in Europe attached rare and expensive feathers to their hats to prominently exhibit their position and wealth.16 In these cases, the feathers retained their exoticism, offered directional adornment, and projected wealth. In Japan, feathers exhibited all of these properties and a few additional ones. 12  Katherine Morris Lester and Bess Viola Oerke, Accessories of Dress: An illustrated encyclopedia (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 74. 13  Richard Blackwell with Vernon Patterson, From Rags to Bitches - An Autobiography (Los Angeles: General Publishing Company, 1995), 187. 14  It was designed by Bill Bellew and made by the J.C.  Costume Company, costing $10,000. First worn May 11, 1974. http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2014/rock-roll-history-presley-to-punk-n09160/lot.111.html. (Accessed: 9 May 2015). 15  Pliny the Elder, The Natural History of Pliny, trans. John Bostock and H.T.  Riley (London: George Bell and Sons, 1890), 479. 16  Colin McDowell, Hats: Status, style and glamour (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 9–10.

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Feathers in Japanese Spiritual Context Rice cultivation was introduced to Japan during the Yayoi period (c. 350 BCE–350 CE). As the source of sustenance and the source of saké, it has played a sacred role in Shinto tradition.17 Scholars believe that a myth in which rice was brought to Japan by a seed in a bird’s mouth may have existed in Yayoi times. Priests are thought to have performed a fertility ceremony in which they donned feathered outfits and rowed out to meet the ‘bird’ each year.18 In the earliest extant texts, references to feathers seem to express a link to the spiritual world. The Kojiki [Record of Ancient Matters, 721], the oldest surviving text, is part mythology and part history. It contains the story of the sea princess, Toyotamahime. When giving birth she asked her husband Hoori not to look, but like Orpheus, he did, and he saw that she had changed into a crocodile. Toyotamahime was so ashamed of this ugly form that she fled forever back to the sea. Feathers come into the story because her special hut, required for giving birth, was thatched with cormorant feathers. The clutching of a cormorant feather was therefore thought to ease childbirth.19 This story was retold in an auspicious or celebratory noh play by Zeami (1363–1443) called Unoha [Cormorant Feathers].20 Similar but better known is Hagoromo [Feather Robe]. This Japanese version of the so-called Swan Maiden folktale has many versions and was recorded as early as the eighth century.21 It is the story of a maiden from heaven who removes the feather robe that she needs to fly between heaven and earth in order to bathe. It is stolen by a fisherman. In Zeami’s noh version, the 17  What actually constitutes the Yayoi period is debated, but it represents a stratified society in which bronze weapons were used and simplified ceramic forms were distinct from earlier periods. 18  Mark J. Hudson, ‘Rice, bronze, and chieftains: An archaeology of Yayoi ritual,’ Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 19, 2–3 (1992), 147. 19  William Aston and Basil Hall Chamberlain, Kojiki (Kobe: J.L. Thompson, 1932), 115. Nihongi, I, trans. William Aston (London: Japan Society, 1896), 96–103. It was custom in some parts of premodern Japan to construct a special hut for giving birth because the process was seen as polluting. 20  In the early eighteenth century, this play was banned as infelicitous, but it was revived in 1993 by the Kanze school. 21  Carmen Blacker, ‘The snake woman in Japanese myth and legend,’ in The Collected Works of Carmen Blacker (Richmond, Surrey and Tokyo: Japan Library and Synapse, 2000), 44, 98. Swan maiden folk tales in which shape-shifting occurs through a garment of feathers occur in many places.

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fisherman insists that the maiden dance for its return. In each of these stories, feathers represent an intermediary between man and gods. The role of the feather as a link to the spiritual world is also apparent in the coronation ceremony of the emperor, who in Japanese tradition is descended from Shinto gods. The new emperor dons a ‘robe of heavenly feathers’ as part of his transformation.22 Death is a transition from life to another world and it is this connection that linked feathers to medicine. One Shinto deity representing this connection was the dwarf Sukuna Bikuna (also pronounced Sukuna Hikuna, literally ‘Small Man of Renown’) who was described in ancient texts as having arrived in a coat of goose or wren feathers.23 He assisted Ō kuninushi in creating the earth. More importantly in this context is his association with medicine and healing as well as saké-brewing and hot springs, which are both believed to have curative powers. Another example that links feathers with life and death is the custom, widely spread among all social classes, of giving a dying person a last drink of water (matsugo no mizu). The water is dripped down a feather in a final hope of resuscitation.24 Cormorant feathers held by birthing mothers similarly suggest both liminality between life and death and healing. The twelfth-century story collection, Konjaku monogatari, contains several tales in which feathers play this role, including one in which medicine is stirred with a feather, and another where a feather duster is brushed over a man to cure his wounds. The realist novelist Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) mentions a belief in the curative powers of feathers in a story called ‘Nightingale in the Snow’ (1687). Feathers were to be brushed across the face of a certain daimyo’s heir to cure him of smallpox.25 In another Saikaku story, cormorant feathers are spread on the ground to find clear water according to where the most dew collected, ‘according to ancient precedent.’26

22  John Breen and Mark Teeuwen, A New History of Shinto (Chichester, West Sussex and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 168. 23  Nihongi, I, 62. He was a god of medicine among other things. 24  Hikaru Suzuki, The Price of Death: The funeral industry in contemporary Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 40–1. A chopstick with a cotton ball on the end dipped in water was also used. 25  Ihara Saikaku, Great Mirror of Male Love, trans. Paul Schalow (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 118. 26  From 1689, Ihara Saikaku, Tales of Japanese Justice, trans. Thomas M. Kondo & Alfred Marks (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1980), 53.

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A mythological connection with feathers too prominent to be omitted in even this brief survey is the tengu. These legendary man/bird creatures appear in Japanese texts from about the tenth century and they evolved considerably over the next millennium, shifting between being truly malevolent to merely mischievous or even virtuous protectors of Buddhism.27 As this last incarnation, tengu were chosen as guardians of the anti-western political movement of the late nineteenth century.28 In general, tengu are associated with mountains and warfare. They are usually depicted with wings and either a beak or a long, Pinocchio-like nose. Tengu carry a feather fan that can bring forth wind. In many folktales, the fan can make noses grow larger or smaller. This feather fan was used as a crest (mon) in some shrines and temples. In all their many forms and meanings, tengu were intermediaries not only between the human and the spirit world, but between the human and the animal world. His feather fan expresses this liminality even when the tengu is in human form (Fig. 10.2).

Heavenly Feathered Arrows To catch arrows like a tengu (tengu no yatori) is a metaphorical expression in Japanese that represents something that is ungodly fast. This phrase exemplifies not just the place of the tengu in the liminal world between man and god, but that of archery and its connection to both these worlds. Arrow fletching was perhaps the most significant utilitarian use for feathers across premodern Japanese history—utilitarian but also replete with religious associations. Archery was extremely important both for obtaining food and for obtaining power, and so it is therefore not surprising that it had, even in these ancient times, connections to religion. The early chronicles commissioned by the imperial house to document their godly origin, the Kojiki (712) and the Nihongi (720), are rife with references to heavenly arrows. For example, Amaterasu, the sun goddess, was an archer and therefore had a quiver of heavenly arrows that unified the people of Japan. To emphasise that their lineage traced to Amaterasu, ‘heavenly-feathered arrows’ are included in the Imperial family regalia. 27  There is mention of a tengu in the Nihongi but this appears to refer to a Chinese mythological animal that is a dog. Nihongi, II, 167. One of the best summaries of this transition is still the paper presented at the Asiatic Society by M.W. de Visser, ‘Asiatic Society of Japan,’ Japan Weekly Mail, July 4, 1908, 16–17. 28  Sarah Thal, Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods: Politics of a pilgrimage site in Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 118–21.

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Fig. 10.2  Tengu with feather fan, centre. Tengu nado [Tengu and miscellaneous]. Hokusai school, mid-nineteenth century. Collection of the Library of Congress

Archery was performed at shrines to ensure peace and plentiful harvests, and in ancient times, the plucking of bowstrings had magical powers. Also, arrows had a mystical import, connecting the world of the gods (kami) to that of humans. They are believed to dispel evil.29 An example of this can be seen in 1652, at the rededication of Sanju ¯sangendo ¯ Temple after some repairs. The famed archer Kataoka Heimon Iemori was selected over many applicants to shoot two arrows with white feathers—white being symbolic of purification.30 Likewise, an exhibition of mounted archery (yabusame) was held at Sensō ji Temple in 1728 as an appeal to the gods to heal the shogunal heir from smallpox.31 Another example that 29  G. Cameron Hurst, Armed Martial Arts of Japan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 105–8. Yabusame is performed at various shrines around Japan. 30  Hinatsu Shigetaka, ‘Honchō Bugei Shō den,’ Monumenta Nipponica, 45, 3 (1990), 278. 31  Gerald Groemer, ‘Sacred dance at Sensō ji: The development of a tradition,’ Asian Ethnology, 69, 2 (2010), 269.

