Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire: New Views on Environmental History 9781441109835, 9781474210614, 9781441108678

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Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire

Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire New Views on Environmental History Edited by James Beattie, Edward Melillo and Emily O’Gorman

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2016 © James Beattie, Edward Melillo, Emily O’Gorman and Contributors, 2015 James Beattie, Edward Melillo and Emily O’Gorman have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-0983-5 PB: 978-1-4742-9439-3 ePDF: 978-1-4411-0867-8 ePub: 978-1-4411-2594-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Eco-cultural networks and the British Empire: new views on environmental history/edited by James Beattie, Edward Melillo, Emily O’Gorman. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-0983-5 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4411-0867-8 (epdf) – ISBN 978-1-4411-2594-1 (epub) 1. Great Britain–Colonies–History–19th century. 2. Imperialism–History–19th century. 3. Postcolonialism–History–19th century. 4. Human ecology–Great Britain–Colonies. 5. Culture diffusion–Great Britain–Colonies. I.Beattie, James, 1977- editor. II. Melillo, Edward D., editor. III. O’Gorman, Emily, editor. DA16.E26 2015 333.709171’241–dc23 2014021909

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

We thank our families for their ongoing understanding and support: Thom, Nina, Simon, Ondine, Eloise and Ida.

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Author Biographies Foreword John M. MacKenzie

viii x xi xiv

Part 1 Regional Eco-Cultural Networks

1 Introduction: Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire, 1837–1945 James Beattie, Edward Melillo and Emily O’Gorman 2 Climate and Empire Georgina Endfield and Samuel Randalls 3 The Chinese State and Agriculture in an Age of Global Empires, 1880–1949 Joseph Lawson 4 Empire in a Cup: Imagining Colonial Geographies through British Tea Consumption Edward D. Melillo 5 Africa, Europe and the Birds Between Them Nancy J. Jacobs

3 21 44 68 92

Part 2 Local Eco-Cultural Networks 6 Peradeniya and the Plantation Raj in Nineteenth-Century Ceylon Eugenia W. Herbert 7 Eco-Cultural Networks in Southern China and Colonial New Zealand: Cantonese Market Gardening and Environmental Exchange, 1860s–1910s James Beattie 8 Colonial Hunting Cultures Kathryn M. Hunter 9 Game of Empires: Hunting in Treaty-Port China, 1870–1940 Robert Peckham 10 Experiments, Environments, and Networks: Commercial Rice Cultivation in South-Eastern Australia, 1900–1945 Emily O’Gorman 11 Animals and Urban Environments: Managing Domestic Animals in Nineteenth-Century Winnipeg Sean Kheraj Index

123

151 180 202 233 263 289

List of Figures Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2

Territorial expansion of the British Empire, 1815, 1901 and 1921, showing also principal seaborne trade routes

6

Extent of the British Empire, c. late 1945, also showing main communication networks

10

Figure 3.1

Map of Qing China

45

Figure 4.1

Lipton’s Tea advertisement from the Illustrated London News

73

Figure 4.2

A tin of Lipton’s Tea (ca. 1896)

76

Figure 4.3

Lipton’s Tea advertisement from the Illustrated London News

77

Figure 4.4

Lipton’s Tea advertisement from The Sketch

80

Figure 4.5

Blue glass sugar bowl inscribed in gilt, ‘EAST INDIA SUGAR/not made by/SLAVES’, c.1820–30

83

Figure 5.1

Der Pfeilstorch (‘arrow stork’)

94

Figure 5.2

The Ornithological Understanding of Migration, c.1900

97

Figure 5.3

Thienemann’s 1910 Map, ‘The Trek to and in Africa’

98

Figure 6.1

Map of Ceylon showing tea districts

124

Figure 6.2

Peradeniya: India Rubber Trees

130

Figure 6.3

Peradeniya: Palms

131

Figure 6.4

Peradeniya: Amherstia nobilis

132

Figure 6.5

Log cabin life – a working day

135

Figure 6.6

Coffee berries

136

Figure 6.7

Hakgala

138

Figure 6.8

Tea gardens

141

Figure 7.1

Maps showing the origins and destination of many Cantonese coming to New Zealand in the nineteenth century

154

List of Figures

Figure 7.2

ix

Unnamed Chinese market gardener, Forbury, Dunedin, operating pedal waterwheel.

160

Figure 8.1

Samuel Gill, ‘Kangaroo Hunting No. 1, The Meet’, c.1856

183

Figure 8.2

Maori group with guns, Chatham Islands, New Zealand, c.1900

190

Figure 9.1

Tiger hunt group, Amoy, China in 1874

208

Figure 9.2

Hunting party, China, c.1910

215

Figure 9.3

Western sportsman with Chinese hunter: ‘Equipped for Pheasant Shooting’

217

A plan of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, officially opened in 1912

234

Figure 11.1

Human and non-human populations of Winnipeg, 1891

268

Figure 11.2

Human population of Winnipeg, 1871–1911

269

Figure 11.3

Large domestic ungulate population of Winnipeg, 1891–1911

269

Figure 11.4

Chicken population of Winnipeg, 1891–1911

270

Figure 11.5

The Central Public Market building in the early 1900s

277

Figure 11.6

Winnipeg city pound records, May to December 1881

282

Figure 11.7

Carlton Street, 1900

284

Figure 10.1

Acknowledgements We thank John M. MacKenzie for his support and advice, and the wonderful staff at Bloomsbury, Emma Goode, Frances Arnold, Emily Drewe and Rhodri Mogford, for their enthusiasm and helpfulness. John Robson, Map Librarian, University of Waikato, kindly provided advice and searched for maps. Nancy Jacobs and Robert Peckham generously commented on Chapter 1 of this book. Kathryn M. Hunter was also involved in the early shaping of this book. A Contestable Research Grant, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Waikato, funded the initial conference from which this book took shape, as well as the employment of a research assistant and indexer. A University Contestable Research Grant also enabled Ted and James to meet in New Zealand to work on the book in early 2013. The Department of Environment and Geography, Macquarie University, contributed funding towards the costs of image reproduction. Emily worked on the final stages of this manuscript during a Carson Fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center, Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität, Munich. We thank Nicola Lemberg and Gareth Ranger for their research assistance, and Austin Gee for indexing.

Author Biographies James Beattie is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. He teaches, and writes on, Asian and British imperial environmental history, garden history, history of science and world history. His most recent books are: Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800–1920 (2011); with Duncan Campbell, Lan Yuan: A Garden of Distant Longing (2013); edited with Emily O’Gorman and Matt Henry, Climate, Science, and Colonization (2014). He is also co-editor of Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History. He is currently working on soft diplomacy and Chinese art collecting (with Richard Bullen), and a book on nineteenth-century diasporic Chinese environmental history. Georgina Endfield is Professor of Environmental History at the University of Nottingham, UK. Her research focuses on climate history and human responses, with a particular interest in the implications of extreme weather events. Much of her work has focused on Mesoamerica and eastern and southern Africa, and she has published widely on these themes. She is author of Climate and Society in Colonial Mexico: A Study in Vulnerability (2008). Eugenia W. Herbert is E. Nevius Rodman Professor Emeritus of History at Mount Holyoke College, USA. She is the author of books and articles on African, European and American history. Her most recent work deals with British colonial history: Twilight on the Zambezi: Late Colonialism in Central Africa (2002) and Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India (2011), which won the J. B. Jackson Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies and has been published in an Indian edition in 2013. Kathryn M. Hunter is Associate Professor of the History Department at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and an Honorary Research Associate at Te Papa Tongarewa/National Museum of New Zealand. She is the author of two books and several articles on rural and bush life in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Australia and New Zealand. Kate’s particular interests are in gender, race and mobility, especially in shared colonial spaces. Her most recent book is Hunting: A New Zealand History (2009).

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Author Biographies

Nancy J. Jacobs is Associate Professor of History, Brown University, USA. She is the author of Environment, Power, and Injustice: A South African History (2003) and articles in the Journal of African History, The American Historical Review, the Journal of Southern African Studies and Comparative Studies in Society and History. Currently, she is completing a book called ‘Birders of Africa: History of a Network’, on the interactions between birds, vernacular birders and ornithologists. She has also compiled a sourcebook on sub-Saharan Africa, African History through Sources, Volume 1. Colonial Contexts and Everyday Experiences, c. 1850–1946 (2014). Sean Kheraj is Assistant Professor of Canadian and Environmental History in the Department of History at York University, Canada. His research focuses on urban environments and the history of animals in Canada. He is the author of Inventing Stanley Park: An Environmental History (2013) and he is the host and producer of Nature’s Past: Canadian Environmental History Podcast. Joseph Lawson is Lecturer in Modern Chinese History at Newcastle University, UK. He has written on Republican-period Chinese warlord regimes in the Tibetan lands, and on twentieth-century plans for the agricultural settlement of China’s western peripheries. He is currently finishing a book about violence in southwest Sichuan from 1800 to 1956. His other interests include world history and modern Chinese intellectual history, while he has also translated the work of several prominent Chinese historians for publication. Edward Melillo is Assistant Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Amherst College in Massachusetts, USA, where he teaches courses on global environmental history and the history of the Pacific World. He received his PhD in history from Yale University in 2006. His articles have appeared in the American Historical Review, Past & Present and Radical History Review. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection, 1786–2008 (2015), which examines the long-term cultural and environmental exchanges between Chile and California. Emily O’Gorman is Lecturer in the Department of Environment and Geography at Macquarie University, Australia. Her research examines how people live in and understand their environments, with a particular focus on rivers, wetlands and climate. She has published in a range of journals and is the author of Flood Country: An Environmental History of the Murray-Darling Basin (2012). She is an Associate Editor of the journal, Environmental Humanities.

Author Biographies

xiii

Robert Peckham is Co-Director of the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine at the University of Hong Kong, and Associate Professor in the Department of History. His research focuses on histories of infectious disease and health, particularly in relation to place, space and governmentality. Recent publications include the volume Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia (2013), co-edited with David M. Pomfret, and the edited volume, Disease and Crime: A History of Social Pathologies and the New Politics of Health (2014). His articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Journal of Public Health and Modern Asian Studies. Samuel Randalls is Lecturer in Geography at University College London, UK. His research explores historical and contemporary relationships between weather and economy, including projects on weather futures trading, histories of climate change economics and most recently, in collaboration with James Kneale, Victorian hail insurance and life assurance for overseas travellers. He has co-edited a 4-volume reader on Future Climate Change (2012) and has published papers in journals including Osiris, Social Studies of Science and Geoforum.

Foreword John M. MacKenzie

From the earliest times, empires have been about networks: networks of the elite and of administrators, networks of the military, networks of the agents of commerce and trade, networks of maritime and land communications, networks of the facilitators of culture and education, sometimes networks of religion, networks of subsidiary rulers and, not least, networks of resistance. In modern times, we have come to realize that we must add webs of nature and of the environment, embracing, as the editors of this book neatly put it, ecocultural networks. It took a long time for imperial historians to break the standard mould of the political economy of empire as well as the complex of the military, war, resistance and conflict. But it became apparent in the past few decades that both the cultural and environmental economies of empire were equally worthy of attention. Indeed, the political, administrative, economic and military dimensions of imperial studies could hardly be fully understood without the essential illumination of the cultural and the environmental. This book, containing a whole range of highly eclectic and stimulating essays, reflects some of the areas that have come to seize the attention of historians, geographers, anthropologists, environmental scientists and others. It also demonstrates the manner in which these studies are required to pay attention to the global, in addition to recognizing the ‘informal’ as well as the ‘formal’, manifestations of imperialism. Moreover, we have to think in terms of complex regional webs. Empires were never simply about the so-called metropole and ‘periphery’: they can only be understood in terms of inter- and intra-colonial networks, some pulling together the informal and the formal, as in the case of China and New Zealand. These essays consider themes that include the significance of climate studies, the interactions of state and entrepreneurs in agricultural innovation, the binding together of societies (albeit in relationships of unequal exchange) through consumable products, whether produced on the plantation, from the natural environment, or through such key human environmental activities as

Foreword

xv

hunting; the manner in which botanic gardens influenced so many economic activities and therefore the orientation of societies and territories which hosted them; the human understanding of environmental phenomena such as bird migration; and the ways in which people and animals co-existed in towns and cities as well as in rural zones. In geographical terms, they span the environments of Europe, North America, South Asia and the Far East, Africa and Australasia. But the underlying themes that run through all of them are the ways in which networks reflect power relationships, the inter-action and inter-penetration of different ethnicities, and the extraordinary power of humans to modify their environments, though not always in intended ways, as well as grow in both understanding and misunderstanding of the natural world. In all of this there were mutual learning processes at work, often involving the recognition that the dominant peoples of empire seldom had all the answers, that their imaginative approach to global phenomena, expressed in aesthetic responses, scientific studies and practical ambitions (the latter two invariably in tension), was often flawed, while each generational network could be prey to fads, fashions and fallacies only to be overturned or modified by the next. But modern environmental historians must also recognize that they are often induced to follow particular obsessions. As in all studies, there seem to be Cinderella areas that receive less attention until rescued by some academic prince or princess charming. In all my reading and editing in this field, for example, I have noted the relative scarcity of studies (with notable exceptions) of marine and riverine studies, of various forms of fishing and collecting, the rarity of interests in the environmental causes and consequences of war and conflict, or concerns with urban environments. To expand on the last, we do have the essay by Kheraj in this collection, but we need a good deal more on feral animals in urban environments (in the United Kingdom, there is a major concern with the amazing burgeoning of populations of urban foxes and grey squirrels, and this must have both historical and global dimensions), on domestic gardens, on the influences of war and religion or of economic recession on urban spaces, not to mention the manner in which humans conceptualize all of these. The other great scholarly requirement lies in global studies. Historians, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries perhaps, liked to deal in what they considered to be eternal verities, in simplifying concepts that provided satisfying structures for explanations of the past (and sometimes predictions of the future). More recently we have passed through an era in which increasing complexity has become the order of the day. With the decline

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Foreword

or discrediting of such scholarly frameworks as Social Darwinism, Marxism, structuralism or modernism, fragmentation has predominated. The real challenge of the future lies in the need to find new intelligible patterns. Perhaps the concept of eco-cultural networks will help in this, but it is clear that a great deal requires to be done in order to refine and apply useful environmental categories, as well as demonstrate the manner in which they can be united with political, military and cultural economies of empires. This book of essays, in its range and diversity, should stimulate ideas on how such a new search for coherence and connectedness can be pursued.

Part One

Regional Eco-Cultural Networks

1

Introduction: Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire, 1837–1945 James Beattie, Edward Melillo and Emily O’Gorman

Today’s globalized world bears enduring traces of the eco-cultural networks generated by the British Empire. The chapters in this book, which cover over a century – from the beginning of the Victorian era (1837) to the end of the Second World War (1945) – examine the pathways of trade, conquest and governance that facilitated transfers of ideas, organisms and commodities throughout Britain’s imperial territories and beyond. We use the concept of ‘eco-cultural networks’ to refer to these processes and to highlight the deep dependencies between societies and their environments. These dynamic relations and their characteristics cannot be understood in isolation. Not only do we argue that British imperial expansion profoundly reordered landscapes and human societies within and outside the formal boundaries of Empire, but we also suggest that the interconnected experiences of imperialism inspired the production of new ways of understanding and using environments. Additionally, we contend that these networks produced a series of intended and unintended consequences with farreaching implications for the Earth and its organisms. A tremendous variety of individuals, institutions and organisms participated in these eco-cultural networks, from working-class consumers in London to tea pickers in Sri Lanka, from merchants and markets in New Zealand and China to indigenous hunters in North America and from birds migrating between Europe and Africa to British administrators in East Africa.1 In addition to bringing diverse cultures into contact, these imperial networks drew together far-flung places in new and unexpected ways. Networks connected not only the territories of Britain, but also those of other empires and regions. For British imperialists and imperial subjects, and those involved in interactions with them, colonial environments throughout the world generated possibilities and limits,

4

Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire

hopes and anxieties. Factors such as new diseases and unfamiliar climates, challenging topographies and unknown biota, as well as cultural complexities and entrenched local resistance, frequently compromised the colonial project of dominance over people and environments. At the same time, newly introduced plants and animals performed differently in various colonial contexts, often complicating attempts at acclimatization and frustrating efforts at commodity production. Historians of the British Empire have rarely acknowledged the importance of environmental factors in the creation, maintenance and eventual decline of imperial power. While they have examined resource extraction, they have not framed their analysis in the context of either ecosystem functioning or global environmental change.2 Likewise, imperial environmental historians have created a rich specialist literature, which examines specific themes and geographical areas, but their work has rarely been synthetic.3 The sole treatment of the environmental history of the entire British Empire is William Beinart and Lotte Hughes’s Environment and Empire (2007).4 Only in later chapters on the twentieth century do the authors examine environmental interactions in some of Britain’s imperial territories. Conversely, global environmental historians have tended to frame their narratives in regional or national terms of comparison, despite the argument of environmental historians Libby Robin and Jane Carruthers that ‘environmental history cannot be divorced from transnational concerns’.5 Indeed, as world historian Kenneth Pomeranz observed, ‘an environmental history with a truly global perspective has been slow to emerge’, in terms of considerations of multisited exchanges of ideas and biota.6 Eco-cultural Networks does not present a synthetic history of the British Empire, nor does it attempt to provide a global narrative of networks. Rather, it reveals points of connection between the two and in so doing exposes the porous nature of the British Empire. The chapters do this by adopting approaches that favour connections over comparisons and privileging linked systems over isolated examples. Such analyses reveal new vantage points, and new frames of analysis, on the environmental history of the British Empire. Each of the case studies in this book offers a new angle from which to approach empire and environment, notably, by tracing transnational connections rather than stressing regional comparisons. Our volume consolidates existing work on transnational networks in the field, while the framework of eco-cultural networks offers environmental historians a useful analytic tool. We stress that this work does not present an overview of the British Empire.7 Instead, the

Introduction

5

strength of the volume lies in its engagement with various kinds of networks, involving myriad ecosystems, peoples, places and goods. This enables us to examine different commodities (tea, coffee, vegetables, rice and domestic animals), diverse environments and landscapes (cities, plains, hill country, forests, wetlands and farmland) and various institutions (scientific societies, colonial governments, imperial organizations, corporations and informal social organizations), as well as diverse places (southern New Zealand, eastern Australia, Sri Lanka, southern Africa, Britain, central Canada, southern China and Hong Kong). In thinking beyond the boundaries of nation-states or regional associations when considering the British Empire, and its interactions with other places, the chapters examine linked systems rather than isolated cases. For example, several of the authors demonstrate how the British Empire overlapped with the Chinese Empire in deep and profound ways, thereby adding new understandings to scholarship on the environmental history of Britain’s so-called informal empire in the East.8

Imperial size and complexity Imperial connections with China are a reminder of the size and complexity of the British Empire, which expanded significantly over the period examined in this book (Figure 1.1). At its height, it covered 35.5 million square kilometres – stretching across more than one quarter of the earth’s landmass.9 The British Empire contained towns and cities, girded tropical and temperate lands and seas, encompassed low-lying wetland areas and vast mountain ranges, included desert and tropical forests, and enveloped a range of other ecosystems. Within each were a wide range of organisms. The variety of peoples living within the Empire was just as diverse as the peoples who interacted with it. The former included indigenous Maori, Arabs and Chinese, and many other groups besides. Some regions within the British Empire became self-governing colonies, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. Others endured greater or lesser degrees of imperial control. Added to this were those regions of ‘informal empire’, such as parts of coastal China, where Britain and other powers established treaty ports. In these zones, foreign citizens did not have to adhere to Chinese law. After 1919, there were also ‘mandated territories’, ostensibly controlled by Britain and its colonies for the newly created League of Nations, a forerunner of the United

6 Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire Figure 1.1 Territorial expansion of the British Empire, 1815, 1901 and 1921, showing also principal seaborne trade routes. Source: Map based on: Nigel Dalziel, The Penguin Historical Atlas of the British Empire (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 64–5; The British Empire Atlas (No place: Time-Life International, 1971), 4–5; ‘Historical and Commercial Chart of the British Empire’, in The Southern Cross Public Schools Atlas for Australasian Schools (Christchurch: Whitcombe & Tombs Ltd., no date), 21.

Introduction

7

Nations. In reality, these territories became semi-colonial outposts, exploited for their labour and, as in the case of the phosphate-rich Pacific island of Nauru, for their natural resources.10 Because of its immense spatial extent, its ecological diversity and its administrative and cultural heterogeneity, the British Empire presents a complex subject to analyse. However, as this book demonstrates, the Empire’s vast scope and its interactions with areas outside its territorial boundaries provide historians with unique possibilities for seeing exchanges and relationships that operated beyond the politicaladministrative borders of nation-states and territories, or the boundaries of more localized regions, and even the Empire itself.

New perspectives on empire This book expands both the geographical and conceptual frameworks of imperial studies. The classic works on the British Empire have cleaved to ethnic and national boundaries. Many historians have focused solely on comparisons among the so-called ‘Anglo-worlds’ of the British Empire – Australia, New Zealand, Canada – and their relations with other Anglo settler colonies, such as the United States or Caribbean territories. Historians have also produced studies that failed to look beyond metropole-colony relations. Their historical models tend to assume a wheel-like representation of direct relations between Britain – the imperial ‘hub’ – and its spokes, individual colonies. Authors have rarely considered exchanges among and beyond these colonies. Instead, they have divided the Empire into ‘colonies of settlement’, ‘crown colonies’ – ‘formal’ empires and their ‘informal’ analogues.11 By examining trans-regional connectivity, regardless of settlement type, we present new perspectives on both global environmental history and the history of the British Empire. A focus on imperial eco-cultural networks shows that the Empire’s territorial boundaries did not circumscribe its environmental, political or social impacts. Several of the chapters in this book demonstrate this innovative approach by highlighting British interactions with other empires and peoples around the world, notably China. This book is divided into two sections, which use different geographical scales to examine British imperial eco-cultural networks. The chapters in ‘Part 1: Regional Eco-Cultural Networks’ (Chapters 1–5) consider trans-regional networks, many focusing on interactions among distant parts of the British Empire and beyond, or situate the British Empire in the context of

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Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire

other imperial powers. In ‘Part 2: Local Eco-Cultural Networks’ (Chapters 6–11), the authors examine networks from more localized vantage points, tracing the ways these assemblages shaped the cultural and physical landscapes of a particular place or places. In both sections, authors emphasize the importance of what we call ‘eco-cultural networks’.