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Fig. 10.3  Utagawa Toyoharu. Kyo¯to Sanjūsangendo¯ no zu [Illustration of Kyoto Sanjūsangendo¯]. Between 1764 and 1772. Collection of the Library of Congress. The archery target can be seen at the end of the veranda

emphasises the role of archery and feathers in the liminality of worlds is the elite practice of having special arrows launched when a child was born (Fig. 10.3). The meaning of the action was extended to the implements—arrows took on meaning that did not require they actually be sent into flight. The most prominent example of this is the hamaya, literally ‘demon-smashing arrow.’ They are always fletched with white feathers. Originally hamaya were purchased as a set with a bow (hamayumi) and were presented to boys at New Years (Fig. 10.4). Today, the bow has generally been dropped (and often replaced with a plaque), along with the gender separation, but hamaya are still widely purchased during the New Year holiday. At the end of the year, old ones are brought to a shrine to be burned along with the evil they have absorbed. Hamaya with or without a bow are also sometimes placed on the roofs of newly constructed homes as a sort of lightning rod for evil. A bow and arrow was also used as a signboard for public bathhouses. Although attributed to a visual pun for ‘to shoot’ and ‘to be in hot water,’ there may have been some latent connection to purification.

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Fig. 10.4  Kubo Shunman, Hama-Yumi, and Buriburi-Gitcho, Boy’s Toys, for the New Year Celebration, nineteenth century. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Archery was not just a spiritual exercise but also arguably the most important weapon in the premodern Japanese warrior’s arsenal. Neolithic archers used a short bow, but the longbow is evident by the Yayoi period. The distinctive Japanese longbow, about six and a half feet long, with a grip about a third of the way up, completely replaced the short bow by the seventh century. Common arrows were usually fletched with three (but sometimes four) pinion feathers that were straight rather than rifled. This fletching could be the most expensive part of the arrow.32

32  E. Gilbertson, ‘Japanese archery and archers,’ Transactions and Proceedings of the Japan Society of London, 4 (1897), 118.

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The outermost tail feathers (ishiuchi) are considered best for fletching, followed by inner tail feathers (oba), and lastly wing feathers (teba).33 According to scholar-bureaucrat Arai Hakuseki’s treatise on arms and armour (Honchō gunkiko, late eighteenth century), five birds were used predominantly: black kite, pheasant, heron, eagle, and honey buzzard. Of these, the feathers of the honey buzzard (which is a type of hawk rather than a buzzard), beautifully striped black, white, and grey, were most commonly used.34 Eagle and other hawk feathers were also desirable, and sometimes crane and swan were used too.35 The white feathers of eagles, swans, or egrets were also occasionally dyed, usually black or red.36 The types of feather and colours used were subject to fashion, but this brief survey makes apparent that the selection of feathers for fletching is not just the outcome of their aerodynamic properties, but also their aesthetics and symbolic capital.

The Non-weaponised Feather During the New Year holiday, what hamaya arrows and hamayumi bows were to boys, hanetsuki was to girls. This badminton-like game does not have the same ancient roots as archery—the first textual reference is only from 1432.37 Hanetsuki resembles games played in China and the West, but it is believed that this specific game originated in Japan among the imperial family and other elites at around this time.38 A battledore, a sometimes elaborately painted or papier machéd board, was used to volley a feathered shuttlecock.39 The people of early modern Japan thought that the shuttlecock looked like a dragonfly eating a mosquito, so hanetsuki came to be seen as a talisman to keep mosquitoes and, by extension, evil away. By the Edo period, this pastime had spread to commoners, primarily as a girls’ game played with a sort of counting song (Fig. 10.5).

33  Hideharu Onuma, Kyudo: The essence and practice of Japanese archery (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1993), 54. 34  Arai Hakuseki, Arai Hakuseki zenshū, VI (Tokyo: Privately Printed, 1907), 320. 35  Gilbertson, ‘Japanese archery and archers,’ 118. 36  Arai, Zenshū, VI, 321. 37  In the Kanmon gyoki. 38  Onuma, Kyudo, 54. 39  Battledores so elaborate as to make game play impossible are still sold at year’s end to bring good fortune in the coming year.

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Fig. 10.5  Torii Kiyotomo, Woman with Battledore and Shuttlecock, 1815–1820. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The shuttlecock was often made from a soap nut (from the Sapindus mukorossi tree) to which the feathers of a female pheasant were attached. Pheasant hen feathers were preferred because supposedly the feathers of the male did not flutter as well. Moreover, hen feathers emphasised the female nature of the game. In Edo, when the battledore was purchased, it was wrapped in white paper into which feathers were inserted, either as spares for the shuttlecock, or as decoration.40 This game has been 40  Kitagawa Morisada, Ruijū kinse fūzokushi (Morisada mankō ) (Tokyo: Choyosha Shoten, 1913), 332

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immortalised in a kabuki dance by a courtesan’s young maid, Hane no kamuro, that has remained popular since it debuted in 1785. The shuttlecock, or hane, like the hamaya, is a communication with the spiritual realm through the protective nature of feathers and gameplay. Feathers were also used for a variety of whisks, brushes, and brooms in Japan. For example, they were used in sericulture, to brush the newly hatched worms from the card on which the eggs had been placed onto a bed of mulberry leaves.41 A similar whisk of black cocks feathers was requisite for the members of the Dutch factory, used to brush dust from seats and clothes during the court journey to Edo for the required audience with the shogun.42 A feather was also an important accessory in a woman’s toilet, used for smoothing eyebrows and to apply tooth blacking.43 Feathers were utilised in writing, drawing, and painting, to brush away the charcoal lines used for drafting.44 A scroll painting from the late fifteenth century depicts an itinerant storyteller using a pheasant feather on a stick pointer to protect the painted illustrations he displayed.45 Perhaps the most prominent historical use that remains today is the feather whisk for ashes used in tea and incense ceremonies. The exact form of this whisk varies depending on the school and time period; a single feather or multiples of crane, wild goose, or eagle feathers. On occasion, exotic bird feathers were also used.46 These feather whisks were even employed as the motif of some family crests (Figs. 10.6 and 10.7). Feathers were put to purely decorative effect too. A set of screens depicting beautiful women in the Shō sō in, an eighth-century treasure house connected to Tō daiji Temple in Nara, were decorated with feathers.  J. J. Rein, The Industries of Japan (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1889), 194.  Engelbert Kaempfer, History of Japan, II (London: Printed for the Translator, 1727), 399. 43  Isaac Titsingh, Illustrations of Japan (London: R. Ackerman, 1822), 228; Isabella Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An account of travels in the interior, including visits to the aborigines of Yezo and the shrines of Nikkô and Isé, I (London: John Murray, 1880); Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese, 4th ed. (London; John Murray, 1902), 63. 44  See, for example: Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea: Letters of travel (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1914), 385. 45  Barbara Ruch, ‘Medieval jongleurs and the making of a national literature,’ in Japan in the Muromachi Age, eds. John Whitney Hall and Toyoda Takeshi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 296. This was the practice of etoki, in which Buddhist principles were explained with illustrated scrolls. 46  A.L.  Sadler, Cha-no-yu: The Japanese Tea Ceremony (Rutland, Vt: Charles Tuttle, 1962), 221. 41 42

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Fig. 10.6  Brush with peacock feathers. Feather-brush with Doran (a kind of medicine case) with a Netsuke of a Rat. Toyota Hokkei, c. 1816. Metropolitan Museum of Art. H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929

Much later but more widely impactful, the Musashino kanzashi was a type of bodkin popular among young girls and geisha in the Fukugawa section of Edo about 1842. It had a bamboo stem to which feathers were affixed.47 Rooster feathers were used to decorate the caps of street acrobats.48 In the Ryukyu Islands, feathered crowns and headdresses appear in records as far back as seventh century.49 There were a number of other uses for feathers, some of which will be discussed in context below. Nevertheless, these few  Morisada, Ruijū kinse fūzokushi, 372  Aimé Humbert, Japan and the Japanese (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1874), 176, 49  Katrien Hendrickx, The Origins of Banana Fibre Cloth in the Ryukyus, Japan (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2007), 69–70. 47 48

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Fig. 10.7  Stage one from Ehon takara no itosuji [Picture Book of Brocades with Precious Threads] showing use of feathers. Katsukawa Shunsho and Kitao Masashige 1786. 1917 reprint owned by D.G. Wittner

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examples give some sense that feathers were all around in daily life across social classes in premodern Japan. Their use did not stem from or rely on imports or outside influence, but rather evolved through autochthonous beliefs and practices.