Defining eco-cultural networks The term ‘eco-cultural networks’ refers to interlinked cultural formulations, material exchanges and ecological processes. Historians of the British Empire, even those of its environment, have generally neglected the coordinated examination of such interlinked phenomena, tending instead to focus on only one or two aspects of those exchanges.12 The first part of the term ‘eco’ refers to ecological processes, or the interconnections among living and non-living entities. This is the subject-matter of ecology. Ecology is fundamentally about networks and relationships among organisms, including people, and the nonliving world. Because flows of energy and movements of biota, under different climatic and geological regimes, can occur with or without people, we use the term ‘cultural’ to denote the role of humans in shaping, and being shaped by, their environments. Additionally, while ecologists often include humans within their frameworks, in many cases, they do not pay much attention to the cultural dimensions of ecological change.13 Our use of ecology is not new. Environmental historians have long drawn upon insights from this field as a basis for understanding environmental change.14 However, environmental historians have traditionally examined either the cultural or the material dimensions of human–environmental interactions. Indeed, as J. R. McNeill has pointed out, there have generally been three main approaches to the field: one that deals with material changes, a second that focuses upon cultural shifts and a third that concentrates upon political developments.15 In this volume, the benefits of a combined analysis of material and cultural perspectives in environmental history is neatly illustrated by Georgina Endfield and Samuel Randalls (Chapter 2), who demonstrate ‘that climate is a philosophical and political category as much as it is a material category’. As they argue, it was ‘deployed by a wide range of different actors in changing and sometimes conflicting ways throughout the British Empire and beyond’. Furthermore, as much as the physical impacts of climate shaped

Introduction

9

expectations of productive tropical soils and seemingly inexhaustible imperial resources, ideas about climate also informed fears about its effects on racial development and generated anxieties about ‘tropical’ diseases. Fundamental to the concept ‘eco-cultural’ is our recognition of the simultaneous production of knowledge about environments with their exploitation under imperial regimes.16 It is no accident that disciplines such as botany and ecology emerged in concert with economic concerns of finding more efficient ways of exploiting natural resources.17 Botanic gardens and their scientists were central to the development of economic botany, facilitating far-reaching exchanges of commodity crops, among many other interactions. Eugenia Herbert (Chapter 6) examines the significance and complexity of these institutions through the lens of the Royal Botanic Garden at Peradeniya, a site that played a central role in the development of a plantation economy in Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka). As she demonstrates, imperial expansion relied upon a capacity to alter environments and peoples, including to transport labour and move plants and animals, in an attempt to generate economically productive spaces. In this context of increasing interconnection and environmental change, new kinds of eco-cultural networks emerged. The exploitation of new resources relied on material, technological and cultural developments, from the expansion of steamship and railway links to the emergence of more rapid conveyance of information, such as through telegraphy and print media (Figure 1.2). Cultural attitudes also played a key role, spread through expanding communications networks and emerging media. Based on their own understandings of resource usage, many colonists perceived imperial environments as inefficiently managed or inadequately developed by indigenous populations, while simultaneously valorizing native peoples’ closer relationship to nature or singing the praises of ‘wild’ nature.18 Colonial ideologies of improvement stressed the appropriation of lands from local residents and the transformation of imperial environments into sources of economic and moral value. European private-property regimes conferred ownership rights, provided food sources and opened new frontiers of commodity production.19 Environmental change, meanwhile, satisfied Biblical injunctions for settlers to cultivate and re-stock the earth. As historian Richard Drayton posits, colonial agriculture as ‘a way of using nature sanctified by the religious and economic assumptions of the West’, proved to be ‘crucial to the culture of British expansion’.20

10 Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire

Figure 1.2 Extent of the British Empire, c. late 1945, also showing main communication networks. Source: Map based on: Whitcombe’s New Zealand Clear School Atlas (Christchurch: Whitcombe & Tombs Ltd., no date [1945?]), 6–7.

Introduction

11

Such attitudes found varying degrees of success through the deployment of military power and related forms of coercion, actions complemented by bureaucracies and legal frameworks, among other means.21 Expanding banking systems, which mobilized capital for investment in imperial projects of environmental change, played significant roles, too. Dwayne R. Winsek and Robert M. Pike have observed that: ‘The growth of a world-wide network of fast cables and telegraph systems, in tandem with developments in railways and steamships, eroded some of the obstacles of geography and … supported huge flows of capital, technology, people, news, and ideas, which, in turn, led to a higher degree of convergence among markets, merchants, and banking.’22 Not only did the expansion of markets and mercantile linkages promise economic opportunities for people living in the Empire or trading with it, but it also had important ecological dimensions.

Eco-cultural commodity frontiers The Empire created commodity frontiers where capital aggregated, but which also required the mobilization of labour to transform raw materials into manufactured goods. Although, at its core, this process involved wide-ranging environmental changes, economic historians have largely ignored the ecological costs of commodity production.23 When examining the British Empire, historians have traditionally emphasized the role of British domestic markets in fostering demand for raw materials from Britain’s colonies – the so-called core-periphery model of economic interaction. Chapters in this book demonstrate the need for scholars to also consider consumer demand from other parts of the British Empire and beyond in the development of commodity frontiers, not just demand created by British consumers. An eco-cultural approach can enrich environmental histories of consumption. As historian Matthew W. Klingle pointed out, environmental historians have generally examined either the cultural or material impacts of consumption on environments, seldom analysing the two together.24 Combining the materialist and cultural aspects of consumer demand within a networked approach can simultaneously expand both our economic and environmental understanding of imperial history. For example, Emily O’Gorman (Chapter 10) examines the establishment of water-intensive rice cultivation in south-eastern Australia during the first half of the twentieth century in these terms. She looks at the ways that colonial cultures of agricultural experimentation, along with

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Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire

international networks of exchange in expertise and genetic material, shaped government and individual approaches to local environments, which in turn were linked to both existing rice markets and the creation of new ones. Likewise, Kathryn Hunter (Chapter 8) shows how colonial ‘game ecologies’ in North America, Africa and Europe led to the over-harvesting of numerous species. As she argues, these developments shifted commodity production, altered fashion trends and reconfigured ecological management. The marketing of imperial commodities also depended upon interactions between imagined colonial geographies and very tangible – yet often concealed – forms of labour coercion and environmental exploitation. Edward Melillo (Chapter 4) shows how the Lipton Tea Company developed debt peonage regimes and tea monocultures in Ceylon. By blending panoramas of bucolic tea plantations with scenes of contented tea pickers, Sir Thomas Lipton pioneered direct marketing strategies that cultivated consumer identities in Britain.25 Likewise, James Beattie (Chapter 7) demonstrates how shared aesthetic appreciation of Chinese flowers could open up points of mutual interaction among colonists and Cantonese in New Zealand. In short, imperialism created shifting eco-cultural networks that connected the environments, capital, knowledge, commodities and resources of formerly separate places, both within the British Empire and outside its boundaries. Eco-cultural networks waxed and waned in response to myriad factors, ranging from the exhaustion of resources to the availability of capital for investment and the collapse of commodity markets. As historical geographer Alan Lester notes, imperial networks depended on existing local conditions, which were sometimes almost entirely controlled by residents of these areas.26 Joseph Lawson (Chapter 3) examines the partial eco-cultural networks that developed between nineteenth- and twentieth-century China and the British Empire, as Chinese officials sought to develop China’s hinterlands through agricultural settlement. The fact that these eco-cultural networks were fragmented demonstrates the contingent nature of such connections, removing the risk of viewing networks as a progressive vision of history, driven by an inexorable unfolding of equally weighted interactions among different places. This reinforces Lester’s point that: ‘The colonial networks that we envisage . . . must be seen not only as provisional and contingent, but sometimes as ephemeral and even fleeting. Rather like the patterns in a kaleidoscope, the precise constitution of the interconnections is momentary, although the networked nature of interconnectedness itself is constant.’27

Introduction

13

Geography and locality profoundly shaped the nature, extent and duration of eco-cultural networks. Robert Peckham (Chapter 9) demonstrates the creation of different kinds of networks of knowledge, practice and material exchanges that characterized British hunting in China and Hong Kong. As he shows, hunting became part of imperial attempts to re-order and assimilate a region that had been profoundly shaped by a wholly different imperial history. At the same time, the act of hunting on unfamiliar terrain highlighted the limitations of British imperial rule and showcased the ‘natural’ order upon which it was predicated. Imperialism could also make formerly non-human networks into eco-cultural ones. Nancy Jacobs (Chapter 5) explores historical understandings of bird movements between Africa and Europe to gain a new perspective on European imperialism and the formation of scientific knowledge. Bird migration, she demonstrates, existed long before Europeans reframed local understandings of avian migrations as continental processes. As Jacobs observes: ‘The shapes of continents and hierarchies of empires coalesced within the localities and hemispheres of migrating birds.’ If the chapters in this book chart the importance of the cultural and material underpinnings of environmental change, they also respond to the strongly declensionist narratives that have characterized environmental history since its inception in the 1970s. For many authors of previous studies, European imperialism precipitated a downward spiral of inexorable environmental ruin and social decay.28 The starting point for such narratives is often a mythical Edenic Age in which local peoples lived in perceived symbiosis with a natural world. In these ‘just-so’ stories, colonial intrusion disrupted this harmonious relationship. Such narratives, as historian Simon Schama observes, give an overly simplistic account ‘of land taken, exploited, exhausted; of traditional cultures said to have lived in a relation of sacred reverence with the soil displaced by the reckless individualist, the capitalist aggressor’.29 These ‘hell in a hand-basket’ scripts threaten to transform environmental history into the new dismal science, and they portray the past as little more than a dress rehearsal for the present. While some environmental historians have vigorously critiqued this tendency – the notion of ‘the ecological Indian’ – it nonetheless remains an entrenched viewpoint.30 Instead of focusing on declensionist narratives, the chapters in this book emphasize the complexity and contingency of imperial environmental histories. For example, Sean Kheraj (Chapter 11) demonstrates the difficulties faced by

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Winnipeg’s city authorities in controlling animals. ‘As a form of mobile property, domestic animals transgressed static property boundaries and threatened damage to buildings, fencing, and other forms of stationary property.’ Yet, at the same time, animal welfare and public-health concerns fed into a raft of legislation to help ‘to establish Winnipeg as an environment intended to sustain both human and domestic animal populations in what can be described as an asymmetrical symbiotic relationship’. Colonial resource extraction also produced other unwanted and unanticipated outcomes. In Ceylon, as Herbert (Chapter 6) shows, monoculture plantations faced collapse as a result of unsustainable patterns of resource exploitation. Here and elsewhere plantation agriculture depleted soil nutrients and deforestation caused erosion, calling for new practices and regulations. In other instances, hydraulic mining created flooding and polluted waterways, and canal-building created new disease vectors. These were only a few of imperialism’s ecological contradictions.31 Such unintended consequences reflected the timing of the British Empire’s emergence. Its rapid expansion during the mid-nineteenth century occurred during an era when modern technologies of mobility – such as the steamboat, the train and the steel-hulled clipper ship – significantly accelerated the movement of people, commodities, genetic material and technologies. Simultaneously, modes of production and patterns of consumption fuelled a demand for natural resources, their by-products and an endless array of manufactured goods.32 The cultural and physical changes associated with this era of rapid transportation and spreading industrialization dramatically reshaped eco-cultural networks of empire. For example, animals played important roles not just in rural frontiers but also in booming urban areas (Chapter 11). Likewise, the commercial entrepôt of Hong Kong and its associated shipping networks enabled Chinese migrant workers to travel throughout the Empire in search of employment. In turn, as Beattie (Chapter 7) shows, these Chinese migrant networks fostered environmental exchanges between southern China and southern New Zealand. Such phases of intense change also generated new forms of environmental knowledge among various colonial interlocutors. Ecological learning was multidirectional. Imperial ecologies depended upon exchanges of cultivars, transfers of techniques and introductions of technologies, which created new environmental practices and cultural adaptations within and beyond the British Empire. Many such interactions were assymetrical, exhibiting unequal power dynamics across the British imperial world. Jacobs (Chapter 5) demonstrates

Introduction

15

how scientists, some working for different European empires, appropriated African local knowledge of birds within particular modes of ordering and using information. Such networks could also exist independently of British control. Lawson (Chapter 3) illustrates how officials in the border regions of nineteenthand twentieth-century China at first acquired only vague comprehension of British imperial agricultural development, often through Japanese sources. Later, as their knowledge accumulated, so they turned more to American, Japanese and German models, rather than expertise from the British Empire. Nevertheless, as Lawson shows, these overseas sources never supplanted older Chinese notions of agricultural development. By relying upon Chinese archival sources, Lawson’s chapter captures the complexity of the British Empire and its broader encounter with environments and peoples outside its borders. Such endeavours often require a poly-lingual, multi-archival and multicultural research strategies. People’s location within eco-cultural networks shaped their understandings and experiences of the British Empire, as much as their cultural background, gender and social status did. This was as true for tea pickers in India as for consumers of that tea in Africa. Yet researchers face numerous challenges in recovering these diverse voices. Cantonese migrants, for example, produced few sources, while fewer still survive (Chapter 7). Creative readings of colonial texts are thus required, as when Jacobs pursues Africans’ opinions on migrating European birds (Chapter 5). While this book examines a range of different eco-cultural networks linking diverse geographical regions, peoples and environments, its intention is not to present a history of all environmental interactions involving all parts of the British Empire. Indeed, contributors emphasize some regions more than others, while several regions are absent altogether. Instead, the object is to examine a series of case studies illustrating the benefits that a networked analysis of the British Empire can provide to environmental and world history scholarship. To this end, for example, several chapters examine different aspects of British imperial interactions with China and Chinese interactions with the British Empire. By focusing on China, we demonstrate the importance of considering how imperial networks responded to, and were in turn shaped by, processes and events beyond British imperial control. We do so to stress that the British Empire should not be conceived of as a selfcontained entity. As we note elsewhere, much more scholarship is needed on environmental interactions among different empires in the nineteenth and

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twentieth centuries. The concept of eco-cultural networks provides a useful framework for evaluating these relationships.33 The image on the cover of this collection was one of the many posters produced by the Empire Marketing Board in the 1920s and 1930s to promote intra-empire trade and product consumption. It depicts Tamil workers loading Ceylonese tea onto a British ship, and brings together a number of the threads that unite this volume: how peoples, commodities, transportation networks, markets and different environments became interconnected through imperialism. Examining these and other eco-cultural networks across and beyond the British Empire provides innovative perspectives to readers of world history, imperial history and global environmental history.

Notes 1 On the perils of attributing historical agency to non-human actors, see: Linda Nash, ‘The Agency of Nature or the Nature of Agency?’. Environmental History 10, 1 (2005): 67–9. 2 See, for example, Christopher A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989); James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1783–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 3 We are indebted to Robert Peckham for this observation. Especially useful studies are: The British Empire in the Natural World: Environmental Encounters in South Asia, eds. Deepak Kumar, Vinita Damoradaran and Rohan D’Souza (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 4 William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Other important works to consider the entirety of the British Empire include Grove, Green Imperialism. Unlike Beinart and Hughes, Grove focuses on the development of imperial ideologies about the natural world, specifically how European colonial expansion has been a key driver for state environmental policy. 5 Libby Robin and Jane Carruthers, ‘Introduction: Environmental History and the History of Biology’. Journal of the History of Biology 44 (2011): 1–14, 6 (quotation). 6 Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘Introduction: World History and Environmental History’, in The Environment and World History, eds. Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2009), 3.

Introduction

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7 While we do not have space to discuss the literature on networks and transnational environmental history in detail here, we do so in: James Beattie, Edward Melillo and Emily O’Gorman, ‘Rethinking the British Empire through Eco-cultural Networks: Materialist-Cultural Environmental History, Relational Connections, and Agency’. Environment and History 20, 4 (2014): 561–75. 8 Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas, ed. Robert Bickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); J. R. McNeill, ‘Environmental History’, in A Concise Companion to History, ed. Ulinka Rublack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 299–315; A. W. Crosby, ‘The Past and Present of Environmental History’. American Historical Review 100 (1995): 1177–89. 9 Janken Myrdal, ‘Empire: The Comparative Study of Imperialism’, in Ecology and Power: Struggles over Land and Material Resources in the Past, Present and Future, eds. Alf Hornborg, Brett Clark and Kenneth Hermele (New York: Routledge, 2012), 37. 10 For an overview of this complexity, see: Robin A. Butlin, Geographies of Empire: European Empires and Colonies, c.1880–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Nigel Dalziel, The Penguin Historical Atlas of the British Empire (London: Penguin, 2006). 11 On which, see James Beattie, ‘Recent Directions in the Environmental Historiography of the British Empire’. History Compass 10 (2012): 129–39. 12 For a critique, see: Matthew W. Klingle, ‘Spaces of Consumption in Environmental History’. History and Theory 42 (2003): 94–110. A notable exception is John M. MacKenzie’s work, which gives equal weight to social and material factors in imperialism. Note: The Victorian Vision: Inventing New Britain, ed. John M. MacKenzie (London: V&A Publications, 2001); MacKenzie, Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009). 13 Péter Szabó and Radim Hédl, ‘Advancing the Integration of History and Ecology for Conservation’. Conservation Biology 25 (2011): 680–7. 14 On which, note Donald Worster, ‘Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History’. Journal of American History 76 (1990): 1087–106; McNeill, ‘Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History’. History and Theory 42 (2003): 5–43. 15 McNeill, ‘Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History’, 6–9. 16 In some senses, our argument echoes the one presented about science and society in States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order, ed. Sheila Jasanoff (London: Routledge, 2004). As Jasanoff notes, ‘co-production is shorthand for the proposition that the ways in which we know and represent the world (both nature and society) are inseparable from the ways in which we choose to live in it. Knowledge and its material embodiments are at once products of social work

18

17

18

19 20 21 22

23

24 25

26 27 28 29 30

Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire and constitutive of forms of social life …’, ‘The Idiom of co-production’, in States of Knowledge, 1. Note, for example, Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, eds. Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997); Science and Empire: Essays in Indian Context, ed. Deepak Kumar (Delhi: Anamika Prkashan, 1991). Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety, 1800–1920: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). Richard H. Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), xvii. Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). Dwayne R. Winsek and Robert M. Pike, Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860–1930 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 1–2. See also, Donald Denoon, The Dynamics of Settler Capitalism: The Dynamics of Dependent Development in the Southern Hemisphere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). On the concept of the ‘commodity frontier’, see Jason W. Moore, ‘Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World-Economy: Commodity Frontiers, Ecological Transformation, and Industrialization’. Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 23 (2000): 409–33; Moore, ‘“The Modern World-System” as Environmental History? Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism’. Theory and Society 32 (2003): 307–77. Klingle, ‘Spaces of Consumption in Environmental History’, 94–110. For related claims, see David Arnold, The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety. Alan Lester, ‘Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire’. History Compass 4 (2006): 124–41. Lester, ‘Imperial Circuits’, 135. MacKenzie, ‘Empire and the Ecological Apocalypse: The Historiography of the Imperial Environment’, in Ecology and Empire, 215–28. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 13. For more on mythological representations of harmonious indigenous relations with nature, see Shephard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999).

Introduction

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31 See, for example, Rohan D’Souza, Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Elizabeth Whitcombe, ‘Canal Irrigation and Ecological Change in Colonial North India’, in Social Ecology, ed. Ramachandra Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 132–49; Grove, Green Imperialism; Ben Daley, ‘Mining the Reefs and Cays: Coral, Guano and Rock Phosphate Extraction in the Great Barrier Reef, Australia, 1844-1940’. Environment and History 12 (2006): 395–433; Beattie and Ruth Morgan, ‘Engineering Edens: Water, Anxiety and Hydroresilience in the British Empire, 1860-1940’, in Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Crisis, Panic and Anxiety in the Age of Imperialism, 1860–1940, eds. Christine Whyte and Harald Fischer-Tiné (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). 32 Geographer David Harvey refers to ‘time-space compression’ in The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 284–307. 33 This is a topic we explore in more detail in: Beattie, Melillo and O’Gorman, ‘Rethinking the British Empire through Eco-cultural Networks’.

Select bibliography Arnold, David. The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. Beattie, James. Empire and Environmental Anxiety, 1800–1920: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. —‘Recent Directions in the Environmental Historiography of the British Empire’. History Compass 10 (2012): 129–39. Beattie, James, Edward Melillo and Emily O’Gorman, ‘Rethinking the British Empire through Eco-cultural Networks: Materialist-Cultural Environmental History, Relational Connections, and Agency’. Environment and History 20, 4 (2014): 561–75. Beinart, William and Lotte Hughes. Environment and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Burke III, Edmund and Kenneth Pomeranz (eds), The Environment and World History. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2009. Butlin, Robin A. Geographies of Empire: European Empires and Colonies, c.1880–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Dalziel, Nigel. The Penguin Historical Atlas of the British Empire. London: Penguin, 2006. Griffiths, Tom and Libby Robin (eds), Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies. Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997.

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Grove, Richard. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Headrick, Daniel R. The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Klingle, Matthew W. ‘Spaces of Consumption in Environmental History’. History and Theory 42 (2003): 94–110. Kumar, Deepak, Vinita Damoradaran and Rohan D’Souza (eds), The British Empire in the Natural World: Environmental Encounters in South Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Lester, Alan. ‘Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire’. History Compass 4 (2006): 124–41. MacKenzie, John M. Empires of Nature and the Nature of Empires: Imperialism, Scotland and the Environment: the Callander Lectures, delivered in the University of Aberdeen, 2–7 November 1995. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1997. —Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009. McNeill, J. R. ‘Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History.’ History and Theory 42 (2003): 5–43. Moore, Jason W. ‘ “The Modern World-System” as Environmental History? Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism’. Theory and Society 32 (2003): 307–77. Weaver, John C. The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003.

2

Climate and Empire Georgina Endfield and Samuel Randalls

Histories of climate and imperialism reveal the entwined arguments used to explain both the climatic determinants of empire and imperial aspirations towards climatic control. In the imperial debates we highlight, climate rarely represents a described natural force. Rather, in this chapter, we argue that climate is a philosophical and political category as much as it is a material category, one that was deployed by a diversity of actors in changing and sometimes conflicting ways throughout the British Empire and beyond.1 Studies of climate have been produced by a wide range of individuals, from foresters and medical practitioners to ships’ captains and religious authorities. Understanding the relations between climate and empire has taxed the minds of both imperial authorities and those working and living under imperial oversight, yet postulating the precise relationship between climate and imperial control, however, has been far from straightforward. Work exploring the connections between climate and empire must account for the complexity of this relationship both by examining the ways in which imperial authorities constructed and legitimated climate knowledges and by investigating the power of climate as a concept able to shape imperial ideas and material practices. This chapter recognizes the ever-changing relationship between empire-making, climatic impacts and climate perceptions. To explore this argument, first we critically review the historical importance of climate in empire through an examination of ideas of climatic determinism. Next, we discuss four key themes that are of particular importance in understanding the connections between climate and empire: first, imperial ambitions for climate control; second, the use of climatic factors to explain away political or economic failings by imperial authorities; third, the development and legitimation of particular forms of climate knowledge; and fourth, the emergence of medical expertise in assessing and reducing the risks of hazardous climates on imperial projects. In each case, there is no unitary imperial position, but there is a degree

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of reflexivity; indeed, we demonstrate that local climate knowledge could enable resistance to imperialism. We suggest that through these four areas of interest, climate and empire became intertwined in important ways, helping to frame eco-cultural networks in drawing new understandings of the environment, new ways of mobilizing labour and new kinds of political and economic systems.

Climatic determinism Recently, environmental historians have postulated that climates have directly or indirectly determined the fate of empires and societal relations, as represented in the popular books of Brian Fagan.2 According to such accounts, periods of cooling and warming, together with alterations in precipitation patterns, cause episodes of crop failure and famine, which then lead to revolutions and wars. This style of writing harks back to older European traditions on the impacts of climate on human society. One frequently made assertion of the nineteenth century was that there was a difference between the industrious dweller of temperate climates and the indigent resident of the tropics. Historically, these kinds of narratives frequently relied on geographical and latitudinal understandings of climate, especially of similarities among climates of the same latitudes. For example, when Europeans discovered that North American climates were dissimilar to those of their birthplace, they offered various explanations about such diversity. These conditions also provoked debate over whether such climates were typical.3 Authorities and settlers in new regions also explored and experimented with an array of responses to climatic differences, while it was thought that with medical insight travellers might be able to avoid any hostile climatic traits. Today, determinists veer between pessimism about humanity’s future in the face of inevitable climatic changes and optimism that humans can adapt to mitigate those risks. Given the influence of such historical arguments on imperialism, it is worthwhile elaborating on these. In the eighteenth century, Baron de Montesquieu constructed theories of climatic determinism based on a latitudinal approach to delineating climate and its influence on the moral and intellectual capacity of humans.4 Montesquieu’s work inspired significant numbers of followers among colonial governors and generated significant debate, particularly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, on the relationship between nature and civilization. Rigorous, scientific and methodical approaches in line with the Baconian tradition of scientific

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investigation made nature more amenable to human actions, and led to fresh interpretations of differences between civilized and uncivilized parts of the world. Differences among peoples now could not simply be explained by nature alone, but rather by the use humans made of nature’s raw materials.5 Increasingly, Europeans came to believe that a country’s populace should be industrious, especially where, as the demographer Davenant pointed out, natural resources (and land in particular) were abundant. Where scarcity reduced humanity’s reliance on nature, excess land tempted people into laziness.6 Although some recognized that humans could have an impact on climate, as through forest clearance, most later writers acknowledged that agricultural development relied on nature’s capacities and was constrained by them. Climates could determine the fate of empires, even if civilization acted to ameliorate or mediate that relationship. During the late eighteenth century, and into the nineteenth century, environmental determinists were challenged in several ways, especially from the perspectives of climatology and medicine.7 Perhaps the most empirically detailed critique of climate determinism came from the geographer, Alexander von Humboldt, who traced human environmental impacts in South America and, later, in other parts of the world.8 In von Humboldt’s reasoning, humans could cause climatic changes, an argument later adopted by another geographer, George Perkins Marsh, perhaps most famously in his 1864 book Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. In arguing against environmental determinism, Marsh stressed that humans were the ones who modified and thereby re-created the environment rather than the other way around. Debates about the domestication of nature would prove to be an important objective of imperial administrations, whereby humans could re-create environments in economically or politically useful ways for empire, rather than merely responding to encountered climates and civilizations. As environmental historian Richard Grove notes, human-caused environmental degradation could have unforeseen consequences for empire-building through its perceived promotion of climatic deterioration brought about by drought and flood.9 In this period, environmental determinism was also coming under serious challenge from medical and anthropological authorities, who increasingly rejected environmental explanations of race in favour of arguments that humans could manage or mitigate the challenges of living in a tropical climate.10 Climatic determinism reappeared at the end of the nineteenth century. Its most noteworthy twentieth-century representative was the geographer

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Ellsworth Huntington. His Civilization and Climate (1915) was renowned for its postulation that climate significantly influenced the emergence of civilizations. To illustrate this, Huntington drew maps of climatic energy zones and allied these with ‘expert opinions’ on the zones of the most and least advanced civilizations.11 As an example of his research into climate and productivity, in 1943 Huntington discussed the importance of the geographical distribution of physical vigour by highlighting that New Zealand workers were twice as vigorous as Indian workers.12 Studies focusing on the influence of climate on society, however, became controversial for the geographical community at least, whose science would fall ‘on hard times’ because of the re-interpretation of determinism in extreme racist ideologies in the early to mid-twentieth century.13 The re-emergence of climatic determinism has had relatively little academic prominence until recently, in part because of these concerns. Contemporary fears about anthropogenic climatic changes, however, have led some authors to draw on historical analogies to illustrate the fragility of civilization under climatic threat. David D. Zhang et al. have recently reprised this thesis quantitatively, suggesting that climatic changes are the ‘ultimate cause’ of the collapse of civilizations historically.14 The thesis has also been re-articulated several times, with fewer or greater caveats, by more popular science authors such as Jared Diamond and Brian M. Fagan, even emerging again in explanations of economic competitiveness.15 Such work has faced considerable criticism for being overly simplistic and has led to increasing anxiety over the possible re-emergence of racialized, deterministic arguments.16 Simplistic environmental determinist stories still fail to account for why in some places at some times climate seems to matter and at other times matters much less. Robert Marks’s account, for example, shows that technological developments in southern China reduced the impacts of climatic changes from any necessary cycle of declining harvests and enhanced mortality. The creation of, for example, ‘ever normal’ granaries to maintain stocks and manage prices is one such intervention.17 Donald Worster, among several others, has also advanced more balanced approaches in considering the interplay of climate and culture.18 But in themselves these analyses do not go quite far enough in explaining the cultural importance and significance of climate as an idea or philosophy alongside its materiality. Hence, we next explore some of the guiding ideas that informed philosophical debates about climate and empire by pursuing four particularly significant themes: first, the desire of imperial authorities to

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domesticate or control climate; secondly, the use of climate to explain away economic or political causality; thirdly, the development of climatic research to legitimate or serve imperial or counter-imperial interests; and fourthly, the role of medical authorities, particularly in the tropics, in helping to demarcate practices of everyday life for both the colonized and the colonizer. In reflecting on these points, we aim to draw out how perceived climatic similarities and differences not only tied together different parts of empire, but also fostered new eco-cultural networks through the establishment of shared research interests, and the movement of labour and capital in response to perceived climatic deficiencies.

Domesticating climate and deforestation A key theme of this chapter is how various attempts to control climates have paralleled histories of imperial expansion. This has been through both intentional and unintentional effects, in which deforestation, desiccation and health have probably been the most prominent filters in these discourses. Justifying deforestation for either military or agricultural purposes became an important focus of study, not least because it was one of the most visible environmental impacts of imperialism. Making climates safe for empires was an important component of imperial strategy, and fostered lively debates on questions of health, race and conduct. We discuss health in more detail later, but here we focus on how authorities attempted to make climates amenable to imperial ambitions, and especially to white colonization. In writing about the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Hugh Williamson argued that cultivation could reduce forest coverage and thereby, as he saw it, the noxious savage airs that were corrupting the complexions of the brunettes (whites).19 In the tropics, the climatic risks to the European or American body could be controlled through careful governance of the body, by maintaining a moral life that would ensure high productivity rather than laziness, and through an active management of the environment.20 Managing the transition of the body through different climates represented one of the key challenges to Europeans, as they sought to make tropical climates safe for white settlement.21 Climates could also be ‘domesticated’, thereby permitting European residence, through the design of buildings and infrastructure tailored to a tropical climate. Practitioners schooled

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in acclimatization theory argued for particular types of tropical housing-design to enable bodies to adapt to new thermal regimes, a feature of especial importance to companies with large numbers of overseas workers.22 These stories of domestication contrast with stories of perceived climatic changes, particularly of deforestation leading to unwanted social and environmental impacts. Not all climates could be easily domesticated, while interventions to enhance political or social security could equally backfire. Richard Grove has demonstrated the connection between colonial debates on deforestation and climatic change in European empires. In the eighteenth century, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, for example, who was trained in the physiocratic theses of the missionary and naturalist Pierre Poivre, argued that deforestation would haunt humanity through its disruptive impact on the interdependent relationship between humans and nature.23 Indeed, on colonial island dependents like Mauritius about which Saint-Pierre was concerned, deforestation affected naval wood supply and the agricultural sustainability of those islands. Conserving forests was not just about economic interests, but was also about preventing further climatic deterioration in the interests of settler societies.24 Climates could shape forests and vice-versa according to the developing scientific arguments of the period. Fears of desiccation also prompted imperial concern, questioning the extent and provenance of imperial environmental changes as well as informing state responses to them – very often through forestry policies. Desiccation narratives inspired conjoint moral, political and scientific projects that sought to domesticate imperial climates. Authorities sought to make local communities adhere to European moral norms, and use the land in ways Europeans thought appropriate. This meant in some cases striving for the sedentarization of previously nomadic groups by encouraging agricultural investment while simultaneously allowing for the subjugation of local people by colonial authorities. The developmentalist agendas of imperial states used the excuse of an apparently deteriorating climate to legitimate intervention towards ‘modern’ agricultural development. Vast landscape alterations, in particular afforestation or reforestation projects, were also instituted by imperial authorities to ‘restore’ environments.25 The clarion calls for state forestry management to preserve health and protect agricultural productivity and settlements reinforced a narrative of state redemption from threatening environments.26 If climatic changes risked political stability, they also opened up possibilities for enhancing state control. Ambitions to domesticate imperial climates were an admixture of diverse political, social and

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scientific ambitions, reliant on different kinds of political, social and scientific expertise.27 Domesticating climates shored up imperial power by ensuring a continual supply of natural goods and resources, while protecting and maintaining the living conditions of whites residing in the colonies. This was not, however, just about the material influence of climate, but was also about making climates safe medically, economically, politically and socially. A wholesome climate safe for civilization was one that was protected from fears of revolt and the corrupting influences on the citizenry. The very idea of climate was to be used to shore up imperial ambitions, whether through deploying it to enforce particular policies or to encourage modes of self-governance among the population. Climates did not make empires, but rather empires made the climates that were then enrolled in support of particular objectives, although not always successfully.

The economy of climate Discussions of climate and empire frequently invoke the imperial ambition of maximizing economic productivity, an aim that raises questions of worker commitment and the optimal climates required for production. Inasmuch as the tropics could hinder productivity and morality, it could also provide new sources of financial, social and sensory opportunities. Here, we identify the ways in which climate was cast as a resource and a hazard by, for and through imperialism. While many debates of the seventeenth century focused on identifying the optimal climates for producing particular goods and explaining economic success in this way, Jean-Pierre Purry, writing in the early eighteenth century after his experience of travelling with the Dutch East India Company, suggested that there was an optimal climate for maximizing production from a colonial outpost that was distinct from a specifically geographical, latitudinal rendering of climate.28 For Purry, the best climate was that which rendered particular economic policies acceptable, not necessarily that with a perceived best natural climate. A climate deficient in providing resources for production could be improved through labour and effort. Imperial ambition thus could enhance the productivity of each colony’s climate, effectively domesticating climatic resources and risks within appropriate economic management: for ‘air’, as Purry declared

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‘is ever best where most Money is stirring, for poverty and want will render people unhealthy in all climates’.29 The perceived economic costs of the deficiencies of productivity in the tropics and the failings of Europeans to adapt did not outweigh the many economic benefits of resources and products that could be grown in the region and which were useful to empire. New products and sensory experiences for consumers at home and abroad encouraged the expansion of agriculture to meet these new demands. Control over territories in the tropics meant that what had been previously traded as a good with foreign partners could now be directly produced in the colonies. Large-scale agricultural plantations appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the rush to provide goods to the home nation precipitated environmental changes that were often detrimental to the colony (see Chapters 4 and 6). For example, the clearance of jungles for agriculture often created ideal conditions for the spread of malaria, which reinforced a vision of the tropics as dangerous and led to a set of imperial interventions designed to restrict the impact of the disease on plantation workers’ health.30 In addition, while the tropics had been perceived as dangerous and unhealthy, from the mid-nineteenth century, the tropics – as a homogenized region – was transformed into a tourist commodity through its presentation as a healthy and desirable tourist destination. Mark Carey shows how the Caribbean climate swiftly became re-made as a commodity during this period, being marketed as a new alluring sunny destination.31 Latitudinal climatic theories were insufficiently precise, as many Caribbean islands were marketed through specific, local weather factors as well as by appeals to imperial associations, such as the marketing of Barbados as ‘Little England’.32 Tropical climates, although they offered distinct disadvantages, presented important economic advantages through their productive and tourist potential. While climates were being actively domesticated, they retained sufficient agency in popular and political discourse to be enrolled as reasons for the failure of imperial ambitions or local economic policies. Climate, in this sense of its meaning, came to stand in as the primary causal factor when things went wrong, even if the blame might be more accurately apportioned to imperial political or economic factors. Mike Davis’s classic work exploring late nineteenth-century El Niño events and famines suggests that famines resulted as much from political and economic policies as they did from changes in precipitation and its distribution.33 As thousands were dying in India from starvation in 1900, the British sold India’s remaining grain on export markets, a situation obscured by

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the rhetoric of British colonial officials. One official, quoted by Davis, suggested that the problem of famine was one of climate-induced apathy: ‘The Gujurati is a soft man … accustomed to earn his good food easily. In the hot weather, he seldom worked at all and at no time did he form the habit of continuous labour.’34 In other words, the climate’s material effect on Indian civilization was the ultimate cause of the disaster. If populations rebelled against imperial policies, then the resulting political uprisings and discontent could likewise be blamed on climatic rather than imperial misrule. For example, British coverage of uprisings in China after flooding focussed on the turmoil of the flood event rather than the fact the rebels primarily attacked foreigners and ruling officials.35 While Davis’s claims may be over-stretched, his general argument is important as it reflects on the work that climate does in legitimating imperial ambitions and protecting authorities. An incommodious climate for imperial authorities was therefore one that presented the greatest challenges for governance even as climatic events really did change the experienced climate. The economic climate is thus at the core of discourses on empire and climate: in material, cultural and political terms, climates could be both resource-rich and hazardous.

Climate and scientific knowledges There have been myriad ways of arriving at legitimate climate knowledge, and in this section we discuss some of the mechanisms through which imperial climate knowledge was produced and co-produced. In a Western context, climate and weather had been the subjects of private narratives, diaries, chronicles and sermons since the late seventeenth century. As Lorraine Daston has demonstrated, a very diverse group of people were involved in observing and recording weather in this period, either in networks or independently, including ‘gentlemen, physicians, sea captains, peripatetic Jesuits, erudite abbots and naturalist curates, university professors and academicians, travellers ...’ .36 In the earliest records, emphasis was often placed on local weather and on the ‘qualitative and narrative framing of “important” weather’, such as on the unusual or extreme event that disrupted everyday life and which was often explained as portentous and as manifestations of divine retribution.37 From the mid- to late eighteenth century, more quotidian recording practices were adopted whereby people collated daily local weather records based on

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their own personal observations. To some extent, this constituted part of an endeavour to collect and organize local natural histories. The emphasis placed on the ‘accumulation of “prerogative instances”, and the sifting of textual information – all as a means of collecting weather’ also represented a form of distinctly local scholarship that arguably played an important role in the cultivation of Enlightenment science.38 The nineteenth century, in witnessing further standardization of information, marked the rise of the modern science of meteorology.39 There were numerous interpretations of what science, and by descent, climate science, constituted, and in this sense, Western science was but one genre among many.40 Scientific theories about climate and weather phenomena continued to co-exist with more traditional popular beliefs.41 Many folk and rural genres that expressed ‘knowledge regarding the full range of weather and climatic conditions’42 were based on familiarity with long-term climate variability or weather knowledge, something Katherine Anderson calls ‘weather wising’. Such folk knowledges were ‘widely respected’ as giving ‘the best advice available’.43 Wolfgang Behringer, for example, uses the phrase ‘sin economics’ to describe the religious significance attached to meteorological events recognizable across various cultures.44 Examples of this include attribution of the revenge of an animate universe against humanity’s sins prevalent among the twelfth-century Zuni tribe of the south-western United States and the purging of sins through the execution of witches in the Little Ice Age (about 1300s–1850s), right through to attempts to stop climatic cooling or the contemporary attribution of climatic changes to carbon sins.45 Exhortations to establish different relationships with nature created modes of governance that pinned responsibility on individuals to be watchful and careful in their behaviour. Religious discourses endured and were translated by, and within, emergent scientific arguments. Scientific and folkloric understandings and predictions of climate co-existed in many colonial contexts. As historians of science David Chambers and Richard Gillespie have argued, Eurocentric models charting the introduction of science to a non-European, non-scientific audience implied that ‘localities peripheral to the European centre would progressively “receive” the ideas of Western science, slowly establishing their own scientific organisations and personnel.’46 Such Eurocentric diffusionist models seemed to be at least superficially applicable in countries where European settlers predominated in the nineteenth century and where the ‘destruction of the indigenes and their traditional cultures had

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been ruthlessly accomplished’.47 Wherever they were, however, local populations were not merely ‘distant recipients’ or ‘passive receptacles of European genius’.48 Climatic variability was a cause for concern for both settlers and indigenous groups. Both comprehended and responded to this variability within the frameworks of their own ‘climatic philosophies’. Indeed, in many situations, settlers encountered an existing body of folkloric knowledge, practice and custom, which tempered the spread of imperial scientific knowledge and subverted the transfer of information from colonist to subject. Nineteenth-century encounters between British missionaries and the Tswana in central southern Africa, for example, reveal the co-existence of different climatic understandings of the same weather events and demonstrate how physical and cultural contact could establish new eco-cultural networks. Missionaries positioned the climate of the region within what David Livingstone has referred to as a ‘moral economic’ perspective, particularly apparent in the association of drought with heathen practices and belief systems.49 In contrast, indigenous societies in this region conceptualized and responded to climatic variability within their own ethno-climatic frames of reference. Rainmaking ceremonies, for example, together with a host of climate-related beliefs, represented key responses to drought among indigenous communities.50 As was typical of many colonial contexts, these local forms of knowledge were often initially nullified or re-inscribed as non-knowledge by colonial settlers.51 Over time, however, missionaries borrowed from the indigenous climatic portfolio, adopting the local terminology in order to better understand and influence their subjects.52 Colonial spaces might, therefore, in the terminology of historian of science Stephen Shapin, be considered ‘scenes’ in which existing geographical knowledge was applied, but where new knowledge was collected, exchanged and developed to help shape the co-evolution of both European and indigenous climatic philosophical ideologies and knowledges.53 Settlers thus attempted to monitor, manage, map, measure and control their exposure to particular climates.54 Some indigenous groups, meanwhile, maintained and developed various ‘traditional’ means of prognostication, of coping with changes in weather patterns. Whether through instrumental means or not, climatic knowledges emerged that were both adaptive, enabling societies to manage weather risks, and often predictive, determining what might or would happen. These developed within, and alongside, scientific enterprises as in the case of deforestation debates.55 Contentions over the scientific understanding of climate and its effects were central to imperial ambitions. Indeed, the development

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of networks of meteorological observers in the late nineteenth century followed the clear geographical patterns of imperialism.