The Birds of the Indian Ocean and the Peacock As a region, the IOW was habitat to most of the birds that had feathers with international trade value. Ostrich, egret, ibis, kingfisher, and peacock feathers crossed the globe. Of these, the only bird with habitat exclusively in the IOW is the peacock. The blue peacock (Pava christatus) is indigenous to India and Sri Lanka, while the green or Javanese peacock (Pava muticus) is found from Burma to Java. Intriguingly, the Java peacock was first identified in Europe by Ulisse Androvandi (1522–1605), sometimes called the father of natural history, through a drawing presented to the pope by the Tenshō Embassy from Japan in 1585.50 This led to the belief, for centuries, that the green peacock was a Japanese bird. For completeness we must mention the Congo peacock (Afropava congensis), but their feathers, although locally significant, were not exported because this bird was only known outside of Africa after 1936, when it was first identified by American zoologist James P. Chapin, curator at the American Museum of Natural History, from a headdress in the museum’s collections.51 Even today, little is known about these birds because their only habitat is deep in the jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Peacock feathers were admired across time and region well outside of their indigenous habitat. The peacock feather was symbolic of Hera in ancient Greece. Peacock feather fans were prized by fashionable women in ancient Rome as much as they were in the court of Peter the Great of Russia.52 In the early ninth century, a Viking chieftain was buried in

50  William Swainson, Animals in Menageries (London: Brown, Orme, Longman and Green, 1837), 168. 51  See, for example: David Chan-oong Kang, East Asia Before the West: Five centuries of trade and tribute (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 62. There is an amusing story in Life Magazine about Chapin having a woman wear the hat down the street to see if anyone noticed. Very few people did. ‘Congo Hat in New York,’ Life Magazine, 7, 7 (14 August 1939), 67. 52  Alexandre E.  Tcherviakov, Fans from the 18th to the Beginning of the 20th Century (Bournemouth, UK: Parkstone Press, 1998), 20, 28.

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Gokstad, near modern Oslo, with a set of peacock feathers.53 Marie Antoinette supposedly sparked a fashion for peacock (and ostrich) feathers as hair ornaments when she capriciously stuck them in one day (although they reputedly fell into disfavour after her tragic end).54 Chinese officials from the Ming dynasty onwards wore peacock feathers in their caps as designators of rank. The beautiful colours and unique design of the tail feathers of the peacock transcended culture. Despite the distance from their indigenous habitat, Japan had a very long relationship with the peacock. The first record of peacocks arriving in Japan was in the year 598 as a gift to Empress Suiko from the Korean state of Silla, and this peacock was followed by another such gift in 647, also from Silla.55 These were diplomatic gifts, given in part because of the added value of religious symbolic capital. Knowledge of them probably arrived even earlier, with the transmission of Buddhism, traditionally introduced to Japan in 538. In Buddhism, peacocks were believed to represent purity and, as the enemy of poisonous creatures, were frequently used for purification ceremonies.56 In Tibetan Buddhism, peacocks were believed to exist on poison and thus became symbolic of consuming mental poisons such as desire. The peacock was also a vehicle for Amida (Amitabha) in some Mahayana sects, and is mentioned in the Amida Sutra (Smaller Sukhavativyuha Sutra). Another important manifestation of the peacock in Japanese Buddhism was the bodhisattva Kujaku Myoo (Mahamayuri Vidyarajah), one of the five Guardians of Law, who protected from calamity and brought rain. He

53  Anders Winroth, The Conversion of Scandinavia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 76 54  ‘An Impartial Sketch of the Characters of the Present King and Queen of France’ in The London Magazine, 46 (November 1777), 539. Her hairdresser, Leonard Autie, also claimed to have been the first put ostrich plumes her hair in 1772 in an act of desperation when suddenly asked to do her hair after a night of drunken partying. Will Bashor, Marie Antoinette’s Head (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2013), 46. The pouf styles Autie designed over the next few years frequently had plumes. Robin W. Doughty, Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 8. 55  See: Martha Chaiklin, ‘Exotic bird collecting in early modern Japan,’ in JAPANimals, eds. Greg Pflugfelder and Brett Walker (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005); Martha Chaiklin, ‘The merchant’s ark: Live animal gifts in early modern Dutch-Japanese relations, World History Connected (2012). 56  According to one early modern Japanese source, their tails could draw out snake venom. Amano Nobukage, Zuihitsu Shiojiri, I (Tokyo: Teikoku Shoin, 1907), 731.

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is usually depicted as riding on a peacock or holding a peacock feather.57 One version at least of various versions of the Peacock Sutra (Kujaku-kyō ) was brought back in 806 by the founder of Shingon Buddhism, Kūkai (774–835). This sutra is read to bring rain, cure illness, or ensure easy childbirth. As a result, this deity holds special reverence in this sect, as is demonstrated by the Peacock Sutra Ceremony.58 Kannon, the goddess of mercy is also sometimes depicted with peacock feathers, although this is more common in Chinese representations. Thus, even though there were not many peacocks in ancient Japan, there was a familiarity with them. Peacocks and their feathers, although foreign, amplified the connection with the spiritual world that birds represented in Shinto belief.

Feathers and the Peacock in Early Modern Japan The medieval period in Japan was ended by more than a hundred years of civil war that had commenced with the Ō nin War (1467–1477). What began as a shogunal succession dispute between two families with political ties spread to the provinces. Warlords battled for supremacy in what historians call the Warring States Period. Few records on imports exist for this period, but after the Portuguese arrived in 1543 as part of their quest for silk and spices, they brought several things that would dramatically affect the history of Japan. These include firearms and Christianity, but they also brought peacocks to present to Japanese dignitaries. The gift birds make frequent appearance on luxurious gold screens depicting Westerners, their ships, and other exotic topics known as nanban byo¯bu. The process of unification began in about 1560 through warlord Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582). As pacification progressed, a unique material culture of the warrior developed that superseded the utilitarian demands of active warfare, which required a speed of replacement that usually prevented any significant decorative additions. For example, castle architecture evolved from functional defensible structures to more elaborate buildings designed for residential use. Oda Nobunaga’s Azuchi Castle was richly ornamented, including a set of sliding doors set with imported glass panes. Similarly, Nobunaga’s successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536?–1598) constructed a golden tea room in Osaka palace. This extravagance extended to the arms and armour used in the last decades of the sixteenth century.  In India this deity was female, but in Japan, he is male: a manifestation of Dainichi-nyorai.  Richard K. Payne, Tantric Buddhism in East Asia (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2006), 198–199. 57 58

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Feathers were important decorative elements in armour during the final years of unification, perhaps because feathers conveyed the economic power that resulted from successful warfare. Moreover, feathers had totemic properties that could be visually broadcast. For this reason, birds and feathers are a common motif in the crests of warrior families, and both were used to decorate pole arms.59 Feathers tied these objects to the primitive, savage actions of warfare, as well as to the liminal existence between life and death of a soldier. Peacock feathers were put to all of these military uses, perhaps in part because the peacock’s connection with royalty in India and Persia had been transmitted to Japan. Japanese merchants and pirates roamed the South Pacific and even the Indian Ocean, bringing back rich cargoes, that judging by extant objects, included many peacock feathers. The creative abandon and decorative exuberance of these years is especially apparent in the kawari kabuto, which might translate as ‘eccentric helmets.’ These wildly diverse head protectors might have rabbit ears, devils, dragons, carp, cranes, elephants, shells decorated on them, or they may even look like a crumpled paper bag. Feathers, including peacock feathers, adorned many examples of this fanciful headgear both in reproduction and in reality. Those covered entirely with peacock feathers are spectacular even in a museum case and must have been an arresting sight on the battlefield. Another striking application of feathers to military wear was the jinbaori, a surcoat worn over armour. Very few of these survive, but the British Museum has one made of pheasant and duck feathers in a bullseye pattern that, at the time of its accession in the late nineteenth century, was believed to have belonged to Hideyoshi.60 This warlord had another of cock feathers as well as, reputedly, one of peacock feathers.61 Nor was Hideyoshi unique in having a peacock jinbaori in the early modern period. One is held in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and there are many documentary references (Fig. 10.8).62 Sometimes, eagle,  Kaempfer, History, I, 431, 540, 593.  British Museum no. 1897, 0318.6. 61  Valerie Foley, ‘Jinbaori: Oneupmanship on the battlefield,’ Textile Society of America Proceedings (1992), 93; Sasama Yoshihiko, Meisho gaitō monogatari (Tokyo: Yuzankaku, 1971), 295. 62   Marion Kite and Audrey Hill, ‘The conservation and mounting of a Jinbaori,’ Conservation Journal, 27 (1998); Sai Sanko, ‘Shō toku kobutsu tenrankai kenbutsu no ki (zoku), Edokaishi,’ 2, 8 (1890), 562; Ishii Kendo, Tenpō kaikaku kidan (Tokyo: Shunyodo, 1926), 189. 59 60

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Fig. 10.8  Detail of figured silk jinbaori with peacock feathers. c. 1700–1800. ©Victoria and Albert Museum. Given by T. B. Clarke-Thornhill

pheasant, or peacock feathers were used for campaign fans (jinō gi).63 These fans were used by officers to direct troops in battle. Peacock feathers would have been relatively easy to see on the battleground. It is difficult to know how common these applications were because feathers do not survive well in the humid Japanese climate. Therefore, although fewer feathered military objects survive than those of other materials, the numbers that do exist suggest that they were not rare. Peacock feathers were also used for arrows. Peacock-fletched arrows seem to have generally been a composite created with other feathers, to take advantage of combination of the visual impact of peacock feathers and the better aerodynamic properties of pinion feathers from birds that

63  G. Woolliscroft Rhead, History of the Fan (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1910), 74. Jinō gi is archaic. Today these fans are better known as gunsen, or war fans.