Climate, health and tropical medicine as agents of empire? Europeans had long associated intemperate climates with disease, ill-health and pestilence. The supposed excessive heat of such places was cited as a major reason for ‘southern sickliness’, but throughout much of the nineteenth century, a key debate for geographers, medical practitioners, colonial administrators and naturalists, among others, centred on whether Europeans could ‘acclimatize’ to life in tropical regions.56 In this section, we explore the dynamics of this debate and demonstrate how climatic concerns fostered eco-cultural networks that, in turn, triggered comparative scientific investigation of healthy and unhealthy climates, and corresponding recommendations for lifestyle changes to accommodate to climatic differences. Before the 1830s, most experts held that races could adapt to new environmental contexts, for example, by adopting local customs. Medics of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries recommended that colonists living in the tropics don clothing appropriate to the climate, including topis (pith helmets), spine pads and tinted glasses, while also taking particular precautions with their diet and activities, all in an effort to render the climate threat less potent.57 They also recommended the emulation of indigenous customs in order to facilitate acclimatization in the tropics. According to health historian Mark Harrison,58 for example, the medic James Johnson, writing in 1815, had suggested that, amid the ‘strange medley or ludicrous and ridiculous customs’, Europeans might usefully pay attention to local knowledge and practice, including clothing, to strengthen their resistance to exotic diseases.59 By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, such beliefs were being replaced by polygenic theories, which held that races were suited to their own particular regions, or ‘native’ climates.60 There were ‘profound anxieties’ that prolonged residence by Europeans in tropical colonies could only result in change for the worse – that is to say, lead to physical, spiritual and moral degradation – and it was thought that settlement in new territories could even prove fatal in some circumstances.61 With the growing adherence to polygenic arguments by the second half of the nineteenth century, medical practitioners emphasized the need to both establish greater distance between European and local populations and to maintain European lifestyles in the tropics to ensure sound constitutional, mental and moral health.62 For Europeans, self-governance

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of lifestyle became particularly important in the tropics to prevent a descent into the moral ineptitude of living in a warm climate. These anxieties and ideologies informed and framed many of the anticipatory geographies of European travellers and colonists. But beyond such homogenized, negative tropical stereotypes, it was often the case that very little was actually known about the geography of different tropical regions, their climates or relative suitability for European settlement. As the geographer Victor Savage has highlighted, only with lived experience within tropical regions was this homogenized view of the tropics challenged.63 Certain locations began to be identified as favourable or unfavourable, healthy or unhealthy, to reside in. Such distinctions were commonly drawn on the basis of relative similarity to, or variance from, more ‘familiar’ temperate conditions.64 Indeed, it was through this comparative lens that settlers comprehended apparent climatic salubrity (or otherwise) and judged how they might cope with those areas that were perceived to be less favourable. Trips to coastal regions or to elevations offering more temperate climatic conditions were particularly encouraged. Hill stations in India, for example, became temperate climate retreats for European bodies otherwise exposed to climates deemed to be overly hot and decidedly unhealthy.65 Constitutional restoration was also encouraged through travelling or a therapeutic ‘change of air’.66 Imperial expansion into the tropics, then, produced new kinds of eco-cultural connections, as colonists encountered new climates and adjusted their behaviours accordingly, leading to associated environmental changes and investment in infrastructure to develop healthy areas such as hill stations. Towards the turn of the twentieth century, germ theory began to challenge predominantly climatological explanations of tropical disease.67 The two theories did not necessarily contradict each other as environmental and meteorological disease aetiologies continued to co-exist with emerging germ theories well into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.68 The shift to a new scientific understanding of disease, in fact, may have also enhanced the particularity of the tropical threat. The identification of diseases specific to the tropics and sub-tropics, for example, including malaria, yellow fever and leprosy, served to highlight the pathological specificity of the tropics and, moreover, helped to establish tropical medicine as a distinctive arena for medical research.69 Nevertheless, this emergent science slowly began to lessen fears of European vulnerability in tropical environments. Now vulnerability and susceptibility to disease became something that could be controlled or at least managed through drugs and personal behaviour rather than by recourse to climatic explanations.70

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Of course, whether it related to climate or germ theories of disease, or to any other, Western medicine at no time operated in a cultural void. There are many occasions when Western medicine was confronted, and challenged, by indigenous medical knowledge, giving rise to a medical pluralism.71 Moreover, for some diseases, such as leprosy in the African and Asian colonies of Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, as historian of medicine Michael Worboys has highlighted, indigenous remedies were embraced as part of the ‘European pharmacopeia’.72 For the most part, however, identifiably tropical diseases became symptomatic of a ‘moral and social sickness’ in need of address, and better understating of germs and contagion effectively upheld the need for maintaining a supposedly ‘healthy’ distance between settler and indigene, promoting, in some scenarios, racial segregation, and justifying, in most, Western medical intervention.73 Tropical medicine in this way became another tool of empire.74

Conclusion and future trends As David Livingstone has argued, climate represented a versatile ‘hermeneutic resource’ of empire for much of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.75 Climate was deployed to account for racial, cultural and environmental differences in various parts of the world, and represented a key philosophical influence on colonial ideologies, imaginaries and experiences.76 Medical topographies or pathological geographies were created on the basis of apparent climate healthiness or un-healthiness. Certain places came to be recognized as ‘the white man’s grave’ while others offered opportunity for ‘climate therapy’.77 Climate provided the dominant lens through which to identify, or indeed construct, opportunities for colonial settlement and investment. The construction of morally, spiritually and economically wanting environments, but which were nevertheless ripe for economic development and which offered potential climatic salubrity for British, and more broadly European, settlement, helped to justify European colonial intervention at the same time as solutions were sought to change or control other less favourable climates through climatic improvement or by other ways to thereby make them safe for settlement. In these ways, climate became an agent of empire. Philosophies of climate have changed over time. Scholarship investigating the direct influence of climate on human societies has most definitely moved on from the reductionist, racially oriented environmental and climatic

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determinism associated with imperialism. Yet climate retains an important place in contemporary environmental discourse and continues to have potent political agency. Climate change, of course, currently represents, and is being represented as, a significant threat to humanity and as such ranks among the most serious of contemporary global anxieties. In some former imperial territories, in former African and Indian colonies in particular, media images of drought, floods, famine and warfare in effect continue to encourage Western intervention, albeit in the form of humanitarian aid.78 Moreover, as noted in the introduction to this chapter, in recent decades climate has once again been invoked in a deterministic way in a swathe of scientific and popular scholarship. This is particularly evident in three sets of work. First, determinism is evident in research that seeks to link climate change with conflict, especially where increased weather extremes and reduced food and water availability are predicted to lead to local or national uprisings and wars. Secondly, it is apparent in what Jon Barnett has referred to as the ‘securitization’ of climate discourse in which potential climate threats inspire new state projects to patrol borders and national resource control strategies. Thirdly, scientific work associating catastrophe and civilization collapse has explored significant periods of climate change in the past to draw lessons for humanity’s future.79 Such claims about climate are often made with little evidence and without direct correlation between events and climates. As Karl Butzer highlights, much of this new environmentalism, particularly in the popular arena, displays a ‘continuing failure to appreciate the complexity of such interrelationships’.80 It is perhaps not surprising that the resurgence in neo-environmental deterministic writing has been paralleled by emerging efforts to explore and highlight this complexity and to demonstrate how human societies have coped with, and successfully responded and adapted to, environmental stresses in multiple ways, including through innovation and adaptation as well as societal disintegration. There is increasing recognition that time- and place-specific cultural, social, political, economic and demographic parameters together combine to construct a mediating context for climate–society interactions. Moreover, in a material sense, this context not only influences how livelihoods in a region may be vulnerable to disruption, and the way in which environmental change or an environmental or climatic event is experienced, but also informs the extent to which, and by what means, different social systems and groups are able to respond. Recent multidisciplinary research projects in various parts of the world are affording new insights into the importance of complexity, resilience, adaptability

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and social transformations in history, demonstrating how various institutions and cultural coping strategies have been developed to deal with the impacts of climate change at a range of temporal and spatial scales.81 They are also revealing how vulnerability to, and experience of, environmental and climatic change, in turn, are contingent upon both temporal and spatial contexts, and can lead to an improved knowledge of risk among affected communities, contributing to improved knowledge. Such work should be seen as a pivotal counterbalance to the simplistic, mono-causal, neo-deterministic explanations of climate–society relationships. It should also be noted that in a more conceptual sense, there is important work being conducted on the changing conceptualizations of climate and shifting climate narratives over time. This has most recently been seen in work by Hulme and Livingstone among others.82 Notwithstanding these recent trends, this chapter has demonstrated that climate is as much a philosophical concept as a material entity, one resonant with cultural, economic or political meanings in eco-cultural networks which have variously justified, legitimated, contradicted or frustrated imperial ambitions. Climates have been domesticated, economically organized, the subject of scientific and indigenous wisdom, and a core part of debates within the field of tropical medicine, in ways that are not just about the effects of climate on something, but rather on how imperialism helped re-make the very meaning of climate as an external actor. Environmental history scholarship has much to offer in terms of investigating climate’s changing significance, ideologically, conceptually and materially, over time and in different places. The lived experiences under empires shaped, and were shaped by, discourses about the climate and its physical manifestations.

Notes 1 Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 2 Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300–1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 3 Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ‘The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period’. The American Historical Review 87 (1982): 1262–89. 4 James R. Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

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5 Lars Herlitz, ‘Art and Nature in Pre-Classical Economics of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Nature and Society in Historical Context, eds. Mikuláš Teich, Roy Porter and Bo Gustafsson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 163–75. 6 Herlitz, ‘Art and Nature’. 7 There are of course earlier precedents of the argument that climates were affected by cultivation: for example, David Hume. 8 Gregory T. Cushman, ‘Humboldtian Science, Creole Meteorology, and the Discovery of Human-Caused Climate Change in South America’. Osiris 26 (2011): 19–44. 9 Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 10 Katharine Anderson, ‘Looking at the sky: the visual content of Victorian Meteorology’. British Journal for the History of Science 36 (2003): 301–32. 11 Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change. 12 Ellsworth Huntington, ‘The Geography of Human Productivity’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 33 (1943): 1–31. 13 James M. Blaut, ‘Environmentalism and Eurocentricism’. The Geographical Review 89 (1999): 391–408. 14 David D. Zhang, Harry F. Lee, Cong Wang, Baosheng Li, Qing Pei, Jane Zhang and Yulun An, ‘The causality analysis of climate change and large-scale human crisis’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 (2011): 17296–301. 15 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999); Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2004); Fagan, The Little Ice Age; Andrew D. Mellinger, Jeffrey D. Sachs and John L. Gallup, ‘Climate, coastal proximity, and development’, in The Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography, eds. Gordon L. Clark, Meric S. Gertler and Maryann P. Feldman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 169–94. 16 Paul Coombes and Keith Barber, ‘Environmental determinism in Holocene research: causality or coincidence?’. Area 37 (2005): 303–11. 17 Robert B. Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 18 Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). 19 Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change. 20 Anderson, ‘Looking at the sky’. 21 Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change. 22 Jiat-Hwee Chang and Anthony D. King, ‘Towards a genealogy of tropical architecture: Historical fragments of power-knowledge, built environment and

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26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire climate in the British colonial territories’. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 32 (2011): 283–300. Grove, Green Imperialism. James Beattie, ‘Environmental Anxiety in New Zealand, 1840-1941: Climate Change, Soil Erosion, Sand Drift, Flooding and Forest Conservation’. Environment and History 9 (2003): 379–92. Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800-1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Diana M. Davis, ‘Desert “wastes” of the Maghreb: desertification narratives in French colonial environmental history in North Africa’. Cultural Geographies 11 (2004): 359–84; Georgina H. Endfield and David J. Nash, ‘Drought, desiccation and discourse: missionary correspondence and nineteenth-century climate change in central southern Africa’. The Geographical Journal 168 (2002): 33–47; James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, ‘Desiccation and Domination: Science and Struggles over Environment and Development in Colonial Guinea’. The Journal of African History 41 (2000): 35–54. Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety. Beattie, ‘Climate Change, Forest Conservation and Science: A Case of New Zealand, 1860s–1920’. History of Meteorology 5 (2009): 1–18. Vladimir Jankovic, ‘Climates as commodities: Jean Pierre Purry and the modelling of the best climate on earth’. Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 42 (2011): 201–7. Old England, 1745, cited in Jankovic, ‘Climates as commodities’, 201. Chang and King, ‘Towards a genealogy of tropical architecture’. Mark Carey, ‘Inventing Caribbean climates: How science, medicine, and tourism changed tropical weather from deadly to healthy’. Osiris 26 (2011): 129–41. Carey, ‘Inventing Caribbean climates’. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002). Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 172. Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts. Lorraine Daston, ‘Unruly weather: natural law confronts natural variability,’ in Natural Law and Law of Nature in early Modern Europe. Jurisprudence, Theology, Moral and Natural Philosophy, eds. Lorraine Daston and Michael Stolleis (Farnham, Surrey : Ashgate, 2008): 233–48; Jankovic, Reading the Skies. A Cultural History of the English Weather, 1650–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); Angela Rusnock, ‘Correspondence networks and the Royal Society, 1700-1750’. The British Journal for the History of Science 32 (1999): 155–69; Jan Golinski, ‘Putting the weather in order: narrative and discipline in eighteenth century weather diaries’, Paper delivered at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA, Los Angeles, 16 May 1998.

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37 Jankovic, Reading the Skies, 9. 38 David N. Livingstone, ‘Reading the heavens, planting the earth. Cultures of British science’. History Workshop 54 (2002): 236–41 (quote, 237). 39 Simon Naylor, ‘Nationalising Provincial Weather: Meteorology in NineteenthCentury Cornwall’. British Journal for the History of Science 39 (2006): 407–33. 40 Masakata Ogawa, ‘Beyond the tacit framework of “science” and “science education” among science educators’. International Journal of Science Education 11 (1989): 247–50. 41 Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007), 80. 42 Sarah Strauss and Benjamin S. Orlove, ‘Introduction’, in Weather, Climate, Culture, eds. Strauss and Orlove (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 7. 43 Golinski, British Weather, 43; Anderson, ‘Looking at the sky’. 44 Wolfgang Behringer, A Cultural History of Climate (Cambridge: Polity, 2010). 45 Gregory Nagy, ‘As the World Runs out of Breath: Metaphorical Perspectives on the Heavens and the Atmosphere in the Ancient World’, in Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Humanistic Studies of the Environment, eds. Jill Kerr Conway, Kenneth Keniston and Leo Marx (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 37–50; Behringer, A Cultural History of Climate. 46 David Wade Chambers and Richard Gillespie, ‘Locality in the history of science: colonial science, technoscience and indigenous knowledge’. Osiris 15 (2000): 221–40 (quote, 224). 47 Chambers and Gillespie, ‘Locality in the history of science’, 225. 48 Warwick Anderson, ‘Where is the postcolonial history of medicine?’. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 72 (1998): 522–30 (quotes, 522, 525). 49 Livingstone, ‘ The moral discourse of climate: historical considerations on race, place and virtue’. Journal of Historical Geography 17 (1991): 413–34; Livingstone, ‘ Tropical climate and moral hygiene: the anatomy of a Victorian debate’. British Journal for the History of Science 32 (1999): 93–110; Livingstone, ‘Race, space and moral climatology: notes toward a genealogy’. Journal of Historical Geography 28 (2002):159–80; Endfield and Nash, ‘Drought, desiccation and discourse’. 50 P. S. Landau, ‘When rain falls: rainmaking and community in a Tswana village c. 1870 to recent times’. International Journal of African Historical Studies 26 (1993): 1–30. 51 Clive Barnett, ‘Impure and worldly geography: The Africanist discourse of the Royal Geographical Society, 1831-73’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 23 (1998): 239–51. 52 Endfield and Nash, ‘Drought, desiccation and discourse’. 53 Stephen Shapin, ‘The house of the experiment in seventeenth century England’. Isis 79 (1988): 373–404 (quote, 373).

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54 Mart A. Stewart, ‘ “Let us Begin with the Weather?”: Climate, Race, and Cultural Distinctiveness in the American South’, in Nature and Society in Historical Context, eds. Mikuláš Teich, Roy Porter and Bo Gustafsson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 240–56. 55 Beattie, ‘Climate Change, Forest Conservation and Science’. 56 Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ‘Fear of host climates in the Anglo-American Colonial experience’. William and Mary Quarterly 41 (1984): 213–40; Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 57 Dane Kennedy, ‘The perils of the midday sun. Climatic anxieties in the colonial tropics’, in Imperialsm and the Natural World, ed. John M. MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990): 118–40. 58 Harrison, ‘ “The Tender Frame of Man”: Disease, climate, and racial difference in India and the West Indies, 1760-1860’. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70 (1996): 68–93. 59 James Johnson, The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions: Being a Treatise on the Principal Diseases Incidental to Europeans in the East and West India, Mediterranean and Coast of Africa (London: J. Callow, 1815), 417. 60 Anderson, ‘Where is the postcolonial history of medicine?’. 61 Kupperman, ‘Fear of host climates’, 213. 62 Nancy L. Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (London: Reaktion Books, 2001); Harrison, ‘The tender frame of man’. 63 Victor R. Savage, ‘Tropicality imagined and experienced. A commentary on Felix Driver’s “Imagining the Tropics: Views and visions of the Tropical world”’. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 25 (2004): 26–31. 64 David Arnold, ‘Envisioning the Tropics: Joseph Hooker in India and the Himalayas, 1848–1850’, in Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire, eds. Felix Driver and Luciana Martins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 143. 65 Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety; Judith Kenny, ‘Climate, Race, and Imperial Authority: The Symbolic Landscape of the British Hill Station in India’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85 (2005): 694–714. 66 Chjae Chard, ‘Lassitude and revival in the warm south: relaxing and exciting travel, 1750-1830’, in Pathologies of Travel, eds. Richard Wrigley and George Revill (Amsterdam: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 2000): 179–205, (quote, 182). 67 Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, 157; Morag Bell, ‘The pestilence that walketh in darkness: Imperial health, gender and images of South Africa, 1880-1910’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18 (1993): 329; Livingstone, ‘Race, space and moral climatology’.

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68 Harriet Deacon, ‘The politics of medical topography: seeking healthiness at the Cape during the nineteenth century’, in Pathologies of Travel, 279–97; Kennedy, ‘The perils of the midday sun’; Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature; Livingstone, ‘Race, space and moral climatology’, 168. 69 Livingstone, ‘Tropical hermeneutics: fragments for a historical narrative. An afterword’. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21 (2000): 92–8. 70 Mark Jennings, ‘ “This mysterious and intangible enemy”: Health and disease amongst the Early UMCA Missionaries, 1860-1918’. The Society for the Social History of Medicine 15 (2002): 65–87, 68. 71 For example, Frederick Chilube, ‘The Clash between Modern and Indigenous Medicine’. Makerere Medical Journal 9 (1965): 36; Helen Lambert, ‘Plural traditions: folk therapeutics and “English” medicine in Rajastan’, in Western Medicine as Contested Knowledge, eds. Andrew Cunningham and Bridie Andrews (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997): 191–211. 72 Michael Worboys, ‘Colonial Medicine as Mission and Mandate: Leprosy and Empire, 1900-1940’. Osiris 15 (2001): 207–20 (quote, 215). 73 Arnold, ‘Introduction: Disease, medicine and empire’, in Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, ed. Arnold (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 1–26 (quote, 7). 74 Arnold, ‘Introduction: Disease, medicine and empire’, 1–26. 75 Livingstone, ‘Tropical hermeneutics’, 93. 76 Arnold, ‘“Illusory Riches”: Representations of the Tropical World, 1840-1950’. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21 (2000): 6–18. 77 Jennings, ‘The mysterious and intangible enemy’; Bell, ‘The pestilence that walketh in darkness’; Endfield and Nash ‘ “Happy is the bride the rain falls on”: Climate, health and “The Woman Question” in nineteenth-century missionary documentation’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2005): 368–86. 78 Bell, ‘The pestilence that walketh in darkness’, 328. 79 Thomas Homer-Dixon, Environmental Scarcity and Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Norman Myers, Ultimate Security: The Environmental Basis of Political Stability (Washington: Island Press, 1994); Diamond, Collapse; critique by Jon Barnett, ‘The prize of peace (is eternal vigilance): a cautionary editorial essay on climate geopolitics’. Climatic Change 96 (2009): 1–6. 80 Karl W. Butzer, ‘Collapse, Environment and Society’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (2012): 3632–9. 81 For example: Andrew J. Dugmore, Thomas H. McGovern, Orri Vésteinsson, Jette Arneborg, Richard Streeter and Christian Keller ‘Cultural adaptation, compounding vulnerabilities and conjunctures in Norse Greenland’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (2012): 3658–63; and Nicholas P. Dunning,

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Timothy P. Beach and Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach ‘Kax and kol: collapse and resilience in lowland Maya civilization’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (2012): 3652–7. 82 Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change; Livingstone, ‘Reflections on the Cultural Spaces of Climate’. Climatic Change 113 (2012): 91–3; Livingstone, ‘Changing climate, human evolution and the revival of environmental determinism’. Bulletin of the History of Medicine (in press).

Select bibliography Arnold, David. The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, 1800–1856. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. Beattie, James. Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800–1920. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Behringer, Wolfgang. A Cultural History of Climate. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Beinart, William and Lottie Hughes. Environment and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Bsumek, Erika M., David Kinkela and Mark A. Lawrence. Nation-States and the Global Environment: New Approaches to International Environmental History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Cushman, Gregory T. Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Drayton, Richard. Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Driver, Felix and Luciana Martins (eds), Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Fleming, James R. Historical Perspectives on Climate Change. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Fleming, James R. and Vladimir Jankovic (eds), Klima, Osiris Volume 26. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Golinski, Jan. British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007. Grove, Richard H. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. —Ecology, Climate and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History, 1400–1940. Cambridge: White Horse Press, 1997. Harrison, Mark. Medicine in an Age of Commerce and Empire: Britain and its Tropical Colonies, 1660–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

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Hulme, Mike. Why We Disagree about Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Jankovic, Vladimir. Reading the Skies. A Cultural History of the English Weather, 1650–1820. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. —Confronting the Climate: British Airs and the Making of Environmental Medicine. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Marks, Robert B. Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Parker, Geoffrey. Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeeth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Stepan, Nancy L. Picturing Tropical Nature. London: Reaktion Books, 2001. Whyte, Ian. Dictionary of Environmental History. London: I. B.Tauris & Co, 2013. Wrigley, R. and G. Revill (eds), Pathologies of Travel. Amsterdam: The Wellcome Institute Series in the History of Medicine, 2000.

3

The Chinese State and Agriculture in an Age of Global Empires, 1880–19491 Joseph Lawson

Late nineteenth-century foreign incursions integrated China deeper into global commercial, scientific and religious networks. All Chinese institutions and fields of knowledge changed as a result. New agricultural institutions and government policies for agriculture were shaped by both foreign imperial power and transnational eco-cultural networks involving foreign engineers, scientists and missionaries, as well as exchanges of ideas, plants and animals. Qing officials employed foreign advisers to assist with irrigation projects and the establishment of new experimental farms. Knowledge of the environmental transformations wrought by European and Japanese colonialism kindled a new vision for Chinese colonial agriculture in Xinjiang and the Mongol and Tibetan lands. International railways sparked the mass settlement of Manchuria, further encouraging leaders to plot similar transformations in other frontiers. After the Qing government collapsed in 1911, transnational connections continued to reshape agricultural practice in China. The experimental farms, now often managed by Chinese graduates of Western or Japanese universities, became one of the chief institutional vehicles for attempts to alter farming practices and increase cultivation. Missionary universities – truly transnational institutions – led the disciplinary development of agronomy and agricultural science in China and trained the employees of many state development bureaus. However, the deeper incorporation of the Qing Empire (1644–1911) into global networks did not necessarily undermine older agricultural practices and state policies. Imperial China had a long tradition of agronomic science. In several respects, state involvement with farming had resembled Britain’s policies for supporting agriculture in its empire well before Chinese people knew anything about European settler colonies. In some cases, the encounter with modern imperialism led to the broader or more intense application of

The Chinese State and Agriculture in an Age of Global Empires, 1880–1949

Figure 3.1 Map of Qing China.

45

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older policies, rather than the undermining of Chinese tradition. For example, new experimental farms resembled, but did not replicate, those of Japan, North America or Australasia (see Chapter 10), and differed in particular in their attitudes towards livestock. Likewise, agricultural scientists at state institutions in the Republican period (1912–49) were influenced by some of the practices and research methods promoted by missionary universities, but largely uninterested in others.

Pre-nineteenth-century China and agriculture Like the French physiocrats and many of the inhabitants of the Anglophone world in the late nineteenth century, most scholar-officials in imperial China regarded the cultivation of land as the key to prosperity and moral virtue.2 A broad network of officials and landowners developed what Francesca Bray calls a ‘science of agronomy’ with a corpus of treatises on crops, technologies and methods.3 Such works circulated throughout China, and, as bureaucratic careers were equally mobile, comparative approaches to land and farming were common.4 Both the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing imperial states made extensive efforts to encourage land cultivation in regions depopulated by war, or in borderlands and conquered territories where more grain was required to feed garrisons. Both dynasties allowed farmers to work new land for three to six years without paying tax on it, though in reality Qing magistrates rarely added newly cultivated land to the tax registers.5 Between 1368 and 1398, an estimated 120,000 households participated in the Ming government’s schemes to resettle the North China Plain which had been devastated by war and disease in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Ming rulers also established state-controlled military farming colonies called tun in newly conquered Yunnan (in south-western China) to provide food for garrisons. Elsewhere, in addition to encouraging the production of grain, the government required farmers to devote some of their land to raising cotton, hemp or mulberry (for silk production), and officials disseminated instructions for growing these crops.6 The Qing government attempted to prohibit Chinese from settling on land in Manchuria and Mongolia in order to preserve the ethnic purity of the homelands of the dynasty’s founders and key allies.7 Elsewhere, the Qing followed the Ming in encouraging the cultivation of ‘wasteland’ (huang) with inducements to farmers of interest-free loans for seed, equipment, draft animals and housing.8

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Their efforts targeted Liaodong and the North China Plain in the seventeenth century, and Hunan and Sichuan in the eighteenth.9 The creation of tun farming colonies was also a cornerstone of the Qing conquest and occupation of the Central Asian lands that became Xinjiang (‘New Frontier’).10 Except for in Qing Mongolia and Manchuria, crop-growers usually enjoyed a number of privileges over people who used land for other purposes. The Shunzhi emperor (r. 1643– 61) anticipated the sentiment of nineteenth-century British settlers that nobody should have rights to land that they did not use productively, ruling that: ‘People who own wasteland may cultivate it themselves; if they are unable to do so, the local magistrate should recruit people and give them a licence to cultivate it. Thenceforth, the land shall be reserved for their use in perpetuity.’11 Magistrates typically felt that households who cultivated land were entitled to some kind of legal right to it, even if they had begun as squatters.12 Tenants who farmed land usually had secure use-rights, often expressed as ‘top-soil ownership’, rights that could be sold or inherited by their descendants.13 In the state tun settlements, households often did not have a legal right to sell the land they occupied, but over the long-term tun land tended to be illicitly sold anyway.14 Nineteenthcentury officials in some localities attempted to prohibit cultivation of hillsides and water margins where it caused the degradation of farmland, but even in these circumstances, they typically continued to allow poor people to farm such land in times of hardship.15

Foreign empires and experts in the late Qing Despite the Qianlong emperor’s famous remark to Lord Macartney that China did not have the ‘slightest need’ for British manufactures (a comment made largely for political reasons), Qing emperors employed foreign experts and Western technology throughout the dynasty.16 Yet foreign science did not replace local knowledge, even in the nineteenth century when the Empire lost a series of wars to better-armed and -financed foreign forces, and officials strove to modernize China’s economy, military and infrastructure. Nineteenth-century administrators’ agricultural policies were eclectic, and drew on a wide range of foreign and local, past and present sources for technologies and techniques that could improve agricultural production. This diversity is demonstrated by officials’ efforts to restore agriculture in the north-west and Xinjiang after decades of rebellion and war in the middle of the century. In the 1860s, Muslim rebellions devastated Gansu, while uprisings in

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Xinjiang eliminated Qing power in most of that territory, clearing the way for Central Asian warlord Yaqub Beg (1820–77) to rule it until 1877.17 Zuo Zongtang (1812–85), the Governor-General of Shaanxi and Gansu, was a pivotal leader in the reconquest and reconstruction of both regions. Zuo was known by the moniker ‘the farmer of the Xiang River’ (in Hunan, his native province); like his contemporaries and successors, he prioritized the recovery of agriculture during reconstruction.18 In 1866, Zuo set up the Fuzhou Dockyard (chuan zheng ju) to build a modern navy, and employed French advisers to oversee its operation. While in China’s north-west, he ordered officials at the dockyard, and Chinese students in France and Britain, to investigate Western canal-digging machinery that could be used in irrigation works.19 In 1881, he employed German engineers and equipment for a large-scale irrigation project at Jingyuan in Ningxia, which involved digging a canal 200 li (100 km) long.20 In this instance, Zuo was even more eager to see hydraulic technology applied to the transformation of wasteland than the Germans, who warned him against the project, and whose advice Zuo ignored. The employment of foreign experts did not mean Zuo and his fellow officials in the north-west rejected older Chinese agronomy. Zuo edited a volume of historical agricultural writing called Agricultural Treatise from the Pavilion of Pucun (Pucun ge nongshu).21 He was particularly interested in the critical examination of ancient agronomic texts, conducting experiments with the ‘dividing the fields’ (qu tian) crop rotation methods described by the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) writer Fan Shengzhi.22 Zuo’s fellow governors in the north-west also paid attention to studies of the same practice; Tan Zhonglin (1822–1905), the governor of Shaanxi, republished the early Qing scholar Wang Xinjing’s (1656–1738) work on the subject, Handbook on Dividing the Fields (Qu tian shu) for distribution among farmers.23 Zuo did the same with the Manual for Cotton (Mian shu) and Ten Principles of Cotton Growing (Zhong mian shi yao), texts that were less archaic in focus, though still written without reference to foreign cotton-growing practices and were probably composed earlier in the Qing dynasty.24 Officials in the north-west were interested in local agricultural knowledge and practice too. Chinese-language sources first mention the Central Asian karez (Chinese: kan’er jing) system of underground, glacier-fed irrigation at Turpan in the 1820s.25 In the 1840s, Lin Zexu (1785–1850), exiled to Xinjiang after he was blamed for Qing defeats in the Opium War, investigated the karez and argued for the construction of more.26 Decades later Zuo agreed, boasting that 185 had been dug during his tenure in the region.27 Zuo also researched and sought to

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propagate a technique from Gansu whereby farmers covered soil with silt from rivers, wells and canals to preserve soil water-content and warmth, and reduce alkalinity.28 In 1875, the Hami (Kumul) garrison commander requested funds to restore and elaborate on a local system of irrigation canals that used 100,000 pieces of felt matting to conserve water.29 The influence of foreign imperialism and global networks on Qing agricultural policy increased after the 1880s, though it often meant the broader application of policy that had long been applied elsewhere, rather than the complete overturning of older practices. The Qing government relaxed restrictions on Chinese settlement in Manchuria in the mid-nineteenth century in order to strengthen the border against possible Russian aggression.30 In 1880, Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909), then the governor of Shanxi, argued for the promotion of cultivation in Mongolia on the same grounds.31 This same argument was used in 1898 by Hu Pingzhi (1840–1912), one of Zhang’s successors in the Shanxi governorship.32 In 1902, the Qing government not only ended the ban on Chinese agricultural settlement of the Mongol lands, but also began to encourage it under the slogan of ‘migration to strengthen the frontier’ (yi min shi bian).33 Fear of a Russian advance was not the only way in which foreign imperialism contributed to the extension of pro-cultivation policies to Mongolia and Manchuria. The court desperately needed funds for modernization projects and to pay the enormous indemnity that the foreign powers had levied after the Boxer Uprising (1900).34 Many officials believed that large sums could be raised from selling off steppe- and forest-land in the north, and that sponsoring its cultivation would yield returns in the form of increased tax income. Also important was the Russian construction of railways in Manchuria beginning in 1897, which created a huge demand for labour and made it easier for settlers to move to the territory and for export crops (chiefly soya beans) to reach external markets.35 From the late 1890s until the 1940s, in one of the largest migrations in human history, between 28 and 33 million Chinese people moved to Manchuria, as did two million Koreans and half a million Japanese.36 This dramatic transformation shaped officials’ and intellectuals’ thinking about development in Central Asia: from the 1900s onwards, writing on Xinjiang and Mongolia referred explicitly to settlement in Manchuria.37 In the same era, Chinese elites became more familiar with the settlement of the North American West and Australasia, to which they increasingly referred in discussions of agricultural policy for Inner Asia. Forced into exile by the conservative coup that ended the 1898 reforms, Liang Qichao (1873–1929) discovered America, Canada and Australia, and in 1904 enthusiastically praised

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Chinese migrants to Southeast Asia, whom he saw as colonial heroes in the same vein as ‘Columbus or Livingstone’.38 Chinese migrants to New Zealand also brought back information about British imperial environments (Chapter 7). In 1901, the governor of Shanxi, Cen Chunxuan (1861–1933), raised the examples of Australia and the American West in a memorial advocating the creation of military farming colonies in Mongolia.39 Zhao Erfeng (1845–1911), the official in charge of a newly created colonial regime in Kham (in eastern Tibet) referred to Japanese Hokkaido, British India and French Madagascar as possible models for various aspects of policy.40 Yuan Dahua (1851–1935), the last Qing governor of Xinjiang, regarded the province as China’s Hokkaido.41 The ‘Industry and Enterprise’ section of the Xinjiang gazetteer, published under Yuan’s watch in 1910, began by framing the aims of Chinese rule in the region with a nod to Western colonial policy. ‘When the Westerners open up a new land, they adopt a colonial policy (zhimin zhi zheng) and use the produce of the colonies (waidi) to generate wealth for the motherland.’42 References to agricultural schemes in European empires were not necessarily accurate. In 1913, a text about Xinjiang proclaimed that: Even the rocky deserts (gebi) … may bring forth life. In recent years, Westerners have used the Atlantic to irrigate the central deserts of Africa so they have become fertile earth. The masters of the Sahara are able to cultivate its every grain. Human technical artifice renders climate and geography powerless.43

Zhu Zengyun, the magistrate of Tau (Chinese: Daofu) in Kham in the early 1910s, referred to the ‘philosopher’ Daniel Defoe, and suggested that lessons from Robinson Crusoe could be drawn for his own world-building exercise in Tau.44 With the mass settlement of Manchuria, and the real and imagined environmental transformations wrought by settler societies in other parts of the world, ideas regarding the kind of transformation that was possible in the Qing Central Eurasian territory became considerably more optimistic. Zuo Zongtang had needed to convince the court of the value of re-conquering Xinjiang in the face of strong opposition from Li Hongzhang (1823–1901). Li was committed to modernizing the Empire, but felt that Xinjiang would never be anything more than a vast expanse of useless wasteland and a drain on the empire’s resources.45 This sort of thinking began to disappear in the 1900s. Optimism regarding what was possible in the Tibetan lands became more widespread in the late 1900s too. A 1910 article in Datongbao reported that: ‘In no time at all [Kham] will have the prosperity and population of a great metropolis’.46

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A text from the same year produced by Zhao Erfeng’s administration addressed prospective settlers to Kham, proclaiming: We have reports of a place called ‘Zayu’. … It is a great open plain and the weather is the same as Chengdu. It has always produced rice. … The manzi47 are not lazy and they know how to grow rice, but there is too much land for their small population to cultivate. … Only about one percent of the arable land there is cultivated, there is still room for 10 million mu [approx. 1.7 million acres, 688,000 ha] of paddy fields. Water resources are convenient; it is truly a great place!48

This sort of promotion probably led to the formation of the ill-fated Batang Cultivation Company (Batang kenwu gongsi). Again, there was a transnational connection: the company’s main protagonist, Peng Jinmen, returned to Sichuan in 1906 from Japan, where he had been a student and member of the revolutionary Datong Society (Datong she). According to one of his associates, ‘the schools in Chongqing competed to employ him as a teacher, but he refused them all’.49 Peng’s real interest lay in frontier agricultural settlement (kenzhi), and he and several like-minded friends founded the company. The company’s efforts at Batang failed, but optimism regarding Kham remained strong. In 1912, Fu Songmu, Zhao’s deputy in Kham chastised the ‘pedantic’ Han who had suggested a decade earlier that the grain could not be grown in Kham, without realizing that, according to Fu, in addition to cold and barren environments, Kham contained warmer regions suitable for cultivation, which Fu implied could be expanded significantly.50 The settlement of Manchuria and increased knowledge of Western and Japanese settler colonialism inspired a new optimism, but, as in Zuo Zongtang’s era, the living Chinese tradition continued to be highly important. When officials in Kham complained about what they saw as Tibetans’ primitive farming methods, they argued that the Tibetans needed to be taught Chinese practices of fertilizing and weeding, rather than modern Western techniques (with which they were unfamiliar). The actual policy of Zhao Erfeng’s regime in Kham drew heavily on the Qing system of tun settlements. His ‘Batang Reconstruction Regulations’, promulgated in the aftermath of his suppression of a revolt at Batang in 1906, proclaimed state ownership over wasteland and outlined a system according to which migrants could rent such land from the government on the condition that they cultivate it.51 The government would assist by providing loans for travel costs, equipment, seed, housing and draft animals, exactly as the Ming and early Qing states had done.

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New institutions of the late Qing and Republic In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, experimental farms and agricultural science colleges became important institutions in the transformation and expansion of farming throughout the world.52 Agricultural experiment stations were established in Saxony in the mid-nineteenth century, and the model spread to the United States in the 1870s.53 Inspired by the role of experiment stations in the agricultural colonization of the western United States, Japan’s Meiji (1868–1912) reformers rapidly adopted the model for Hokkaido’s colonization. The idea also received praise in some British colonies.54 In 1877, Sapporo Agricultural College in Hokkaido was founded with significant input from William Clark Smith, the president of Massachusetts State Agricultural College.55 In the 1870s and 1880s, Kaitakushi (the Hokkaido Development Agency) employed Horace Capron (1804–85), a former United States Department of Agriculture Commissioner, and Edwin Dun, a former Ohio rancher.56 Ventures inspired by the new Japanese institutions and guided by Japanese agricultural scientists and farm managers, who themselves drew on German– American models, were established throughout the Qing Empire in the 1900s, around the same time that many British colonies picked up the model in earnest from the United States and other colonial powers.57 In 1902, Yuan Shikai (1859– 1916), then Governor-General of Zhili, appointed the Japanese agricultural scientist Kusubara Shōzō, graduate of the Komaba Agricultural College and director of an agricultural research station in Japan’s Saga Prefecture, to advise at a new experimental farm in Baoding.58 In 1903, Yuan oversaw the establishment of another farm in Jinan, also with the help of a Japanese expert.59 Advocating the establishment of an experimental farm near Beijing in 1905, the newly founded Ministry of Commerce (Shang bu), noted that such bodies had facilitated the Japanese settlement of Hokkaido.60 In Kham, Zhao Erfeng employed two Japanese experts to give advice on agricultural science and experimental farms.61 Experimental farms proliferated rapidly throughout China. Sichuan alone had more than seventy-four in 1911, and they were also founded by the new colonial regimes in the non-Chinese parts of the empire.62 In 1910, county officials in Zhao Erfeng’s new Kham administration opened experimental farms in Batang and Drenthang (Chinese: Dengke), more than 600 km from Chengdu across some of the most difficult terrain in the Empire.63 By 1910, Turpan in Xinjiang boasted an experimental forestry plantation (nonglin shiyan chang) with 4,000 peach, apricot and willow trees.64

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In some respects, the new agricultural stations closely followed the Japanese model, aiming to combine research on a broad range of crops with education programmes to train experts and/or local farmers. Stations near to large towns were often attached to agricultural colleges (nongye xuetang) that ran two- or three-year curriculums for middle-school or post-middle-school students.65 In 1909, Xu Shichang (1855–1939), the Governor-General of the three new Manchurian provinces, proposed an experimental farm in Jilin in Manchuria, outlining its aim as the development of a model for new methods in a range of crops, horticulture, forestry and animal husbandry.66 It would also both recruit students who would receive practical and theoretical training, and play an educative role in the wider community by working with local gentry and elders (shen-qi) to organize an agricultural association to propagate the models developed by the farm. The experimental farms also aimed to introduce new crop varieties, either from abroad or from other parts of China. An experimental farm at Fengtian (Shenyang; Manchu: Mukden), Manchuria, imported 185 varieties of crop from other countries between 1907 and 1908.67 Managers of experimental farms elsewhere in China planned further trials using seeds imported for the Fengtian farm. La Shijun, the official behind the farm in Drenthang, Kham, proposed introducing three varieties of Japanese string beans from Fengtian and one variety of American string bean; in addition to sixteen other ‘foreign’ vegetables and nineteen from other parts of the Qing Empire, as well as a strain of cold-resistant rice from Luding (Tibetan: Chakzam).68 American cotton also spread quickly through the Empire. It was introduced in Jiangsu in the mid-Guangxu reign (1875–1908), and reached Xinjiang by 1910, if not earlier.69 The specific goals that farms prioritized depended on individual officials’ preferences and biases. Zhao Erfeng supported La Shijun’s endeavour, but dismissed the idea of doing much actual experimentation. Zhao already knew what he wanted: the ‘five grains’ – an ancient formulation that usually referred to rice, two varieties of millet, wheat and beans. In particular, he wished to know whether there were any places that could grow rice. Other than this, Zhao believed the farm should focus on education rather than research: The farm should concentrate on the five grains (wu gu), to serve as a model for the man people to study the art of crop growing. Vegetables are not a key aspect of agriculture. Furthermore, the report states that the earth is not suitable for the production of rice, and therefore this crop will not be trialled. What is the evidence for this?70

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La got the message, and his next report did not mention the trial vegetable crops and listed instead the methods of making Tibetan agriculture more similar to the intensive agriculture practised in Sichuan. In general, Qing officials were not interested in the possibility of making experimental farms into large-scale enterprises. The Ministry of Commerce memorial referred to the importance of the huge Kaitakushi ranch in Hokkaido, with ‘up to one thousand qing of land’ (about 17,000 acres, or 6,880 ha; in fact, the largest Hokkaido ranch covered almost 35,000 acres, or 14,164 ha).71 But no farms of this scale were created in China, and the Ministry advocated something quite different: ‘In order that the experimental farm can serve as a site for demonstration and research, it is not appropriate for it to be in a remote, barren or wild region.’72 The Ministry proposed a farm of around 170 acres (69 ha) at a place outside Xizhimen in Beijing. Even in Manchuria, where lots of land was available, Xu Shichang favoured a smaller farm of, at most, a few 100 acres spread over different sites adjacent to the provincial capital.73 The ventures established by magistrates in the outer reaches of Kham and Xinjiang demonstrate how rapidly the idea of experimental farms spread to the remote corners of the empire, but modernizers in the upper echelons of imperial administration tended to have in mind small farms near to population centres. The new agricultural institutions of Meiji-era Japan strongly promoted animal husbandry, and in particular cattle ranching, viewing it as progressive since ‘it produced the primary cuisine of modern nations—beef ’.74 Many Hokkaido officials saw livestock as the centrepiece of the island’s agricultural development; the most important Kaitakushi operation in Hokkaido was a horse-breeding ranch.75 Proposals for experimental farms in China mentioned animal husbandry, as did Liu Kunyi (1830–1902) and Zhang Zhidong in a 1901 memorial.76 In Kham, there were plans for an Animal Husbandry School in Drenthang, for which dairy cows from the Netherlands and goats from Australia were to be imported (though it appears they never arrived).77 In 1905, the newly created Bureau of Military Livestock (junmusi) established two ranches in Chahar, where Mongolian horses were joined by English and Russian horses.78 But, in general, even as the influence of Japan, North America and Australia became more pronounced, Qing officials became less keen on livestock farming during the dynasty’s last decades. In 1900s Mongolia, Chinese officials viewed nomadic pastoralism as a primitive and wasteful use of land.79 Kham’s colonial government outlined plans for an animal husbandry school and founded a tannery in Batang, but its spending illustrated its priorities: 24,000 taels of silver for the tannery, versus

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60,000 taels spent on encouraging crop-growing in 1906 alone.80 In general, in their writing Zhao’s officials showed little interest in livestock farming.81 It was not until the late 1920s that Chinese officials in the Mongol lands began to take a serious interest in livestock farming. Looking back on the previous two decades of attempts to modernize agriculture, one writer complained in 1933 that ‘just about all great works are biased towards land cultivation and have forgotten pastoral farming. All attention is focused on crops and livestock are ignored.’82 Even in the 1930s, there were still only ‘a handful’ of organizations that invested in animal-breed improvement programmes, in contrast to the many that worked with plant breeding.83 Late Qing hostility to livestock farming ran counter to the traditions of Manchu rule: in the eighteenth century, the Qing government had established state ranches in Xinjiang to provide mounts and pack animals, which were restored in the 1880s following Zuo Zongtang’s re-conquest in 1876–8. Zuo did not plan a large-scale conversion of grazing land into crop land in Xinjiang: ‘Land that is especially fertile can be set aside for crop growing, and that which is plentiful in water and grass can be grazing land. … Cultivation is not the only way to make full use of the earth’s resources.’84 Zuo blocked one proposal for more cultivation in the Lop Nur region, arguing that ‘in the economy of the northwest, livestock farming is often the most profitable activity’.85 To a certain extent, the neglect of livestock farming in the 1900s reflected the growing influence within official policy of what Dee Mack Williams calls ‘Han ecological identity,’ hitherto counterbalanced by other traditions within the Qing administration of land and resources.86 ‘For centuries, Chinese literati viewed and described neighbouring seminomadic peoples and their native homelands in the most disparaging terms’, and nothing characterized those native homelands more than nomadic pastoralism.87 However, it is also likely that officials’ relative neglect of animal husbandry in the 1900s was related to the way that the supposed backwardness and wastefulness of pastoralism justified the appropriation of Mongol land.88