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fly.64 However, peacock-fletched arrows were too expensive for general warfare and were more frequently put to ceremonial use. Hawking, the peacetime substitute for military preparedness, also had use for peacock feathers. They were fastened to the plate that held the hawk bell (suzuita) so that the hawk might be easily visible from the field when the bell is silent.65 One of the most common uses for peacock feathers found in Japanese prints and illustrated books was their use as mere ornament, stuck into a vase.66 They were frequently placed by writing desks, a practice evolving from a combination of the beauty and costly exoticism of the plumes, the protective powers they symbolised, and the fact that the character for the verb to learn (narau 習う) includes the character for feather (羽). Through connections with Buddhism, peacocks had long been a popular motif in art and design, but as opportunities to see real feathers increased, the feathers alone were widely applied to design. This rise is difficult to track precisely, but was roughly contemporaneous with the enormous expansion of consumer goods in the later part of the seventeenth century. For example, kujaku-ori, was silk woven with a peacock feather pattern. The existence of this textile is evident in the story ‘What the Seasons Brought the Almanac Maker’ from Ihara Saikaku’s collection, Five Women who Loved Love (1686). A group of rakes hold an informal beauty contest of passing girls. The winner, selected for both her physical beauty and her exquisite taste in clothing, was dressed in an iridescent satin outer garment with a peacock feather design67 (Figs. 10.9 and 10.10). Another application of the peacock feather pattern to textiles was a tie-­ dyed pattern called kujaku shibori. Perhaps because of the underlying nuance of sexuality, birds and feathers in general and peacocks and peacock feathers specifically are frequently depicted on kimono in woodblock prints of courtesans. Even when the women are dishabille, peacock feathers are often found in the surrounding environment, in vases or on the 64  Charles E. Grayson, Mary French, and Michael J. O’Brien, Traditional Archery from Six Continents (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 34. 65  Coloured feathers of any kind or even wool were also used. E.W. Jameson, The Hawking of Japan: The history and development of Japanese falconry (Davis, CA: Privately Printed, 1962), 18. 66  See, for example: Oyamada Toyokiyo, Matsunoya hikki, 65 (Tokyo: Kokusho kankō kai, 1908), 390. 67  Ihara Saikaku, Five Women Who Loved Love, trans. Theodore du Barry (Rutland VT: Charles Tuttle, 1956), 126.

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Fig. 10.9  Writing desk with feather brush. Peacock feathers are partially visible to the left. From the series: Yoshiwara keisei bijin awase jihitsu kagami [The actual mirror of a group of beauties from the Yoshiwara]. 1784. Collection of the Library of Congress. Gift of Crosby Stuart Noyes

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Fig. 10.10  Kubo Shunman. Courtesan Dreaming of the New Year’s Procession. 1814. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

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screen in the background. Some such prints show garments made from actual peacock feathers.68 At least one textile exists into which real feathers are woven: a monks stole (kesa) in which the weaver utilised the fronds of the feather to depict the shaggy brows of the dragon.69 Rather than sexuality, clearly inappropriate for a monk, the choice was more likely made from the protective attributes and desirable qualities inherent in the feather. Peacock feathers were also reproduced on lacquer and ceramics. All of these applications show how integrated peacock feathers were and their level of familiarity across Japanese society. When encyclopaedist Terajima Ryō an sought to describe a native pheasant, he compared its feathers to that of a peacock.70 Yet as familiar as they were, relatively few people came into contact with real peacocks. Thus, peacocks and their feathers were multivalent: familiar yet exotic, and representing the world beyond the borders of Japan. Peacock feathers had not only the inherent liminality that feathers represented; they represented the liminality of Japan with the rest of the world in tangible form.

Origins In the sixteenth century, peacock feathers were all imported by Japanese and foreign traders. As breeding pairs were brought into Japan in small quantities and peafowl are not difficult to raise, it is at least possible that some demand was supplied domestically by the eighteenth century. So-called peacock teahouses (kujaku jaya) and peacock street entertainment suggest that sufficient quantities of live birds existed so that, although they were by no means common, live peafowl were not the exclusive possession of ruling elites or ultra-wealthy.71 Nevertheless, trade was still the most likely source for the peacock feathers that roosted in early modern Japan. An early reference to the exchange of feathers is found in the work of Jesuit missionary Luis Frois

68  The British Museum has a print by Katsugawa Shunsen c.1810 that shows a courtesan in an entire cloak of peacock feathers. British Museum no. 1906,1220,0.198. 69  Helen C. Gunsalus, ‘An Exhibition of Japanese Priest Robes,’ Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago, 34, 7 (1940), 111. 70  Terajima Ryō an, Wakansansai zue, eds. Shimada Isaō , Takeshima Atsuō , and Higuchi Motomi, VI (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1985), 330. This term not used today, and so it is unclear exactly what pheasant is referred to. 71  See: Chaiklin, ‘Exotic bird collecting.’

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(1532–1597), who gave Oda Nobunaga some peacock feathers.72 More significant, however, is the fact that Dutch and Chinese traders were actively involved in feathers. Dutch trade records are more complete than Chinese records of exports and country trade, especially for ostrich feathers, which were acquired in Cape Town and Muscat and sold all over the world.73 Records for peacock and other important IOW trade feathers, such as kingfishers, are more elusive in the premodern period because they were not farmed like ostriches. This meant that supply and quality could not be easily c­ ontrolled. It is clear, however, that peacock and other feathers were brought to Japan. While it is possible to track, to some extent, the live birds that were brought as diplomatic gifts, the specifics of trade in feathers are hard to come by because of the unique trading situation in Japan. The Dutch East India Company (VOC), Japan’s sole Western trading partner after 1639, always tried to prohibit private trade by its servants, who were seen as competition. However, the Japanese government forced the Company to accept a system that allowed private trading (called kambang trade) to ensure that certain luxuries that would not sell in enough bulk to be profitable for the Company would continue to arrive. Few records of the content of private trade exist.74 Large amounts of feathers were exported by the Dutch and other traders from Calcutta, the Malay Peninsula, and Tenasserim.75 However, available literature suggests that Siam was the most significant source for nearly all kinds of ornamental feathers except for ostrich. In 1832, for example, the British exported 4000 pairs of wings and 100–150 pairs of larger feathers for fans and 1200 peacock tails from the Chao Phraya River basin.76 Those of the argus pheasant (Argusianus argus) and purple sunbird (Nectarina asiatica) were also exported, although the former had  Kajishima Takao, Nihon dō butsushi (Tokyo: Yasaka Shobu, 2002), 411.  See, for example: Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Plumes (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008). 74  Even Korean emissaries noted that Dutch traders on Deshima sold peacock feathers: Sin Yu-han, Kaiyūroku 2 kan, Shin ikan azana Shūhaku go seisen 1681 (Seoul: Chosŏn Yŏnʼguhoe, 1914), 29. 75  See, for example: House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (Hereafter: HCPP), 10/2 ‘Enclosure 1 Report on the Trade of the three Settlements, Prince of Wales Island, Singapore and Malacca,’ (Session 6 December 1831–16 August 1832), 649, 916. 54,000 were exported to China. 76  Edmund Roberts, Embassy to the Eastern Courts of Cochin-China, Siam and Muscat in the U.S. Sloop-of-War Peacock (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1837), 318. 72 73

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waned in popularity in Europe by the 1830s.77 The feathers of peacocks, kingfishers, pelicans, egrets, and herons were all sent to China from Siam.78 Siam was a supplier for Japan too, not just of peacock feathers, but other kinds of ornamental feathers.79 This represents a direct link, through the medium of traders, of ‘isolated’ Japan with the rest of the IOW. Annam (in present Vietnam) was another supplier of peacock feathers to Japan.80 Lacking a formal trading company, records of Chinese trade to Japan are also sparse, but Dutch records show that Chinese and Southeast Asian traders also brought peacocks and their feathers to Japan at least as early as 1653, when a ship that originated in Cambodia brought fourteen birds.81 There are only two mentions of feathers in these records: 2000 bird feathers in 1660, and 90 in a ship from Zhapu, south of Shanghai, in 1775. Regardless of strong demand within China, peacock feathers were not rare and could even have been harvested from live birds that were imported sporadically throughout the entire early modern period. In the seventeenth century, junks often sailed from Siam, and later, traders could easily obtain feathers in Canton where there was an entire ‘Feather Street’ devoted to selling these appendages from peacocks and other birds.82 Domestic peacock feathers from Yunnan Province were sold along with imported feathers from Cambodia, Siam, and other habitats.83 Peacock and other feathers were even spun into threads woven to make iridescent 77  Sir John Bowring, The Kingdom and People of Siam, I (London: John W.  Parker and Son, 1857), 227. Or possibly some other kind of sunbird. Bowring misidentifies this as a hummingbird, which are not indigenous to Thailand. 78  Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society of Useful Knowledge, XXI (London: Charles Knight, 1841), 454; Thomas Crawfurd, Journal of an Embassy from the Governor of India to the Court of Ava, II (London: Henry Colburn, 1829), 437–438; Wyndam Beawes, Lex Mercratorio (London: J.C. and J. Rivington, 1813), 232. 79  ‘Siam and Japan’ Japan Daily Mail (30 July 1898), 105. This article lists ‘white nightingale’ but I have not been able to link this to a species. Francois Turpin, ‘History of Siam’ in A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels, IX, ed. John Pinkerton (London: Longman, Hurst, Reese, Orme and Brown, 1811), 624, 626. See also: Anna Leonowens, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co., 1870), 290. 80  Hayashi Fukusai, Tsūkō ichiran, IV (Tō kyō : Kokusho Kankō kai, 1912), 552. 81  Turpin, ‘History of Siam,’ 624; Nagazumi Yō ko, Tō sen yūshutsuhin suryō ichiran (Tokyo: Sō bunsha 1987), 53, 89, 170. 82  Anne Brassey, A Voyage on the Sunbeam (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1879), 381; Edmund Roberts, Embassy to the Eastern Courts of Cochin-China, Siam and Muscat (New York: Harper Brothers, 1837), 120. 83  Roberts, Embassy to the Eastern Courts, 120; Beawes, Lex Mercatoria, 824.

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capes for women in Canton.84 Peacocks and their feathers tied East Asia to the rest of the IOW, not just through legend or idealised religious iconography, but through their physical transport across the water.

Restoration, Modernisation, and Feathers The opening of the treaty ports in Japan in 1859 changed the feather market in dramatic ways. The demand for arrows, made archaic overnight, plummeted. Only one feather craftsman is listed in the Tō kyō meikō kagami, a compendium of the top artisans and craftsmen in Tokyo compiled by the city government in 1879. Itō Gensuke of Inariya-chō , an area of Tokyo with many temples, ran a small workshop comprised of just four family members. He had taken over the business when his father Genzō died, six years previously. Once the family had exclusively fletched arrows but the reduction in demand caused by the Meiji Restoration in 1868 caused them to diversify into feather brushes. Gensuke was at the top of his field, exhibiting several kinds of arrows and feather sweepers in the First Domestic Industrial Exhibition in 1877, where his work was commended.85 Conversely, with the loosening of trade restrictions, peacock feathers flooded in from Canton and made what had been an expensive luxury, very cheap. Quantities of live peacocks were also imported from China, causing prices to fall further.86 Japanese craftsmen like Itō Gensuke, struggling in a shifting market, came up with a new product—peacock feather fans. To keep costs even lower, some Japanese craftsmen then produced fans made from hawk, pheasant, and other indigenous Japanese birds, affixing peacock feathers to the ends. So many were exported that there was a steep rise in feather prices.87 By the late nineteenth century, Japan became a net exporter of feathers and did its part to support the great feather hat boom of the second half of the nineteenth century by supplying pelican, albatross, and other types of feathers.88 Feather fans were widely used around the world, but as important as fans were in Japanese culture, they were not generally used in daily life or performance in premodern Japan. The single exception, the feather campaign fans mentioned above, may or may not have been a conscious tie to 84  J. Macgwan, ‘Chinese and Aztec plumagery,’ Journal for the Society of the Arts, 3, 109 (1854), 93–94. 85  Tō kyō meikō kagami (Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 1879), 466–7. 86  ‘Kujaku no ke, Ō i ni geraku,’ Asahi Shinbun (Osaka) (11 September 1880), 1. 87  ‘Kujaku no uchiwa,’ Yomiuri Shinbun (8 April 1892), Special Section, 1. 88  ‘Feathers For hats: Most of them come from game birds and domestic fowls,’ Los Angeles Times (1886–1922) (22 October 1899), 7.

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Fig. 10.11  Japonesque birthday cards depicting peacock feather and other fans. c. 1884. Publishers Proofs of the Publications of L. Prange & Co. Collection of the New York Public Library

tengu and their associations with warfare, but they had no impact on other uses. A similar association of feathers with successful military endeavour can be seen in the legend that the feather fan was introduced from Korea in 200 CE by the warrior Empress Jingu ¯.89 These new peacock feather fans were developed primarily for export to Europe and America, supporting a linkage between Japan and peacocks beyond the borders of the nation, and active integration into a global network of circulation (Fig. 10.11). 89  Comment by Mr. Ernest Hart in Tachibana Minko and Shokunin burui, ‘Discussion,’ Transactions and Proceedings of the Japan Society 2, 1 (1892–1893), 254–5.

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Appropriating the Appropriated The Aesthetic movement embraced Japan and the hand production it was perceived to exemplify. The relative isolation of Japan and the exoticism it represented set off a wave of Japonisme that made the previous tide of Chinoiserie pale by comparison. Japanese aesthetics influenced several major art and architectural movements, including art nouveau, art deco, and the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. In these visual contexts, peacock feathers came to represent Japan in a way that more commonly used indigenous feathers like those of the hawk, quail, or pheasant never did. Peacocks, through their frequent representation in Japanese fine and decorative arts were perceived to be Japanese by outsiders. For example, American home decorators of the late nineteenth century who wanted to add a Japanese touch to their decor would go to A.A. Vantines, one of the early purveyors of Japanese goods on Broadway near Nineteenth Street in New York, where peacock plumes were sold in bunches of one hundred. They would, in echoes of traditional Japan, put these feathers into vases, or in a uniquely Western form of Japanesery, insert them into inverted, half-opened paper umbrellas.90 This appropriation of the Japanese peacock went far beyond actual feathers. Louis Comfort Tiffany, for example, frequently employed peacock designs in lamp shades and the special iridescent glass he developed. This connection between the peacock and Japan was so strong that in 1877, when James Whistler sought an image to decorate a room designed to display porcelain for Liverpool collector Frederick R. Leyland, he used peacocks. The main image in the famed Peacock Room (now located in the Freer Gallery) is the ‘Princess de la Pays Porcelaine,’ a young woman in quasi-Japanese dress standing in front of a Japanese screen. The colour scheme was reputedly inspired by a Japanese robe and screen belonging to Whistler.91 The battling peacocks are reputed to represent Leyland and Whistler, a commentary on a payment dispute between artist and patron (Fig. 10.12). The connection to Japan and peacocks can even be found in live fowl, through a variety of Indian peacock called ‘Japanned.’ These birds were once believed to be a separate species but now are thought to be a genetic  Cynthia Brandimart, ‘Japanese novelty stores,’ Winterthur Portfolio, 26, 1 (1991), 13  ‘The Peacock Room in the Freer Collection: Art at home and abroad,’ New York Times (5 October 1919), 89. 90 91

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Fig. 10.12  James McNeill Whistler. The Peacock Room. Oil paint and gold leaf on canvas, leather, mosaic tile, and wood. Freer and Sackler Gallery of Art. Gift of Charles Lang Freer

mutation. Charles Darwin discussed these birds several times in support of his theory of evolution because they would appear spontaneously in captive stocks, although they can be bred.92 Also called ‘black winged’ these peafowl were named for the dark lustrous feathers on the back, japanning being an old name for black lacquer. This appellation did cause some confusion, however, leading people to think this bird was a Japanese species, probably overlaid with residual confusion as to the native habitat of the green peacock. This Western confusion about the Japanese relationship with the peacock only speaks to how completely Japan had appropriated the peacock. The peacock had become completely decontextualised from its origins.

92  Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1871), 2:115.