Agricultural institutions after the revolution Qing rule collapsed in 1911, but efforts to improve agriculture with experimental farms and similar initiatives flourished in the following Republican era. Transnational networks deepened. Connections with the United States eclipsed those with Japan, and Chinese trained in other countries or the missionary

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universities in China replaced foreign advisers at the Republic’s agricultural institutions. Han An (1883–1961) was a prominent example. Between 1907 and 1912, Han studied at Cornell University – which trained many officials of Republican-era agricultural bureaus – and the Universities of Michigan and Wisconsin. In addition to holding various posts at Chinese universities, Han served in regional bureaus of agriculture and forestry in Jilin (Manchuria), and Chahar and Suiyuan (Mongolia), and was the Director of the National Forestry Research Institute (Zhongyang linye shiyansuo) between 1941 and 1948. Even in Xikang – a poorly funded province established in Kham in 1939, described by one scholar as little more than a ‘personal fiefdom’ of the warlord Liu Wenhui – the directors of the provincial Agriculture Improvement Institute were graduates of the science programmes of foreign universities.89 Ye Xiufeng (1900–90), who had studied at the University of Pittsburgh, served as the director of both Xikang’s Bureau of Development (jianshe ting) and Agriculture Improvement Institute.90 His successor, Liu Yiyan (1884–1966), had studied engineering in Glasgow.91 Xu Xiaohui, who served in a variety of positions in the Xikang government in the 1940s, including as the vice-director of the Agriculture Improvement Institute, was a graduate of the agriculture programme of Tokyo Imperial University.92 Under the leadership of such men, experimental farms grew in number and size throughout Republican-era China. By 1925, a state experimental farm system in Suiyuan Province covered more than 200 hectares over five sites.93 Xikang province’s Agriculture Improvement Institute managed at least nine operations, and had a goal of establishing an experimental farm in every county of the province.94 The goal was ambitious because large areas of Xikang were controlled by the Tibetan government or Nuosu chiefs who ignored the desires of the provincial government. Nevertheless, such aspirations demonstrated the centrality of experimental farms to the developmental agendas of China’s local governments in the 1940s. Particularly after the Japanese invasion, all levels of Chinese government suffered from a chronic shortage of funds, which meant that commercial production became an important goal of state farms as they attempted to recoup costs. Three quarters of the land used by a state farm at Ya’an in Xikang was devoted to growing crops for market.95 The Russian émigré Sinologist, freelancer and Nationalist government employee Peter Goullart (1901–78) visited another Xikang farm in Taining in Kham, and conveyed the impression that production of butter for sale in Chongqing and Kunming was one of its key goals.96 The move towards profit-making was also partly due to corruption. There is evidence

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that poorly paid and inadequately supervised farm managers sometimes ran operations as businesses for private gain. A local man of Luding complained, for example, that he had allowed the Luding Forest and Horticulture Plantation cheap use of his land so it could carry out the noble tasks of research and education, only to find later that it was being used for ‘private profit’.97 In addition to the graduates of foreign universities employed on state farms, missionaries and missionary universities constituted another transnational link that shaped the development of agricultural science and government policy after 1911. The University of Nanking (Jinling daxue), a private missionary school established in 1888 with funding from American protestant churches, founded a College of Agriculture and Forestry in 1914. With the help of a strong institutional connection to Cornell University, the college ran ‘the biggest and best agricultural program in China’.98 Like other Republican-era endeavours of the foreign agricultural missionaries (who were mostly American Protestants), it aimed to transform Chinese farming with American science and theory.99 The College’s graduates subsequently became, among other things, professors in agricultural sciences, biology and economics; managers of state farms and forestry plantations; employees and directors of the National Agricultural Research Bureau (zhongyang nongye shiyan suo); directors and staff of provincial bureaus of economic development (jianshe ting); and employees of a variety of science-related businesses.100 Research outputs from the College were widely read by Chinese scientists and students working at state institutions. The star of the College’s faculty was John Lossing Buck (1890–1975), who arrived in China as a missionary in 1915 after graduating from Cornell, and served as director of the College’s agronomy programme. Buck’s first book, Chinese Farm Economy, was published simultaneously in Chicago and Shanghai, and remained the standard textbook in Chinese universities’ agronomy programmes until the Communist take-over.101 Yet just as Chinese experimental farms were not exact replications of Japanese farms, nor were the methods and ideas of the University of Nanking College of Agriculture faculty copied wholesale by the Chinese state institutions that employed the College’s students. One of Buck’s great preoccupations was measuring the annual amount and distribution of labour expended in raising different crops. The results filled large parts of his book, Chinese Farm Economy, and other publications. His interest in the topic was probably related to the missionary community’s belief that idleness was one of chief causes of the social ills of the Chinese countryside. As Buck put it, it was ‘the first problem needing attention in China’.102 The work of Chinese state institutions bore the mark of

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the University of Nanking in many ways, but none followed Buck’s exercise in accounting for the labour-power of Chinese farmers. In addition to training many of the employees of provincial bureaus of agriculture, Buck and his colleague Xu Cheng (Paul Hsu), a fellow Cornelleducated agronomist, also worked with the China International Famine Relief Commission, a foreign charity largely backed by American missionaries, to establish agricultural cooperatives during the 1920s and 1930s. In the early 1920s, the Commission researched agricultural cooperatives in India, Burma and Japan, before settling on the German cooperative model pioneered in 1860 by Friedrich Raiffeisen.103 Cooperatives proliferated throughout China and, along with experimental farms, became one of the central pillars of state agricultural development before the Communists defeat of the Nationalist regime in 1949. By 1927, there were 561 cooperatives in Hebei alone.104 After establishing a national government in 1927, the Nationalist government began its own experiments with cooperatives. Party members studied those established by the Famine Relief Commission and the University of Nanking. The Party founded the Office of Cooperatives in 1935 to centralize management of the cooperatives throughout the country, and the Agricultural Credit Administration (Nong ben ju) in 1936 to manage bank loans to them.105 The cooperatives established a new system of agricultural finance in China. In 1934, the sum total of loans from banks and state institutions was more than 18 million yuan, 80 per cent of which was used for seed, fertilizer, working animals and irrigation construction.106 Modern banking institutions were new, but to an extent this was an example of twentieth-century transnational connections leading to the revival, strengthening and adaptation of much older practices: provision of loans of seed, livestock, food and housing to encourage the cultivation of new land was one of the key economic policies of the Ming and Qing states.

Conclusion As this and other chapters in this volume demonstrate, a new set of global ecocultural connections developed in the late nineteenth century due to Western (plus Russian, and then Japanese) imperial expansion and the deployment of new transport and communications technology. Foreigners and foreign places began to contribute to new efforts to change Chinese agriculture and environment. Perhaps surprisingly, given the dominance of British merchants in China’s

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foreign trade and Britain’s strong imperial presence in China, state-directed ecocultural networks between China and the British Empire were thinner and less obvious than those with Japan, the United States or even Germany. Governors of frontier provinces of the Qing Empire and Republic of China referred to British colonization of Australia, India and Canada – in addition to, but perhaps less often than, American settlement of the western United States and Japanese settlement of Hokkaido. Australian goats were ordered for Drenthang in Kham, and English horses for the Qing Bureau of Military Livestock (junmusi) ranches, but it is likely that further research will show that more plants and animals came from outside the British Empire. Some of the Republican-period technocrats who managed provincial development bodies had studied in the British Empire, but fewer than those who had studied in Japan and the United States. None of the new networks signalled the end of existing Chinese practice or policy. From the 1860s to the 1880s, Zuo Zongtang employed German experts for assistance with irrigation projects, but at the same time regularly referred to, and even republished, works from the existing corpus of Chinese agronomic writing. In the 1900s, Chinese discourse on Western and Japanese settler-colonialism proliferated, though actual plans for the settlement of places like Kham continued to draw heavily on the older Ming and Qing systems. China’s modernizers founded experimental farms for which they employed senior directors of Japanese agricultural institutions, though they did not copy the Japanese models exactly. They were not interested in establishing ventures on the massive scale of the Kaitakushi’s Hokkaido horse-breeding station. Moreover, because pastoralism was viewed as a primitive way of using land, they were much less interested than Japanese officials in livestock farming. Similarly, in the Republican period, John Lossing Buck’s preoccupation with measuring the hours and days of labour performed by Chinese farmers never found any expression in the work of the Chinese agricultural scientists whom he trained. This story of a combination of foreign and native is a familiar one that resonates with many accounts of the cultural and social dynamics of imperialism, and particularly with late Qing officials’ concern for mastering both Western practical knowledge and the living tradition of Chinese learning, a goal they expressed succinctly in the phrase ‘ti-yong’ ([Chinese] body/essence-[Western] use/efficacy).107 However, the term ti-yong was rarely used in discussions of agriculture, and there was little discourse on the combination of ‘foreign’ and ‘local’ in agricultural policy. There is no indication in Zuo Zongtang’s writing, for example, that he thought about the balance of foreign and native as he made plans for the redevelopment of agriculture in the north-west. Perhaps it was

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difficult to conceptualize the pragmatic pre-nineteenth-century tradition of Chinese agronomic writing as part of an ‘essence’ that stood in opposition to pragmatism that was, in other fields, increasingly defined as a foreign quality. Moreover, in agricultural science, ‘local’ could not signify a civilizational core to be juxtaposed with foreign ‘practicality’ because, as all the officials referred to in this chapter were aware, practical results in agriculture depended on knowledge of local conditions. This did not mean that there was an easy, unproblematic interaction between foreign science and local knowledge: Sigrid Schmalzer has shown that Republican-era attempts to breed pigs of better quality often failed to consider local conditions, even though the men behind such attempts often wrote about the need to do so.108 But discourse on agriculture did not pose a Chinese ti against a foreign yong or consider how Western science would relate to local knowledge. In 1949, the Communist Party emerged victorious from the Civil War, and agricultural policy changed track. Communist policy grew naturally out of the Republican context. The government continued to employ foreign advisers, though now they were Russian, rather than Japanese or American. The Communist leadership retained the ideal of an agricultural settler-society in the north-west, and went much further than previous governments (Ming, Qing or Republican) had ever done in sending young people to remote parts of Xinjiang, Mongolia, Qinghai and Kham to plough up grasslands. Yet, as Judith Shapiro comments, although the Mao era’s agricultural practice could be seen ‘as an extreme form of a philosophical and behavioural tendency that has roots in traditional Confucian culture, … Maoism rejected both Chinese tradition and modern Western science’.109 Its implementation signalled the end of the era discussed in this chapter, when both Chinese tradition and modern Western science were highly significant.

Notes 1 I would like to thank James Beattie and the anonymous reviewer for their useful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. Research for this chapter was conducted while I was supported by a doctoral scholarship from Victoria University of Wellington, and then by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. 2 Peter C. Perdue, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987),

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4 5

6

7 8

9

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11 12 13 14 15

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11–12; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Francesca Bray, ‘Science, Technique, Technology: Passages between Matter and Knowledge in Imperial Chinese Agriculture’. British Journal for the History of Science 41, 3 (2008): 342. Bray, ‘Science,’ 343. Zheng Tianting (ed.), Qing shi (shang bian) [Qing history, part one] (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1989), 289–94; Yeh-chien Wang, Land Taxation in Imperial China, 1750–1911 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 28. Wang Yuquan, Liu Zhongri, and Zhang Xianqing, Zhongguo jingji tongshi. Mingdai jingji juan (shang) [General History of the Chinese Economy. The Ming Dynasty I] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue yuan, 2007), 254. James Reardon-Anderson, ‘Land Use and Society in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia during the Qing Dynasty’. Environmental History 5, 4 (2000): 505–6. For the early Qing, see Zheng Tianting (ed.), Qing shi, 289–94. For incentives offered to migrants to Xinjiang in the Qing, see Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 344, 50. Perdue, Exhausting the Earth, 95, Yingcong Dai, The Sichuan Frontier and Tibet: Imperial Strategy in the Early Qing (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 25, 33. Perdue, China Marches West, 343; Justin Tighe, Constructing Suiyuan: The Politics of Northwestern Territory and Development in early Twentieth-Century China (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 51. Quoted in Zheng (ed.), Qing shi, 296. Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘Land Markets in Late Imperial and Republican China’. Continuity and Change 23, 1 (2008): 108. Philip C. C. Huang, Code, Custom and Legal Practice in China: The Qing and the Republic Compared (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 75–9. Wu Tingyu, ‘Qing chao tun tian’ [Tun farming colonies in the Qing dynasty]. Shixue jikan 4 (1996): 35. Anne Osborne, ‘Highlands and Lowlands: Economic and Ecological Interactions in the Lower Yangzi Region under the Qing,’ in Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History, eds. Mark Elvin and Liu Ts’ui-jung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 221. Joanna Waley-Cohen, ‘China and Western Technology in the Eighteenth Century’. American Historical Review 98, 5 (1993): 1525–45. James A. Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 239–41.

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18 See Peter Lavelle, ‘Cultivating Empire: Zuo Zongtang’s Agriculture, Environment, and Reconstruction in the Late Qing’, in China on the Margins, eds. Sherman Cochran and Paul G. Pickowicz (Ithica: Cornell East Asia Program, 2010), 49–56. 19 Qin Hancai, Zuo Wenxiang gong zai xibei [Zuo Zongtang in the northwest] (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1984 [1946]), 231–2. 20 Qin, Zuo Wenxiang, 232. 21 Lavelle, ‘Cultivating Empire’, 46. 22 Ma Xiao, Zuo Zongtang zai Gansu [Zuo Zongtang in Gansu] (Lanzhou: Gansu renmin chubanshe, 2005), 147. 23 Qin, Zuo Wenxiang, 240–3. 24 Qin, Zuo Wenxiang, 240–3. A copy of Mian shu (perhaps not exactly the same as the edition reprinted by Zuo) in the library of the China Agricultural Museum (Zhongguo nongye bowuguan) was printed in 1866, though this edition did not give a date for the handbook’s original composition. See ‘Mian shu’, in Xuxiu Siku Quanshu [Expanded and revised Complete Library in Four Branches], vol. 977 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1997), 131–8. 25 Liu Ts’ui-jung and Fan I-chun, ‘Shi cong huanjing shi jiaodu jiantao Qingdai Xinjiang de tuntian’ [Qing tun colonies in Xinjiang from an environmental history perspective]. Zhongguo shehui lishi pinglun 8 (2007): 201–2. 26 Ts’ui-jung and Fan I-chun, ‘Shi cong huanjing shi jiaodu jiantao Qingdai Xinjiang de tuntian’, 202. 27 Eric Trombert, ‘The Karez Concept in Ancient Chinese Sources Myth or Reality?’, T’oung Pao 94, 1–3 (2008): 146–7. 28 Qin, Zuo Wenxiang, 238. 29 Qin, Zuo Wenxiang, 238. 30 Reardon-Anderson, Reluctant Pioneers: China’s Expansion Northward, 1644–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 69. 31 Zhang Xiuhua, ‘Qing mo fang ken Meng di de shizhi ji qi dui Menggu jingji shehui fazhan de yingxiang’ [Cultivation of Mongol land in the late Qing and its impact on Mongol social and economic development]. Jilin daxue shehui kexue xuebao 47, 3 (2007): 81–2. 32 Tighe, Constructing Suiyuan, 100. 33 Tighe, Constructing Suiyuan, 100–1. 34 See also Reardon-Anderson, Reluctant Pioneers, 16–17. 35 Thomas R. Gottschang and Diana Lary, Swallows and Settlers: The Great Migration from North China to Manchuria (Ann Arbor: Centre for China Studies, University of Michigan, 2000), 48–9. 36 Adam McKeown, ‘Global Migration, 1846-1940’. Journal of World History 15, 2 (2004): 155–89.

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37 Chen Chongzu, ‘Xinjiang chuyan’ [Views on Xinjiang, 1913], in Zhongguo bianjiang xingji diaochaji baogaoshu deng bianwu ziliao congbian [Historical travel writing, survey reports and documentary materials from China’s borderlands] vol. 4, ed. Bian Ding (Hong Kong: Fuchi shuyuan, 2009), 369. 38 Jing Tsu, ‘Extinction and Adventures on the Chinese Diasporic Frontier’. Journal of the Chinese Overseas 2, 2 (2006): 247–8. 39 Cen Chunxuan, ‘Menggu kenwu zougao gongdu’ [Cultivation work in Mongolia – memorials to the throne, 1901], in Zhongguo bianjiang xingji diaochaji baogaoshu, vol. 10, 3–4. 40 Elliot Sperling, ‘The Chinese Venture in K’am, 1904-1911, and the Role of Chao Erh-feng’. The Tibet Journal 1, 2 (1976): 23. 41 Alexander Woodside, ‘The Centre and the Borderlands in Chinese Political Theory’, in The Chinese State at the Borders, ed. Diana Lary (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007), 23. 42 Yuan Dahua and Wang Shuwo, Xinjiang tuzhi [Illustrated Gazetteer of Xinjiang] [1910] (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1965), ‘shiye’, 1a. 43 Chen Chongzu, ‘Xinjiang chuyan’, 372. 44 Zhu Zengyun, ‘Chuanbian zhengxie’ [Notes of an official on the Sichuan frontier, 1914], in Kangqu Zangzu shehui zhenxi ziliao jiyao (shang) [Rare historical documents from Kham, part one], eds. Zhao Xinyu, Qin Heping, and Wang Chuan (Chengdu: Bashu shushe, 2006), 120. 45 Immanuel C. Y. Hsü, ‘The Great Policy Debate in China, 1874: Maritime Defense Vs. Frontier Defense’. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 25 (1964–5): 216. 46 ‘Chuanbian kaiken zhi jinzhuang’ [Developments in the cultivation and settlement of the Sichuan frontier]. Datong bao [Datong news] (28 September 1910): 35. 47 ‘Man’ was used in antiquity to refer to non-Chinese peoples in the south; and since then in compounds like yeman (‘wild, savage’), and manheng (‘unreasonable’, ‘overbearing’). 48 Sichuan minzu yanjiu suo (ed.), Qing mo Chuan Dian bianwu dang’an shi liao [Documents from the late Qing Sichuan and Yunnan frontier administration], 3 vols., vol. 2 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1989), 666–7. 49 Yang Gengguang, ‘Sichuan Le-Ping kenwu gongshe nian yu nian lai zhi jingguo’, [The Sichuan Leshan-Pingshan Land Cultivation Society: a retrospective after twenty years]. Chuanbian jikan 2, 2 (1936): 1. 50 Fu Songmu, Xikang jiansheng ji [A record of building Xikang province], 3 vols., vol. 2 (Beijing: Zhongguo Zang xue chubanshe, 1998 [1912]), 22b. 51 Sichuan minzu yanjiu suo (ed.), Qing mo Chuan Dian bianwu dang’an, vol. 1, 95–103. 52 Alexis Dudden, ‘Japanese Colonial Control in International Terms’. Japanese Studies 25, 1 (2005): 9–12.

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53 See H. C. Knoblauch, E. M. Law, and W. P. Meyer, State Agricultural Experiment Stations: A History of Research Policy and Procedure (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, 1962), 14–17, 19–20. 54 Beattie, ‘Scientific Agriculture, Health and Gardening: Japan, New Zealand and Bella and Frederic Truby King’. New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 16, 2 (forthcoming, December 2014). 55 Dudden, ‘Japanese Colonial Control’, 9. 56 Brett L. Walker, ‘Meiji Modernization, Scientific Agriculture, and the Destruction of Japan’s Hokkaido Wolf ’. Environmental History 9, 2 (2004): 249–50. 57 Peter Griggs, ‘Improving Agricultural Practices: Science and the Australian Sugarcane Grower, 1864-1915’. Agricultural History 78, 1 (2004): 11. 58 Wang Qiaohong, ‘Lun wan Qing shiqi wo guo nongye shiyan yu tuiguang’ [Agricultural experimentation and extension in late Qing China]. Anhui nongye kexue 36, 22 (2008): 9809. 59 Wang Qiaohong, ‘Lun wan Qing shiqi wo guo nongye shiyan’, 9808. 60 ‘Shangbu zou qing bo guandi xingban nongshi shiyan chang zhe’. Dongfang zazhi 3, 6 (1906): 112. 61 Wang Chuan, ‘Qing mo, Minguo shiqi Xikang diqu de nongye gaijin ji qi shiji chengxiao’ [Attempts to improve agriculture in the Xikang region in the late Qing and Republican period, and their impact]. Minguo Dang’an 4 (2004): 55. 62 Wang, ‘Lun wan Qing shiqi wo guo nongye shiyan’, 9809. 63 Sichuan minzu yanjiu suo (ed.), Qing mo Chuan Dian bianwu dang’an, 640–2, 818. 64 Yuan Dahua and Wang Shuwo (eds), Xinjiang tuzhi, ‘shiye, part 1’, 10a. 65 See Songshou (Songseo), ‘Zou bao Min sheng sheli nongye zhongdeng xuetang ji nongshi shiyanchang’ [Memorial with a report on Fujian’s agricultural school and experimental station], 1909. National Palace Museum Archives (NPMA), Taiwan 181391; Zhang Mingbo ‘Zou wei Guangxi kaiban nonglin shiyan chang’ [Memorial on the opening of an agriculture and forestry experimental station in Guangxi] 1909. NPMA, 174990. Pang Hongshu, ‘Zou wei tuizhan Qian sheng nongye ni xian jiu shengcheng fujin sheili nongshi shiyanchang’ [Memorial advising the establishment of an experimental farm near Guizhou’s capital as the first step to advancing agriculture in the province], 1909. NPMA 179984. 66 Xu Shichang, ‘zou wei Ji sheng sheli nongshi shiyan chang.’ NPMA, 1777420. 67 Wang Qiaohong, ‘Lun wan Qing shiqi wo guo nongye shiyan’, 9809. 68 Sichuan minzu yanjiu suo (ed.), Qing mo Chuan Dian bianwu dang’an, 641–2. 69 Wang Jingyu, ‘Zhongguo xiandaihua zhengcheng de jiannan bashe (shang)’ [China’s hard trek to modernization, part one]. Zhongguo jingji shi yanjiu 1 (2007): 4–5; Yuan and Wang (eds), Xinjiang tuzhi ‘shiye part 1’, 4a. 70 Sichuan minzu yanjiu suo (ed.), Qing mo Chuan Dian bianwu dang’an, 642. 71 Walker, ‘Meiji Modernization’, 258.