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Conclusion The peacock feather has long represented the generic ‘oriental’ that encompasses the Middle East as much as East Asia. Peacock feathers were decorative motifs in design from Persian to Egyptian revival to Japonisme. They are a prime example of what Arjun Appadurai called ‘the aesthetics of decontextualisation.’93 Although Appadurai was speaking of the thirst for novelty, here there was also comfort in the familiar. Peacock feathers were fluid in value and meaning in a way that eclipsed their origins. In the nineteenth century, the peacock feather clearly took on a direct linkage to Japan in Western perception because it was a familiar expression of the unfamiliar. The trade in peacock feathers never endangered peacocks the way it did other bird species because their desirable train feathers could be obtained without killing the bird and peacocks are so easily domesticated. Habitat destruction coupled with surging demand in the modern world has put some pressure on the species in the wild. They are sometimes unnecessarily killed to obtain the whole train at once.94 Thus, in India, export of peacock feathers was made illegal in 1972. They are not, however, protected or considered endangered. Restrictions did not dampen the demand for peacock feathers, which remains strong in Asia as evidenced in a recent series of customs seizures from India bound for other Asia entities such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia.95 Like other ephemera such as valentines or baseball cards, feathers have had remarkable staying power in our world. They still express ‘sexual and economic supremacy’ and go through periodic revival as fashion items, even amid the ever-increasingly protective attitudes we have towards animals. A recent revival of feather fashion was evident in Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler, who was one of many who attached feathers directly to his hair. Feathered evening dresses for red carpet events never seem to go out of style. Feathers universally represent a link to something primal. 93  Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the social politics of value,’ in The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 28. 94  Watt, Commercial Products, 141. 95  ‘23  kg of peacock feathers seized at airport,’ The Times of India (20 August 2010); ‘Peacock feathers seized at airport,’ Aviation India (23 April 2015); ‘Peacock feathers seized,’ The New Indian Express (14 September 2014). These are just a few examples among many.

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In this brief discussion of feathers in Japan we can see that they challenge many of our perceptions about the isolation of Japan. Peacock feathers show that the IOW was a significant contributor to the material culture of not just early modern, but contemporary Japan. Their demand was entirely devoid of any actual, rational need. The adoption of the peacock feather was accompanied by live birds, but feathers spread more widely than the birds. Peacocks connected to the spiritual role of birds in Japan but also to the world otherwise known only through books. Their distinctive patterns and colouring made them visually appealing and easily identifiable. In this way, peacock feathers took root in a way that other beautiful exotic bird feathers like those from ostriches, birds of paradise, or kingfishers did not. Feather imports altered the landscape of early modern Japan, nineteenth-century European perceptions, and even our modern vision of what is Japanese. The flight of the peacock is the story of how a bird of the Indian Ocean became a symbol of Japan.

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Index1

A A.A. Vantine’s, 307 Aden, 127, 134, 141, 164 Aesop, 1, 2 Afghanistan, 156 Kabul, 158 Africa Central, 20, 165 East, 3, 10, 11, 19, 20, 151, 157, 161, 162, 164, 166, 182, 248–261, 263, 267, 269, 270 North, 130, 131 Southern, 151, 152, 158, 164 Ainu, 219, 221, 240 Amaterasu, 285 Ambohimalaza, 200, 205, 206 Amida (Amitabha), 295 Sutra, 295 Anatolia, 149, 154 Andaman Sea, 227 Andrianampoinimerina, 186, 187

Androvandi, Ulisse, 294 Animism, 148 Anthropocene, 12 Appadurai, Arjun, 309 Apulia, 159 Arabia, 29, 30, 129–132, 135, 136, 140, 154, 208 Arab Revolt, 140 Archaeopteryx, 279 Archery, 285–289 Argentina, 162 Aristotle, 4 Arrow, 32, 256, 285–289, 298, 299, 305 hamaya/hamayumi, 287, 289, 291 Artis Library, 41 Asses, see Donkeys Australia, 35, 151–153, 161, 170, 204n81 Western, 170 Austria, 39

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Chaiklin et al. (eds.), Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42595-1

315

316 

INDEX

Ayutthaya capital, 219, 227, 234 kingdom, 227, 233 B Bab al-Mandab, 127 Bahram, 46 Bahrayn, 154 Baluchistan, 155 Banda Islands, see Pulo Ai Bandar Abbas, 44, 45, 47 Banu Hilal, 130 Barghash, Said, 262, 263, 266–270 Barigos, 230 Batavia (Jakarta), 30, 228 Baudet du Poitou, 159 Bay of Bengal, 10, 67, 222n9, 223, 227, 232 Beads, 250, 253, 254 Bedouins, 155 Beef, 185, 192–194, 199, 200, 205 Beltana Pastoral Company, 170 Bezoar stones, 32 Birds, 21, 28, 32–34, 37, 38, 38n40, 40, 43, 45–54, 278n3, 279, 280, 282, 283, 285, 289, 291, 294–299, 302–305, 307–310 See also Cassowary; Cockatoo; Dodo; Eagles; Indian raven; Kingfisher; Parrot; Peacock; Partridge Blackwell, Richard, 282 Blauw Jan, 40, 45, 55 Boer War, 149, 164, 165 Bombay (Mumbai), 208, 266 Bourdieu, Pierre, 9 Bourgeoisie, 40, 55 Bow, 32, 287–289 Brazil, 36, 155 Breeding, see Husbandry Britain, 12, 15, 44n67, 81, 154n26, 161n80, 194

Buddhism Shingon, 296 Tibetan, 295 Buffalo horn, 31n16, 254 Burma (Myanmar), 72, 218n2, 234, 237, 294 Burton, Richard, 166, 253, 256, 266 Burundi, 251, 265–267 C Cambodia, 218, 218n2, 220, 227, 236, 237, 304 Phnom Penh, 220, 223 Camel, 2–4, 21, 126, 131, 137, 138, 139n44, 140, 169, 171 camelry, 129, 138, 139, 142 Camphor, 222 Canton (Guangzhou), 238, 281, 304, 305 Capitalism, 6, 12 Capitalocene, The, 12–16, 249n7 Caravan, 2, 127, 130, 167, 169, 250, 258, 263, 263n73 Cassowary, 28, 32, 34–36, 40, 55 Caste, 148, 152, 169 Catalonia, 159, 160 Cattle, 11, 19, 20, 42, 48, 126, 137, 151, 166, 167, 181–210, 250, 251n17 bullocks/oxen, 165, 169, 170, 182, 188, 190, 191, 193, 195, 198–204, 206–210, 209n113 Cavalry, 9, 18, 126, 128–131, 135, 136, 138, 138n41, 139, 139n44, 142–144 Chanks, 78, 100, 102–104, 107, 114, 119, 120 diving, 100 fishery/fishing, 17, 99–122 fishery renters, 110, 114 Chaophraya River, 223, 226, 234, 239 Chapin, James P., 294, 294n51

 INDEX 

Chickens, 36, 278n3, 280 China, 4, 8, 9, 75, 107, 152, 152n18, 158, 159, 161, 170, 218n3, 222n9, 223–226, 231, 237n47, 250, 281, 289, 303n75, 304, 305 China Sea, 220, 223 Chinese diaspora, 234, 238 Christianity, 296 Classic of Mountain and Seas, The, 4 Cochinchina, 223, 227, 234 Cockatoo, 35, 39, 47, 56 Coen, Jan Pieterszoon, 35 Commodities, 2, 8, 11, 28, 74, 78, 141n55, 143, 206, 218, 220, 222, 225–227, 228n26, 231, 235, 239–241 Conch shells, see Chanks Congo, Democratic Republic of the Kasongo, 264 Kisangani, 255 Nyangwe, 262, 264, 265, 267 Cornelisz, Reyer, 51 Corvée labour, 219, 235 Courtesan, 291, 299, 302n68 Cowle, 108, 109 Cowhorn, 184, 188, 192, 193 D Darfur, 140, 143, 144 Darwin, Charles, 5, 308 De Carpentier, Peter, 229 De Jonville, Eudelin, 73 Decolonisation, 141 Deer Java, 48 speckled, 35 Deerskins, 20, 217–242 De Indiae utriusque re naturalis et medica, 56 De Meere (ship), 45 Diplomacy, 7, 8, 47, 56, 232 Disease

317

African Horse Sickness, 132, 133, 136, 151, 166 cholera, 90 malaria, 71, 72, 186, 186n19, 201 Dodo, 17, 48–53, 50n95, 50n98, 51n100, 56 Dogs, 4, 43, 45, 47, 56, 285n27 Domestication, 4, 150 Dongola (Sudan), 129, 133, 137 Donkeys, 19, 150, 156, 195 Halar, 155 Hassawi, 154, 158 Jhalavad, 155 Muscat, 19 Spanish, 161 white, 153–160, 169 Dordrecht (ship), 35 Ducks, 36, 280, 281, 297 Dutch East India Company, see Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie Dutch Republic, 28–30, 33–43, 55 E Eagles, 46, 289, 291, 297 East Asia, 2, 9, 227, 247, 305, 309 East India Company (English; EIC), 17, 44, 232, 234 Ebony, 48, 198 Egypt Cairo, 169 Tombos, 129 Eland antelope, 37, 38 Elephant, 3, 7–10, 28, 29, 31n16, 35, 36, 38, 41n54, 43, 43n64, 44, 44n68, 47, 167, 170, 247–249, 252, 254–260, 270, 297 Hansken, 36, 39 Eritrea, 125, 127, 128, 133, 137, 139–141, 164 Djibouti, 125, 127, 128, 133, 138, 139, 141 Estado da Índia, 68, 70