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72 ‘Shangbu zou qing bo guandi xingban nongshi shiyan chang zhe’ [Memorial from the Ministry of Commerce requesting state land be made available for experimental farms]. Dongfang zazhi 3, 6 (1906): 113. 73 Xu Shichang, ‘zou wei Ji sheng sheli nongshi shiyan chang’ [Memorial on the establishment of an experimental farm in Jilin province]. NPMA, 177420. Xu used the area unit ‘xiang’ (though he wrote it unconventionally), and like the ‘mu’ unit more common in the rest of China it varied in size over time and place. 74 Walker, ‘Meiji Modernization’, 249–50. 75 Walker, ‘Meiji Modernization’, 250. 76 Eduard Vermeer, ‘Population and Ecology along the Frontier in Qing China’, in Sediments of Time, 258. 77 Scott Relyea, ‘Gazing at the Tibetan Plateau: Sovereignty and Chinese State Expansion in the Early Twentieth Century’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2010), 398. 78 Peter Ho, ‘The Myth of Desertification of China’s Northwestern Frontier: The Case of Ningxia Province (1929-1958)’. Modern China 26, 3 (2000): 368. 79 Tighe, Constructing Suiyuan, 100–1. 80 Ma Jinglin, Qing mo Chuanbian Zang qu gaitu-guiliu kao [The imposition of direct rule in the Tibetan areas of the Sichuan frontier in the late Qing] (Chengdu: Sichuan chuban jituan, 2002), 161. He Yimin, ‘20 shiji chu nian Chuanbian Zangqu zhengzhi jingji wenhua gaige shulun’ [Political, economic and cultural reform in the Tibetan areas of the Sichuan frontier in the early twentieth century]. Xinan minzu xueyuan xuebao 22, 6 (June 2001): 43. Taels (Ch. liang) were units of weight for silver, though there were different taels weighing different amounts. The ‘treasury standard tael’ (kuping liang) weighed 37.5 g; but the Shanghai tael was only 33.9 g. 81 Xiuyu Wang, China’s Last Imperial Frontier: Late Qing Expansion in Sichuan’s Tibetan Borderlands (Lanham: Lexington, 2011), 232. 82 Tighe, Constructing Suiyuan, 149. 83 Sigrid Schmalzer, ‘Breeding a Better China: Pigs, Practices, and Place in a Chinese County, 1929-1937’. Geographical Review 92, 1 (2002): 5. 84 Du Jingguo, Zuo Zongtang yu Xinjiang [Zuo Zongtang and Xinjiang] (Wulumuqi: Xinjiang renmin chubanshe, 1983), 150. 85 Du Jingguo, Zuo Zongtang yu Xinjiang, 150. 86 Dee Mack Williams, ‘The Barbed Walls of China: A Contemporary Grassland Drama’. The Journal of Asian Studies 55, 3 (1996): 671. 87 Williams, ‘The Barbed Walls of China’, 671. 88 Tighe, Constructing Suiyuan, 111, 45. 89 James Leibold, Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and its Indigenes Became Chinese (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 69. 90 Wang De’an, ‘Jiefang qian Xikang jianshe ting ji jingji jianshe gaikuang’, [The Xikang Bureau of Development, and economic development before liberation] in

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95 96 97

98 99 100

101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire Ya’an wenshi ziliao xuanjii [Collected writings on Ya’an history] 8 (1994): 67; Wang Chuan, ‘Minguo houqi “Xikang sheng nongye gaijin suo” ’ [The Xikang Provincial Agriculture Improvement Institute in the late Republican period]. Xizang daxue xuebao 20, 1 (2005): 63. Wang De’an, ‘Jiefang qian Xikang jianshe ting ji jingji jianshe gaikuang’, 68. Wang Chuan, ‘Minguo houqi “Xikang sheng nongye gaijin suo” ’, 62. Tighe, Constructing Suiyuan, 139. Liu Yiyan, ‘Wu nian lai Xikang nongye jianshe zhi huigu’, [Xikang’s agricultural development in the last five years]. Xikang jingji jikan [Xikang economy quarterly] 1, 8 (1944): 5–6; Zhang Zhichu, ‘Xin sheng qu huading hou Xikang jianshe wenti zhi wo jian’ [Views on Xikang’s development and its obstacles, postprovincialization]. Kangdao yuekan [Kham guide monthly] 1, 2 (1939): 16. Report from director of the Ya’an farm to the Agriculture Institute head office, 1947, Sichuan Provincial Archives (SCDAG), 249–79. Peter Goullart, Princes of the Black Bone: Life in the Tibetan Borderland (London: John Murray Publishers, 1959), 49–51. ‘Luding xian gongmin Zhang Chongxin hancheng’ [Petition from Zhang Chongxin, of Luding County], 1942, Xikang sheng nongye gaijinsuo Luding senlin yuanyi chang [Files of the Xikang Provincial Agriculture Improvement Institute’s Luding forestry and horticulture plantation], SCDAG, 249–74. Laurence A. Schneider, Biology and Revolution in Twentieth-Century China (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 78. Schneider, Biology and Revolution, 80. University of Nanking, Sili Jinling daxue nongxueyuan biye tongxue lu [Record of Alumi of The University of Nanking’s College of Agriculture] (Nanjing: University of Nanking, 1933). Randall E. Stross, The Stubborn Earth: American Agriculturalists on Chinese Soil, 1898–1937 (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1986), 175–6. Stross, The Stubborn Earth, 165. Yixin Chen, ‘The China International Famine Relief Commission and the Rural Cooperative Movement in China’. Chinese Historical Review 13, 1 (2006): 110. Chen, ‘The China International Famine Relief Commission’, 115. Chen, ‘The China International Famine Relief Commission’, 123. Chen, ‘The China International Famine Relief Commission’, 123, 127. Luke Kwong, ‘The T’i-Yung Dichotomy and the Search for Talent in Late-Ch’ing China’. Modern Asian Studies 27, 2 (1993): 278–9. Schmalzer, ‘Breeding a Better China’, 18–19. Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 8.

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Select bibliography Bray, Francesca. ‘Science, Technique, Technology: Passages between Matter and Knowledge in Imperial Chinese Agriculture’. British Journal for the History of Science 41, 3 (2008): 319–44. Dudden, Alexis. ‘Japanese Colonial Control in International Terms’. Japanese Studies 25, 1 (2005): 1–20. Millward, James A. Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Osborne, Anne. ‘Highlands and Lowlands: Economic and Ecological Interactions in the Lower Yangzi Region under the Qing,’ in Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History, eds. Mark Elvin and Liu Ts’ui-jung. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Perdue, Peter C. Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500–1850. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987. —China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Reardon-Anderson, James. Reluctant Pioneers: China’s Expansion Northward, 1644–1937. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Schmalzer, Sigrid. ‘Breeding a Better China: Pigs, Practices, and Place in a Chinese County, 1929-1937’. Geographical Review 92, 1 (2002): 1–22. Shapiro, Judith. Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Stross, Randall E. The Stubborn Earth: American Agriculturalists on Chinese Soil, 1898–1937. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1986. Tighe, Justin. Constructing Suiyuan: The Politics of Northwestern Territory and Development in Early Twentieth-Century China. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Trombert, Eric. ‘The Karez Concept in Ancient Chinese Sources Myth or Reality?’ T’oung Pao 94, 1–3 (2008): 115–50. Vermeer, Eduard B. ‘Population and Ecology along the Frontier in Qing China’, in Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History, eds. Mark Elvin and Liu Ts’ui-jung. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Walker, Brett L. ‘Meiji Modernization, Scientific Agriculture, and the Destruction of Japan’s Hokkaido Wolf ’. Environmental History 9, 2 (2004): 248–74. Wang, Xiuyu. China’s Last Imperial Frontier: Late Qing Expansion in Sichuan’s Tibetan Borderlands. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011.

4

Empire in a Cup: Imagining Colonial Geographies through British Tea Consumption1 Edward D. Melillo

In the 14 January 2001 issue of the New York Times Magazine, food journalist Michael Pollan highlighted the current proliferation of ‘supermarket narratives’, or labels that ‘tell a little story about where the food I’m buying comes from and how it has been produced’.2 More recently, geographer Gail Hollander has called attention to ‘marketing strategies that deploy geographical knowledges while emphasizing freshness, environmental “friendliness” and social justice’.3 Despite such compelling accounts of the twenty-first-century origins of the supermarket narrative, this literal approach to product placement has a long history, dating back to the nineteenth century. Sir Thomas Lipton, a Glasgow grocer, pioneered the supermarket narrative. After purchasing 1,214 hectares of bankrupt coffee estates in British Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) in 1890, he converted these vast agrarian landscapes into some of the world’s most successful tea plantations. As he later recollected, ‘ “Direct from the Tea Garden to the teapot!” … was the slogan I came home with from my trip to Ceylon and I made the utmost of it in all my advertising’.4 Innovative catchphrases such as this one asserted the freshness of Lipton’s tea while simultaneously implying a seamless relationship between colonial producer and metropolitan imperial consumer. Additionally, by blending panoramas of bucolic tea plantations with scenes of contented tea pickers, Lipton’s advertising motifs artfully concealed the environmental degradation and oppressive labour conditions that characterized Ceylon’s tea industry. More generally, such promotions of Ceylonese tea offered a convenient rhetorical platform from which British pundits could criticize China, the long-time holdout against Britain’s mercantile ambitions. This chapter explores the ways in which Lipton’s advertising campaigns packaged and promoted an imagined empire. In anthropological terms, such

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product storylines fostered widespread commodity fetishism, the mystification of the social relations upon which capitalist exchanges depend. Through this process, things appear to be the bearers of value, rather than reflecting the labour involved in their creation.5 Yet Lipton’s promotional strategies went beyond merely masking the unsavoury labour relations involved in Ceylonese tea production. They also obscured the environmental deterioration – including widespread deforestation, soil degradation and biodiversity loss – that Lipton’s tea plantations wrought.6 A close examination of archival material and ephemera from Lipton’s product line provides new insights into the labour and environmental histories of the British Empire. It also suggests that colonial geographies may depend, far more than previously acknowledged, upon a dialectical relation between imagined landscapes and material conditions of production.

The rise of a tea colony Sri Lanka, a 65,610-square-kilometer island off the southern coast of the Indian subcontinent, has a documented human history exceeding 3,000 years. Located at the geographic nexus between African and Asian ocean-trading routes and possessing several deep harbours, Ceylon held tremendous appeal to agents of Europe’s maritime empires. Following periods of Portuguese (from 1505 to 1656) and Dutch (from 1656 to 1796) rule, the island’s diverse population endured British imperial control from 1796 to 1948. By the 1820s, as Eugenia Herbert will demonstrate in Chapter 6, Ceylon’s wet zones served as fertile settings for newly established colonial plantations of commodity crops, including cinchona (used to produce anti-malarial quinine), cinnamon, coconut, rubber, cocoa and coffee.7 Starting in 1869, the island experienced an epidemic of coffee rust (Hemileia vastatrix), a fungal parasite that debilitates plants by destroying their leaves. This devastating outbreak, coupled with the explosive growth of Brazil’s coffee industry in the late 1800s, left Ceylon bereft of coffee plantations by the end of the nineteenth century.8 Such unanticipated biological disruptions and economic upheavals deterred many planters from pursuing new ventures, but a few colonists detected a silver lining to the coffee crisis. In 1867, the Scotsman James Taylor became Ceylon’s first successful tea grower. Taylor, who arrived in 1852 at the age of seventeen, worked on a coffee estate before shifting his attention to tea cultivation. In a letter home, written shortly after his arrival, Taylor disabused his relatives of the widely held notion that Ceylon was a tropical paradise: ‘There is no fruit here

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but impenetrable jungles with underwood and climbing plants and poisonous or useless fruits. Part of the estate [where I am working] is left – a wood full of monkies [sic], birds and serpents’.9 Like so many of his fellow Europeans who sought their fortunes in distant imperial outposts, Taylor discovered that colonial environments rarely matched the pastoral, Eurocentric imagery found in promotional literature and spread by metropolitan rumour. Despite such challenges, Taylor began experimenting with tea (Camellia sinensis) from the British Royal Botanical Gardens at Peradeniya. He planted 7.7 hectares of this tea on the Loolecondera Estate in central Ceylon’s hilly Kandy region. As he soon found, Ceylon was well suited for tea cultivation. High humidity and frequent rainfall in the highlands shortened the maturation period for tea shrubs and made their leaves harvestable sooner than those in China or in India’s northeastern state of Assam. In 1873, a 12.7-kilogram consignment of Ceylonese tea reached British markets; two years later, Loolecondera was home to over 40 hectares of tea bushes.10 Taylor was not the first foreigner to consider the prospects of tea planting in Ceylon. Earlier attempts at its cultivation had ended in failure. George Gardner, the superintendent of the Peradeniya Gardens, wrote to the colonial secretary in 1847: ‘I have good reason for believing that tea cultivation will never succeed in Ceylon, I should be very sorry to see the Garden put to so much expense for an Article that will not benefit it. Through the kindness of a friend, I already possess two Tea Plants, which are quite enough for Botanical purposes’.11 Gardner’s pessimism was justified. His comments came at a time when Chinese tea exports dominated world markets. After the introduction of tea to Europe in the seventeenth century, this beverage had consistently evoked China in the British popular imagination. The first printed reference to the new-fangled brew appeared in a London coffeehouse advertisement in 1658, which referred to ‘that excellent and by all Physicians approved drink called by the Chineans Tcha’.12 The British tea market got off to a modest start, but experienced epic growth during the 1700s; buyers switched from Chinese to South Asian suppliers during the late nineteenth century. The East India Company sold fewer than twentynine long tons of Chinese dry leaf tea in 1701. By 1780, sales reached nearly 2,232 long tons per annum. In the late 1860s, the United Kingdom imported 91.4 per cent of its tea from China. By the turn of the century, however, this number had shrunk to a mere 4.7 per cent of British tea imports. The rapid expansion of tea cultivation in Ceylon and India facilitated this astonishing change. With his 1890 purchase of vast tea estates across the Ceylonese hill country, Lipton

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became a major player in the global tea business. By the early 1900s, Ceylon was supplying 35,714 long tons, or 33 per cent, of British tea per year.13 The replacement of Chinese tea with tea from highland Ceylon and Assam represented a striking transformation of commodity sourcing and consumption patterns. In 1946, George Orwell reflected upon this transition in the Evening Standard: ‘First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays – it is economical, and one can drink it without milk – but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it’.14 Orwell’s remark perpetuated long-standing British associations between Chinese tea and emasculation. English traveller Jonas Hanway suggested in An Essay on Tea (1757) that the Chinese were ‘some of the most effeminate people on the face of the whole earth’. In a more sweeping attack on the Chinese, Hanaway asked his British readers, ‘[w]ill the sons and daughters of this happy isle, this reputed abode of sense and liberty, forever submit to the bondage of so tyrannical a custom as drinking tea?’15 Indian and Ceylonese tea offered British imperialists an economic toehold for reducing dependency upon Chinese imports. As historian Arthur Reade noted in Tea and Tea Drinking (1884), ‘[e]very year thousands of acres are being brought under cultivation, and in a short time it seems likely that we shall be independent of China for our supplies of tea’.16 Assamese and Ceylonese teas also provided Britain’s leaders with opportunities to refine the imagery of empire as a co-operative venture, yielding mutual benefits to people throughout the colonies. This reworked view of the empire prefaced later exhortations by the Empire Marketing Board for consumers to buy empire-made goods.17 Campaigns for imperial economic autonomy yielded both intentional and unintentional biological consequences. In one of the nineteenth century’s most audacious botanical strategies, the British spent the first half of the 1800s selling millions of long tons of Indian-grown opium to Chinese addicts, while at the same time farming an Indian-grown stimulant to encourage consumer independence from China.18 Claims about connections among biology, race and economic fitness frequently underwrote imperial rhetoric. In an 1882 treatise on India’s tea industry, planter Samuel Baildon conflated botanical and moral degeneration among the Chinese, suggesting, ‘suppose that instead of the [tea] plant being indigenous to China and extending its growth along the countries mentioned into India, that it was indigenous to India, and extended its growth to China, deteriorating as it did so’. As Baildon continued, ‘it possibly occurs [to the Chinese tea farmer] as he whiffs his evening pipe of opium, that what has been

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grown in his garden will be put on a ship and go a long distance: but whether it will turn out good or bad, or show a loss or a profit, is nothing at all to him’.19 In similar fashion, other nineteenth-century British authorities critiqued Chinese tea as a remnant of pre-modern, un-hygienic practices, ‘which necessitated many filthy and objectionable features’. They contrasted this inferior product with Indian and Ceylonese teas, which had been produced within the empire’s borders, handled under strict supervision and processed in modern production facilities.20 Although such claims were founded on imperialist racism and other specious premises, the processing of Ceylon tea was, indeed, a highly mechanized affair. A five-stage leaf-preparation technique, which included withering, rolling, fermenting, firing and sorting the tea leaves, took place in ‘factories’ that British planters built in close proximity to tea-harvesting sites.21 Lipton was a pioneer of this worksite configuration and pursued a business scheme that emphasized total control of the tea-production process. Vertical integration occurred both literally along wire lines that his workers used to transport their harvests rapidly down mountainsides and more figuratively through Lipton’s direct management of every link in the commodity chain from production to consumption. Lipton framed this total control of the process from the plantation crop in Ceylon to the store shelf in Britain as a benefit to the tea-drinking public. In Lipton’s own words, his goal was ‘abolishing, wherever possible, the middle man or intermediary profiteer between the producer and the consumer’.22 What he did not mention, of course, was that by eliminating middlemen from the production chain, he helped to maximize his own profits. When developing the company’s advertising motifs, Lipton’s artists paired the latest elements of scientific modernization with aspects of timeless exotica. Thus, their promotional campaigns fused the rationalization of production and the re-enchantment of colonial life. At the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Lipton displayed his wares as part of a lavishly decorated East India pavilion. After Lipton’s Tea won ‘highest honours’ at the awards ceremonies, the company drafted an advertisement announcing ‘Victorious Over All Others’. The accompanying image juxtaposed a majestic parade of elephants, show horses and turbaned riders in the foreground with a panoramic background scene of tea pickers conducting an orderly harvest next to busy tea factories with smoke billowing from their stacks (see Figure 4.1). Such marketing campaigns justified British imperial ventures by exemplifying claims about the creation of order in distant lands. Yet they also relied on the production of anonymity; the labour in the picture is simultaneously central and faceless.23

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Figure 4.1 Lipton’s Tea advertisement from the Illustrated London News, 28 October 1893, 666.

Reorganizing Ceylon’s landscapes of labour Behind the advertising artistry, a major reorganization of Ceylon’s landscapes of labour was underway. Unlike the island’s seasonal coffee harvest, which had occupied the months from October to February, tea picking was a yearround affair. As a result, it required a permanent workforce. Sir James Emerson Tennent, the island’s colonial secretary from 1845 to 1850, saw the enormous potential for tea cultivation on the island but worried about insufficient supplies of skilled labour: ‘On this fine estate an attempt has been made to grow tea: the plants thrive surprisingly, and when I saw them they were covered with bloom. But the experiment has hitherto been defeated by the impossibility of finding skilled labour to dry and manipulate the leaves’.24 Local villagers were reluctant to abandon smallholder farming for wage work on estates. Instead, planters relied upon Hindu Tamils from South India who migrated to Ceylon in large numbers between the 1830s and the mid-twentieth century. Most of this labour diaspora occurred under the kangany debt peonage system, through which Tamil foremen (kanganies) returned to their home villages in southern India to recruit

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plantation workers, or ‘coolies’.25 As Sri Lankan scholar S. B. D. De Silva pointed out, ‘[i]n India “labour-hunting” was a term used in government reports. … A recruiting agent and several sub-agents scoured the villages, drumming up hopes of a bright future and using every possible stratagem to increase their catch’.26 The kangany also acted as a sub-overseer. In addition to advances he received from plantation owners for bringing labourers to worksites, the kangany took a daily cut, known as ‘pence money’, of each labourer’s wage.27 The entire arrangement revolved around debt. As one scholar noted, ‘[h]eavily indebted to the kangany, without any social security and receiving food and money only through the kangany’s hands, the term “free labor migration” loses much of its accuracy’.28 Conditions of debt bondage were similar throughout the plantation system but could stem from a variety of expenses. Indian independence activist Karumuttu Thiagarajan Chettiar remarked in 1917, ‘[t]here is absolutely not a single coolie on any one [Ceylon] estate without debts. The only question is about the difference of amount. … These debts are said to be accumulated in different ways. First, the amount advanced by the kangany before recruiting and the travelling expenses. Secondly, the value of things bought from the kangany from time to time. Thirdly, cash lent by kangany during illness and other occasions’.29 Thus, the kanganies monopolized the social interactions of their workers, serving in a quartet of roles as recruiters, merchants, bankers and bosses. Most of the migrants who travelled hundreds of kilometres from villages in Tamil Nadu or Kerala to Ceylonese highland estates were members of their home region’s lowest caste – Paraiyans – the term from which the English word ‘pariah’ originates. One of the largest waves of Tamil labour immigration across the Palk Strait – the seas separating India from Sri Lanka – occurred in 1877 when 380,000 workers fled widespread famine in southern India. Although some of these migrants returned to their villages after fulfilling their terms of plantation service, others remained in Ceylon, chasing the ever-elusive hope of paying off burdensome debts. As of 1904, an estimated 400,000 Tamil coolies were working on at least 2,000 Ceylonese tea estates.30 These women and men were by no means a docile workforce, and organized resistance to British rule was not unheard of in Ceylon’s countryside. Throughout the nineteenth century, Anglo colonists remained haunted by the memory of two rebellions against British dominance: a nationalist uprising in 1818 led by chiefs of the Kandyan Province; and a more grassroots insurrection in 1848 – the Matale Rebellion – in which the peasants of Sri Lanka’s central highlands rejected unjust British taxes, called for the overthrow of the colonial government,

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and armed themselves in preparation for confrontation. The British mercilessly put down both rebellions in ways that anticipated the suppression of what they termed the 1857 ‘Indian Mutiny’.31 Fears of another uprising compelled plantation owners to run their estates as social enclaves, an approach facilitated by the central-highland district’s hilly, jungle-covered terrain. Through surveillance, control of worker mobility and spatial isolation of coolie communities, planters limited their labourers’ exposure to urban political movements, trade union activity and ‘outside agitators’.32 In fact, tea estates were quasi-martial spaces that resembled military encampments. Barracks-style housing, regimented schedules punctuated by factory bells, early morning and evening musters of workers, roll calls and squads of khaki-clad guards imposed a rigid disciplinary structure of industrial time and regimented work. Although the Sri Lankan government formally abolished the kangany system in 1938, these militarized features of the plantation workplace remained intact until well after the Second World War.33 The kangany debt peonage system bore striking resemblances to labour regimes that developed throughout the world during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the Age of Abolition (from the 1780s to the 1880s) came to a close, marking the final convulsions of the Atlantic slave trade, new forms of un-free labour – work, paid or unpaid, without the freedom to quit – emerged to meet the demands of capitalists and their state sponsors.34 Often, organizers of these arrangements relied upon sub-contractors to recruit poor, landless workers and transport them far from home to labour on plantations, mines and railway-building projects in harsh, remote regions. Such longdistance relocations undermined the repertoire of legal protections, modes of collective action or options for escape upon which these workers had previously relied in their homelands.35 Tamils who laboured under the kangany system had counterparts across the globe, including the Chinese coolies who worked on Cuba’s sugar plantations and Peru’s guano mines; the Chilean, Peruvian and Bolivian peasants who dug sodium nitrate (an ingredient in fertilizer and explosives) in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile; the Melanesian labourers who toiled on Australian sugar plantations; and the Japanese bonded workers who harvested plantation crops in Hawaii, enduring years of bondage to the debt for their passage and other loans incurred throughout the process of their indenture. The connections among these large-scale mobilizations of un-free labour, the rapid transformation of environments throughout the developing world and the unequal exchanges that resulted from the conversion of these landscapes into sources of wealth

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for Europe and the United States have only recently begun to attract scholarly attention.36 Networks of nature in the British Empire and beyond were always deeply intertwined with networks of labour.