318 

INDEX

Ethiopia Ethiopian Empire, 18, 128, 134 Ethiopian Plateau, 127, 129, 168 Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, The, 5 Extinction, 56, 219 F Falcon Peregrine, 46 shaheen, 46 Falconry, 46 Fan, 282, 285, 286, 294, 298, 298n63, 303, 305, 306 jinō gi, 298n63 Feather albatross, 305 black kite, 289 chicken, 36, 278n3, 280 cormorant, 283, 284 crane, 289, 291, 297 crow, 280 duck, 36, 280, 281, 297 eagle, 36, 46, 289, 291, 297 egret, 278, 279, 289, 294, 304 goose, 281, 284, 291 hawk, 289, 299, 305, 307 heron, 289, 304 honey buzzard, 289 ostrich, 7, 32, 40, 279, 282, 294, 295, 295n54, 303, 310 peacock, 21, 277–310 pelican, 304, 305 swan, 280, 280n7, 283n21, 289 Fernberger, Christopher, 39 Firearms, 4, 19, 137–143, 250, 253, 256–259, 266, 296 First World War, 139, 140, 161, 164 Fish, 41n55, 70, 78, 79, 83, 85, 88, 92, 101, 109, 114, 122, 185 Fishery

chank, 100, 103–122, 116n49 pearl, 17, 66–68, 72, 73, 75, 79–92, 106, 109, 109n30, 110, 113n35 Flugel, J.C., 282 Formosa (Taiwan), 20, 218, 218n2, 218n3, 219, 227–231, 238 Fort Zeelandia, 238 Fowl, 36, 187, 281, 307 France, 8, 29, 159, 232 Funj Sultanate, 18, 128, 134, 135 G Gallieni, Joseph, 161 Gekroonde liefde (ship), 44 Genocide, 143 Germany German East Africa, 161, 164, 166 Gessner, Konrad, 4 Goats, 17, 35, 36, 48, 137, 151, 187, 240 Green Imperialism, 5n8, 54 Grotius, Hugo, 77 Gulf of Aden, 127 Gulf of Mannar, 17, 66–68, 72, 76, 100–102, 104, 109n30 Gulf of Siam, 223 Guns, see Firearms H Haag, Tethart Philipp Christian, 38 Habsburg Empire, 34 Hagoromo, 283 Hane no kamuro, 291 Hanetsuki, 289 Haori, 221 jinbaori, 221, 297, 298 Hassan, Muhammed Abdullah, 136 Heijn, Jacobsz, 226, 226n19 Helmet kawari kabuto, 297

 INDEX 

Hides, 19, 31n16, 148, 166, 182, 192–210, 207n102, 207n103, 209n116, 219, 219n4, 221, 221n8, 222, 223n12, 225, 227, 229–232, 231n31, 234, 236, 240, 256 Hijaz, 128, 133, 143, 154 Hinduism, 102 Holland, see Netherlands, The Hornell, James, 101, 101n5, 102, 103n13 Horse breeds; Arabian, 129, 130, 142; Dongolawi, 129, 130, 135, 137; Ethiopian, 130; Persian, 44, 45 foals, 140 riding, 129, 142 war, 9, 15, 136 Huis ter Nieuburgh (ship), 35 Hunting, 4, 6, 10, 17, 81 deer, 231 elephant, 10, 256 Husbandry, 132, 136, 142, 148, 150, 155–162, 167, 170, 279, 302 I Ihara Saikaku, 284, 299 Five Women who Loved Love, 299 Imerina, imperial, 181, 186–188, 195, 196, 204, 208, 210 India Bengal, 103, 104, 118 Calcutta, 114, 115, 303 Gujarat, 101, 104, 121, 155 Indus Valley Civilisation, 102, 103 Keelakarai, 112–114, 119, 120, 122 Madras, 83–85, 89, 91, 101, 101n5, 107, 111, 115, 120 Nagore, 119, 120 South, 99–122

319

Surat, 43, 237n47 Tamil Nadu, 68, 103 Tanjore, 106, 107, 110, 111, 114, 116, 116n50, 117, 121 Tinnevelly, 107–118, 121 Indian raven, 52–54 Indonesian Archipelago Batavia (Jakarta) (see Batavia (Jakarta)) Madura, 116 Pulo Ai (Banda Islands), 239 Infantry, 129, 136, 141, 143 Iraq, 156 Irrigation, 126, 148 Islam, 152, 261 Wahhabi, 135 Italo-Ethiopian War, Second, 139 Italy, 161 Ivory, 7, 8, 10–12, 10n27, 20, 28, 32, 166, 247–270, 278 J Janjaweed, 143 Japan Deshima, 30, 31n16, 45, 303n74 diaspora, 222, 225, 227–229, 234, 236 Edo, 221, 221n8, 289–292 Hirado, 230 Hokkaido, 219, 221, 240 Nagasaki, 30, 222, 222n10, 231n31, 237, 240 Nara, 291 Java Sea, 223 Jeddah, 127 Jingu, Empress, 306 K Kadalkutti, 85, 86, 105 Kannon, 296 Kataoka Heimon Iemori, 286

320 

INDEX

Kenya, 163, 166–168, 261 Mombasa, 163 Khmer, 219, 219n4, 223, 227, 236n42 Angkor, 223 Kingfisher, 278, 294, 303, 304, 310 Kisling, Vernon N., 39 Kojiki, 283, 283n19, 285 Konjaku monogatari, 284 Kō shūinden, 221 Kujaku Myoo, 295 L La Loubère, Simon, 235 Lacquer, 221, 222, 302, 308 Lake Tanganyika, 253, 254, 265, 267, 268 Leather, 169, 193, 194 Lebanon Beirut, 155 Leopard, 3, 35, 36, 39 Levaillant, François, 37 Leyland, Frederick R., 307 Linneaus, Carl, 5, 16 Lion, 3, 6 Little Ice Age, 39, 135 Louis XIV, King, 34, 235 Luxury, 9, 68, 76, 79, 193, 224, 241, 277, 278, 281, 282, 303, 305 M Macao, 225, 237n47, 238 Madagascar Antananarivo, 191 Tamatave, 191, 194, 207 Mahdist Rebellion, 138 Maize, 166, 185, 194 Malay Peninsula, 223, 227, 303 Tenasserim, 223, 227, 303 Malays, 222, 233, 234

Manyema (people), 255, 262, 264, 265, 267 Mare Liberum, 77 Mascarene Islands, see Mauritius; Réunion or Rodrigues Mauritius, 17, 30, 48–56, 157, 162, 163, 181, 182, 185, 187, 193–200, 199n63, 203–205, 207, 208 Mauritshuis, 33, 38 Meat, 2, 8, 11, 19, 42, 49, 51, 148, 167, 183, 190–192, 194–210 See also Beef Medieval warm period, 249 Menelik II, 138 Mercantilism, 29 Merchants, 2, 29, 40, 76, 83–86, 100, 100n4, 101, 103, 105–107, 111–115, 116n49, 118–122, 134, 153, 166, 194, 197, 198, 200, 201, 205, 208, 218, 220–223, 225–227, 230–232, 234, 236, 238, 240, 297 Mergui, 223, 227 Middle East, 2, 3, 8, 9, 19, 72, 150, 153, 160, 161, 169, 232, 309 Milice Indigène, 139 Mirambo, 257–259, 266 Missionaries, 182, 200, 248, 254, 268, 302 Christian, 165 Mitchell, Timothy, 71, 72 Mollusc, 71–74, 101, 103, 104, 114, 118, 122 Monkeys, 32, 36, 39, 48, 50 Monopoly, 100, 121, 122, 197, 198, 198n59, 200, 201, 204, 208, 222, 226, 231–233, 237–241, 259, 269 Monsoon, 2, 31, 67, 82, 88, 127, 134, 134n21, 233 Moore, Jason W., 12, 13

 INDEX 

Mosquitos, 71, 72, 289 Mozambique, 155, 158, 165, 185, 199n63, 209 Mules, 17, 126, 130, 131, 137, 138n41, 139, 141, 147, 149, 150, 152–166, 169–171, 195 Musk, 222 Myanmar, see Burma (Myanmar) N Namibia, 165 Narai, King, 231, 232, 238, 239 Nassau-Siegen, Johan Maurits van, 36 Netherlands, The, 30, 32–34, 36, 37, 39, 41n54, 56, 66 Amsterdam, 28, 30, 34–36, 39–42, 45, 46, 52, 53, 55, 65, 72 Kloveniersburgwal, 36, 40, 41 Rembrandtplein, 42 Nieuw Amsterdam (ship), 44 Nihongi, 283n19, 285, 285n27 Nile River, 41n54, 71, 72, 127–130, 135, 155, 169 North, Frederic, 73 Nubia, 129 Nyungu ya Mawe, 257 O Oda Nobunaga, 296, 303 O’Héguerty, Pierre, 51 Oldenbarneveldt, Johan van, 35 Oman, 250, 251, 261, 262n66, 264, 267 Orange, House of, 34, 35 Orangutan, 3, 38, 39 Oranje-Nassau Frederik Hendrik van, 34–36, 39 Maurits van, 36 Willem III, 36, 36n31, 37 Willem V, 36n31, 37, 38n40, 38n42 Origin of the Species, The, 5

321

Ottoman Empire, 133, 135, 140, 154 Oyster animal, 67, 70–72, 74–91 life cycle, 72, 73, 83 shell, 68, 71, 72, 78, 79, 88 P Pallas, Peter Simon, 38 Pangolin, 42, 50 Parrot, 32, 36, 38, 39, 43, 51–54, 52n104, 54n109 Mauritius broad-billed, 48 Partridge, 45 Chukar, 29, 45, 46 Pastoralists, 130, 132, 143, 167, 183, 187 Pattani, Sultanate of, 237, 238, 241 Peacock blue, 294 Congo, 294 green (Javanese), 294, 308 Peacock Room, 307, 308 Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, 249 Persia, 29, 43–47, 156, 208, 232, 297 Isfahan, 44, 47 Phacochoerus aethiopicus, 38 Phetracha, King, 239 Philippines, 218n2, 225, 225n15 Manila, 225 Pigeon pink, 51 Seychelles blue, 38, 38n40 Pigs, 36, 42, 48, 50, 187 Plantations, 11, 19, 163, 164, 181, 185, 187, 194, 195 Poolvoet, Enoch, 239 Port fees, 222 Prasat Thong, King, 44, 236, 237 Presley, Elvis, 282 Pretorius, Johannes, 53, 54 Pulo Ai, 30, 239

322 

INDEX

R Radama I, 187, 192, 193, 197 Raiding, 184, 185, 265 Rainfall, 151, 186 Ramnad, 70, 107, 109–111, 114, 116, 121 Ranavalona I, 194, 198, 208 Rasulids, 134 Red River, 223 Red Sea, 9n23, 127, 130, 132, 133, 138, 141n57 Red Seal ships, see Transportation vehicles Réunion, 55n112, 157, 160, 181, 185, 187, 194, 199, 200, 204, 208 Rhinoceros, 3, 7, 31n16, 36 Sara, 39 Rice, 43, 182, 185, 194, 196, 198, 208, 231, 239, 283 Rimbaud, Arthur, 154, 155 Ruga ruga, 257–260 Rumaliza (Mohammed bin Khalfan al-Barwani), 261, 265–268 Ryukyu Islands, 292 S Saddles, 131, 170, 194 Sahle Sellassi, 136 Saké, 283, 284 Samurai, 218, 221, 227 Sanjusangendo Temple, 286 Saudi Arabia, 126, 127 Savery Hans, 49, 53 Roelant, 49, 53, 53n106 Screen, 291, 296, 302, 307 Nanban byobu, 296 Second World War, 133, 140 Sensō ji Temple, 286 Shark skin (shagreen), 6n11, 222

Sheep, 36, 137, 151, 187 Shingen-bukuro, 221 Shinto, 149, 152, 283, 284, 296 Shō sō in, 291 Siam (Thailand), 29, 36, 43, 44, 220, 226n21, 232n35, 235, 238, 238n51, 303, 304 Silver, 31, 106n20, 137, 218, 222n10, 224, 226, 227, 230, 231, 234, 236, 241 Simmel, Georg, 278 Simorgh, 46 Skins of individual animals, 20, 31, 31n16, 37, 38, 53, 193, 218n2, 222, 222n9, 222n10, 223, 228, 230, 231, 237, 240 Slave trade, 166, 252, 263 Slavery, 162 Smallpox, 89, 284, 286 Somalia British Somaliland, 168 Côte Française des Somalis, 139 South Africa Cape Colony, 209n115 Cape Town, 43n63, 160, 165, 303 Natal, 29, 160, 208, 209, 209n115 Southeast Asia, 2, 3, 7n14, 20, 149, 152, 218–220, 222, 223, 225, 242, 304 Soviet Union, 141 Spear, 127, 128, 131, 256, 257 Specx, Cornelis, 226 Speke, John Hanning, 166 Spice Islands, 29, 30, 48, 54 Springbok, 37 Sri Lanka (Ceylon), 17, 29, 30, 65, 100, 101, 104, 294 Kandy, 45 Mannar, 17, 66–68, 70–72, 75, 76, 79, 84, 85, 92, 100–102, 104, 106, 109, 109n30, 110, 119 (see also Gulf of Mannar)

 INDEX 

323

Tuticorin, 83, 90, 92, 106, 108, 109n30, 110, 112, 113n35, 114–116, 116n49, 122 Stadholder, 17, 29, 32–43, 55 Stingray skins, 107, 222n9, 222n10 Subramanyam, Sanjay, 100n3 Sudan Khartoum, 252 Tombos, 129 Sudanese Camel Corps, 138 Sugar, 31, 162, 181, 182, 194, 195, 204n81 cane, 54, 194, 195 Suiko, Empress, 295 Sukuna Bikuna, 284 Sulu Sea, 225 Swahili (people), 11n29, 157, 185, 195, 196, 208, 261, 264n81 Swarte Leeuw (ship), 51 Swords, 127, 128, 131

Tiffany, Louis Comfort, 307 Tippu Tip (Hamed bin Mohammad el-Murjebi), 259, 261, 264–267, 264n81 Tō daiji Temple, 291 Tokugawa, 226n21, 238n51, 240 Tō kyō meikō kagami, 305 Tortoiseshell, 9n22, 11, 278 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 296 Transportation vehicles bullocker, 20, 203, 204 carriage, 195 cart, 148, 163–165, 195, 205, 206 chariot, 129, 130 dhow, 127, 138, 163, 171 Indiamen, 36, 43, 44 railways, 148 shuinsen(Red Seal ships), 226, 227, 234, 237 Tuskers, 43, 248

T Taiwan, see Formosa (Taiwan) Tamil Muslims, 100, 100n4, 101, 110–115, 118, 119, 122 Tanning, 193, 228, 280 Tanzania Mrima, 167, 251, 261, 262, 264, 270 Tabora, 264, 266, 268 Ujiji, 255, 261, 262, 265–268 Tax, 70, 110, 219, 222, 258, 263, 268 Tengu, 285, 285n27, 286, 306 Terajima Ryō an, 302 Textiles barkcloth, 254 cotton, 185, 200, 205, 206, 221, 224, 233, 240, 250, 253, 254 silk, 31, 43, 44, 47, 221, 224–226, 233, 296, 298, 299 Thailand, 20, 218, 220, 223, 225, 227 Siam, 20, 218, 218n2, 220, 223, 225, 227, 304n77

U Uganda, 161, 166, 167 United States of America, 81, 141, 159, 160, 206, 207n103, 306 Unoha, 283 Unyamwezi, 256, 264, 266, 267 Urundi, Kingdom of, see Burundi V Valentijn, François, 43 van der Elst, Pieter, 229 van Haesel, Jan, 230 Van Goens, Rijklof, 65 Velten, Jan, 41, 42, 45, 46 Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), 17, 20, 27–56, 54n109, 54n111, 65–67, 72, 77, 79–82, 87, 107–109, 218, 219n4, 220, 225–234, 226n19, 238–241, 303 Heeren XVII, 30, 32, 53

324 

INDEX

Vietnam Annam, 304 Champa, 223, 233, 234; Hội An, 220, 223, 234 Đà Nẵng, 223 Viet, 219n4, 223, 227, 234 Vosmaer, Arnout, 37, 38 W Watts, Sir George, 281 Westvriesland (ship), 36 Whistler, James McNeill, 307 Wintergerst, Martin, 43 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 307 Wyndham, 170

Y Yamada Nagamasa, 228, 236 Yemen, 125–126, 131, 133, 134, 141, 143 Yemeni Imamate, 135 Z Zambia, 251 Zanzibar, 156, 157, 163, 164, 208, 250, 252, 261–263, 266–269 Zeami, 283 Zebu, 41, 182 Zimbabwe, 166