Showcasing contented women in bucolic gardens Unlike other un-free labour regimes, which created ‘bachelor frontiers’ of maleonly work encampments, the kangany system relied upon men and substantial numbers of women and child labourers who worked as pickers and factory hands on tea estates. Lipton’s Tea advertisements used these other bodies as a means to assert certain characteristics of the final product. Thomas Lipton was remarkably innovative in linking packaging to advertising. In 1953, the Lipton Tea Company’s president reflected on the founder’s innovations: ‘Lipton, a showman first, concentrated on his wares. At that time tea was stored in chests and weighed out for the customer, who had a right to doubt its freshness and the accuracy of its measure. Lipton decided to sell it in quarter, half, and one-pound packets. It would be fresher, easier to handle, and a standard brand. He visualized an attractive label of a Tamil girl with a basket on her head …’.37 Variants of this design appeared on the exteriors of the painted tins in which British consumers purchased Lipton’s Tea (see Figure 4.2). Images of contented Tamil harvesters, picking leaves in a pristine tropical landscape, impressed upon consumers the idea that they were purchasing a wholesome, unadulterated product that had journeyed ‘Direct from the Tea Garden to the teapot!’ Such scenes also promoted an imagined empire in which exotic women tended imperial gardens, as opposed to one in which indebted migrant labourers toiled

Figure 4.2 A tin of Lipton’s Tea (ca. 1896).

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on industrialized plantations. Yet Lipton’s motifs were not free of the internal contradictions that drove questions of representation throughout Europe and North America in the late 1800s. As Leo Marx showed in The Machine in the Garden (1964), nineteenth-century US writers – including Mark Twain, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne – wrestled with the tension between a timehonoured North American pastoral ideal and the sweeping transformations that mechanized technology had recently brought to the countryside.38 Similar antagonisms to these appear in Lipton’s Tea advertisements, along with the added challenge of gender representation. The test facing company artists was to reconcile images of the garden – an extension of the Victorian domestic sphere and thus an acceptable space for women – with scenes of industrialized tea-production landscapes and transnational mobility, explicitly masculine spheres.39 The women in one of Lipton’s advertisements from 1896 (see Figure 4.3), who appear at the centre of the image in their role as tea pickers, are literally contained within a sphere under the supervision of a white overseer, while Tamil men on the peripheries of the scene prepare Lipton’s packaged commodity for export aboard steam trains and ocean-going ships.40 Some Anglos did not consider the appearance of machines in colonial gardens to be a contradiction. Rather, they saw it as a symbol of modernity, a necessity for increased productivity and a prerequisite for taming wild environments. In

Figure 4.3 Lipton’s Tea advertisement from the Illustrated London News, 14 March 1896, 346.

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1888, the British planter William Boyd wrote enthusiastically about Ceylon’s transformation under British rule, noting, a new era is dawning on Ceylon. … The steam engine will be heard in every hollow, the steam horse will course every valley; English homes will crown every hillock, and English civilisation will bless and enrich the whole country, causing the wilderness to blossom as a rose, and making Ceylon, as it was in former times, a garden of the world and the granary of India.41

Such predictions were common throughout the empire. Whether Ceylon’s upland ecosystems could withstand the intensive agriculture required by commodity production was another question. As an anonymous colonist from Haputale in southern Ceylon exclaimed in 1885, ‘[t]he “tea mania” has now fairly set in and many estates have extensive tea nurseries and some are planting tea under coffee and chinchona [sic] trees. Oh! ye gods of agriculture, how in the name of commonsense do you expect all these products to thrive in the same six feet of soil?’42 How much stress the colony’s ‘six feet of soil’ could endure became a matter of much speculation among estate owners. Planters debated theories of agricultural practice in the pages of the Tropical Agriculturalist, a Colombo-based journal. Established in 1871, it was the world’s first periodical devoted to tropical agriculture.43 Although formal scientific research on Sri Lankan agronomy did not appear until the 1940s, turn-of-the century British farmers were well aware that tea cultivation reduced soil productivity over time. Erosion and decreased soilnitrogen levels were among the most pressing obstacles that tea cultivators faced in Sri Lanka.44 Both problems stemmed, in large part, from another acute environmental issue, deforestation. As historian James L. Webb has argued, the clearing of the island’s highlands – by both Britons and Kandayan highlanders who practised shifting cultivation – was ‘the most extensive conversion of rainforest into tropical plantation agriculture to be seen anywhere in the British Empire in the nineteenth century’.45 Between 1820 and 1948, forest cover in Sri Lanka plummeted from 80 per cent to 43 per cent.46 The removal of trees to open land for successive plantation regimes destabilized hillside surface soils, changed the hydrological regimes of upland and lowland ecosystems, reduced the biodiversity of highland forests and eliminated nutrient-rich leaf litter that had formerly accumulated beneath tree canopies.47 Planters searched for ways to replace key elements of their soils and experimented with a vast range of fertilizers – from goat manure to fish guano, seaweed to night soil, Peruvian bird guano to Chilean sodium nitrate – as remedies for nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium deficiencies. These field tests had mixed results.48

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Many British commentators retained causal associations between the clearing of forests and the march of imperial progress, despite degraded soils, increased erosion rates and losses of vegetation and fauna. As Manchester journalist Alfred Arthur Reade put it in 1884, ‘[a] large quantity of tea is now imported from this island [Ceylon], and new plantations, it is reported, are being made every month; day by day more of the primeval forest goes down before the axe of the pioneer, and before another quarter of a century has passed it is anticipated that the teas of our Indian empire will become the most valuable of its products’.49 Such sentiments built upon long-standing efforts by imperial agencies to promote plantation expansion. Following the Ceylon colonial government’s Crown Lands Encroachment Ordinance of 1840, territory not currently occupied or under cultivation, including forests, was opened to the creation of tea, rubber, coconut and cinnamon estates. A later act, the Waste Lands Ordinance of 1897, further expanded this sweeping enclosure of the common lands on which the Kandyan peasantry had traditionally relied for gathering food, obtaining fuel and pasturing cattle.50 Such state-sponsored expropriations of public goods, justified as expansions of private property, echoed the earlier Enclosure Acts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. As E. P. Thompson remarked, ‘[i]n agriculture the years between 1760 and 1820 are the years of wholesale enclosure in which, in village after village, common rights are lost’.51 Here, the metropolitan poor shared with the colonial peasantry the experience of alienation from their means of production. In Britain, those who had previously depended upon resources in the public domain, such as the meadows, forests and thickets of the English countryside, became the factory workers of the Victorian and Edwardian Eras. During Europe’s Industrial Revolution, stimulants – such as sugar, coffee, rum, tobacco and tea – formed a group of foods that anthropologist Sidney Mintz has aptly described as ‘proletarian hunger killers’. These substances linked ‘Caribbean slaves, Indian peasants and European proletarians’ through networks of production and consumption that crisscrossed the British Empire.52

The malleable politics of tea In its roles as a workday stimulant, a sobering alternative to alcohol, and a means of avoiding diseases (such as dysentery and cholera) caused by unsanitary water, tea served as a handmaiden to capitalist expansion.53 Yet, as anthropologist Nicholas Thomas has noted, ‘[o]bjects are not what they were made to be but what they

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have become.’54 During the 1900s, various social movements appropriated tea and the ‘tea break’ as sites of struggle against forms of dominance. Tea drinking proved to be a malleable practice and a symbol for social change for groups as seemingly divergent as women’s suffragettes in early twentieth-century California who used feminine associations with tea to articulate their larger political goals and British dockworkers at mid-century who struck when employers disrupted the routines of their afternoon ‘cuppa’.55 With such a pliable social biography, tea became a vector for multiple meanings.56 In its role as a colonial ambassador, ‘Lipton’s teas have carried the name and fame of Ceylon into the remotest villages of the three kingdoms and to the furthest corners of the Empire’, wrote Yorkshire Post publisher Arnold Wright in 1907.57 Lipton’s Teas made every attempt to connect its flagship product to the geography of empire. As one of its advertisements suggested, the southern half of Ceylon had become dominated by a vast array of tea estates in only six years (Figure 4.4). By 1928, Lipton’s Tea owned nine Ceylonese estates valued at just under £1 million, covering 3,593 hectares (in tea and other crops), and employing more than 5,000 coolies.58 One year before Thomas Lipton’s death in 1931, the

Figure 4.4 Lipton’s Tea advertisement from The Sketch, 12 February 1896, 4.

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multinational food conglomerate Unilever purchased Lipton’s business interests and reaped high profits until the Sri Lankan government nationalized the country’s tea plantations in 1975. After the plantations underwent re-privatization in 1992, Unilever Ceylon pursued policies that dramatically eroded the welfare of its workers, from privatization of social security benefits and outsourcing of jobs to mandatory early retirements.59 Environmental degradation from plantation agriculture, meanwhile, continued at a brisk pace. Deforestation, soil erosion, wildlife habitat destruction, water pollution and profound hydrological shifts were among the consequences of this continued industrialization of the nation’s countryside.60

Imagining the British Empire As political scientist Benedict Anderson has argued, the formation of national identity involves the emergence of ‘an imagined community’, a perception of group coherence that develops in the minds of its members through narratives of belonging and rules about inclusion or exclusion from the body politic.61 Empires, too, require the production of imagined communities, meditated by interactions of aspirations with material constraints. The afternoon ‘cuppa’ and the associated ceremonies of ‘tea time’ continue to connect former imperial subjects far and wide with landscapes of labour and diverse environments. Such eco-cultural networks coalesce not only in the production of the commodity, but also in its transportation, marketing and consumption. Selling tea required making connections for the buyer. In an attempt at olfactory imperialism, British publicists artfully crafted associations between the scent of Lipton’s Tea and the tourist experience of a visit to Ceylon. As the popular travel guide writer Allister Macmillan put it in the 1920s: ‘When passengers from the steamers land at Colombo for a brief tour of … the city and its environs, there is always at the back of their minds the memories and impressions of the fragrant Lipton tea; and these memories and impressions are recalled vividly and pleasantly by the sight of the premises of Messrs. Lipton, Ltd., in the beautiful district of the Cinnamon Gardens, at the end of Union Place, one of the principal thoroughfares of Colombo.’62 Such potent linkages between consumption and place suggest how consumers experience imagined geographies by ingesting exotic substances. For his poor and middling customers who were unable to travel to the source, Lipton pioneered the notion that they could remember a place to

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which they had never been by experiencing its essence through consuming a product. This was, quite literally, a metabolic dislocation in which terroir – ‘a taste of place’ – transported consumers to a distant locale. The term terroir suggests a region with a soil, microclimate, drainage properties or other distinct environmental features that impart unique qualities to the food produced there. As one author has described it, terroir also contains a less quantifiable element: ‘Beyond the measurable ecosystem, there is an additional dimension – the spiritual aspect that recognizes the joys, the heartbreaks, the pride, the sweat, and the frustrations of its history.’63 Such a definition hints at lifting the veil of the commodity fetish, but when framed solely in mystical terms, the actual labour and environmental relations that facilitated the commodity’s social life remain invisible. Working to expose these factors, the Jamaican-born cultural critic Stuart Hall summed up the presence of myriad unseen ‘foreign elements’ that comprise the British cup of sweetened tea: I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children’s teeth. There are thousands of others beside me that are, you know, the cup of tea itself. Because they don’t grow it in Lancashire, you know. Not a single tea plantation exists within the United Kingdom. This is the symbolisation of English identity – I mean, what does anybody in the world know about an English person except that they can’t get through the day without a cup of tea?64

By the year of Lipton’s death, tea had become the unmistakable cornerstone commodity of the British Empire. As the 1931 Imperial Economic Committee Report on Tea claimed, ‘[o]ver 70 per cent of the tea exported is produced in the Empire, and nearly 70 per cent is consumed by the Empire. Over two-thirds of the entire capital engaged in tea production is provided by the Empire. All the machinery employed in India and Ceylon is of Empire origin, and over 60 per cent of the chests used for the transport of tea are imported from Empire countries’.65 Thus, as Lipton well understood, tea consumption amounted to an act of British ‘culinary patriotism’.66 The ‘supermarket narrative’, developed in large part by a Scottish grocer who owned a sizeable chunk of Sri Lanka’s highlands, was not entirely Lipton’s innovation, however. In the 1820s, the East India Company distributed sugar bowls inscribed with the text: ‘East India Sugar Not Made by Slaves’ (Figure 4.5). Since at least the beginning of the nineteenth century, stories about place and labour have met in the marketplace. In the case of the British Empire, such commodity biographies re-imagined the eco-cultural networks that facilitated

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Figure 4.5 Blue glass sugar bowl inscribed in gilt, ‘EAST INDIA SUGAR/not made by/SLAVES’, ca. 1820-30, British Museum. Source: Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1950), vol. 2, plate XXII.

rituals of consumption. These linkages depended upon a diverse array of actors, such as Tamil coolies who picked tea leaves, Caribbean slaves who cut sugarcane and Anglo planters who oversaw the felling of native forests. The eco-cultural networks of an empire kept cups full at garden parties and textile factories from Cape Town and Kandy, Winnipeg and Wellington, alike.

Notes 1 The author thanks James Beattie, Tanisha Ford, Nina Gordon, Eugenia Herbert, Barbara Krauthamer, Benjamin Madley, Jerry Melillo, Lalise Melillo, Emily O’Gorman, Dawn Peterson and Elizabeth Pryor for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter. 2 Michael Pollan, ‘The Way We Live Now: Produce Politics’, The New York Times Magazine (14 January 2001): 11. 3 Gail Hollander, ‘Re-naturalizing Sugar: Narratives of Place, Production and Consumption’. Social & Cultural Geography 4, 1 (2003): 60. Also see the chapters in Brands and Branding Geographies, ed. Andy Pike (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Pub., 2011); and Carol Morris and James Kirwan, ‘Food commodities, geographical knowledges and the reconnection of production and consumption: The case of naturally embedded food products’. Geoforum 41, 1 (2010): 132. 4 Sir Thomas Lipton, Lipton’s Autobiography, 2nd edn (New York: Duffield and Green, 1932), 177. 5 Karl Marx, Capital, 3 vols. (1867–94; repr.; New York: Penguin Books, 1990), vol. 1, 125–77. Major works that deal with ‘commodity fetishism’ include:

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7 8 9

10

11

12 13

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Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire Marshall Sahlins, ‘Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-pacific Sector of the World-system’. Proceedings of the British Academy 74 (1988): 1–51; Michael T. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); and György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971). Few attempts have been made to analyse environmental aspects of commodity fetishism. For two exceptions, see Nicolás Kosoy and Esteve Corbera, ‘Payments for Ecosystems Services as Commodity Fetishism’. Ecological Economics 69, 6 (2010): 1228–36; and Ian Hudson and Mark Hudson, ‘Removing the Veil? Commodity Fetishism, Fair Trade, and the Environment’. Organization & Environment 16, 4 (2003): 413–30. Effects of soil degradation include decreasing soil fertility, erosion, salinization, acidification, pollution and compaction. See J. K. Syers, ‘Managing Soils for Long-Term Productivity’. Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 352, 1356 (1997): 1012. K. Locana Gunaratna, Spatial Concerns in Development: A Sri Lankan Perspective (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, 2006), 163. Stuart McCook, ‘Global rust belt: Hemileia vastatrix and the ecological integration of world coffee production since 1850’. Journal of Global History 1, 2 (2006): 180. James Taylor, as quoted in James S. Duncan, ‘The Struggle to Be Temperate: Climate and “Moral Masculinity” in Mid-Nineteenth Century Ceylon’. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21, 1 (2000): 38. Goutam Kumar Sarkar, The World Tea Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 1; S. Rajaratnam, ‘The Ceylon Tea Industry, 1886-1931’. Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies 4, 2 (1961): 169; Roy Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003), 164; and Thomas J. Lipton Company, Views of Lipton’s Ceylon Tea Estates (New York: Thomas J. Lipton), 1. James L. A. Webb, Jr., Tropical Pioneers: Human Agency and Ecological Change in the Highlands of Sri Lanka, 1800–1900 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002), 64. James Maurice Scott, The Tea Story (London: Heinemann, 1964), 17. Denys Forrest, Tea for the British: The Social and Economic History of a Famous Trade (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), 27, 284; and John Burnett, Liquid Pleasures: A Social History of Drinks in Modern Britain (New York: Routledge, 1999), 61. George Orwell, ‘A Nice Cup of Tea’, Evening Standard, 12 January 1946. For a discussion of why the British overwhelmingly rejected coffee in favour of tea, see S. D. Smith, ‘Accounting for Taste: British Coffee Consumption in Historical Perspective’. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27, 2 (1996): 183–214.

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15 Jonas Hanaway, An Essay on Tea, in A Journal of Eight Days Journey, 2 vols. (London: H. Woodfall and C. Henderson, 1757), 2: 17, 35–6. 16 Arthur Reade, Tea and Tea Drinking (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1884), 20. On the reception of Reade’s book, see Julie E. Fromer, A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian England (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 95–9. 17 Stephen Constantine, ‘ “Bringing the Empire Alive” The Empire Marketing Board and Imperial Propaganda, 1926-33’, in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. John M. MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 217–18. For a more general analysis of popular conceptions of the British imperial enterprise as intimately tied to nation-building, see Stephen Vella, ‘Imagining Empire: Company, Crown and Bengal in the Formation of British Imperial Ideology, 1757-84’. Portuguese Studies 16 (2000): 296. 18 On the East India Company and the opium trade with China, see the chapters in Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952, eds. Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2000). 19 Samuel Baildon, The Tea Industry in India: A Review of Finance and Labour, and a Guide for Capitalists and Assistants (London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1882), 11, 32–3. 20 David Crole, Tea: A Textbook of Tea Planting and Manufacture (London: Crosby, Lockwood and Son, 1897), 40. For more on these ideas, note Jayeeta Sharma, ‘British Science, Chinese Skill and Assam Tea: Making Empire’s Garden’. Indian Economic & Social History Review 43, 4 (2006): 429–55. On the connections among race, marketing and Victorian imperial spectacle, see Anne McClintock, ‘Soft-Soaping Empire: Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising’, in Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement, eds. George Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis and Tim Putnam (New York: Routledge, 1994), 128–52. 21 N. A., Views of Lipton’s Ceylon Tea Estates (New York: Thomas J. Lipton, 1912), 2–3. 22 Lipton, Lipton’s Autobiography, 177; and Michael D’Antonio, A Full Cup: Sir Thomas Lipton’s Extraordinary Life and his Quest for the America’s Cup (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010), 127. The quote is from Lipton, Leaves of the Lipton Logs (London: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., 1932), 174. 23 For more on Lipton’s Tea and the Chicago World’s Fair, see Piya Chatterjee, A Time for Tea: Women, Labor, and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 93. 24 Sir James Emerson Tennent, Ceylon: An Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and Topographical, 5th edn, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1860), vol. 2, 251–2. 25 Dharmapriya Wesumperuma, Indian Immigrant Plantation Workers in Sri Lanka: A Historical Perspective, 1880–1910 (Nugegoda, Sri Lanka: Dharmapriya

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31 32

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Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire Wesumperuma, 1986); and R. Jayaraman, ‘Indian Emigration to Ceylon: Some Aspects of the Historical and Social Background of the Emigrants’. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 4, 4 (1967): 319–59. One possible origin for the term ‘coolie’ was the Tamil word for wages, kūli. See Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, new edn, ed. William Crooke (London: J. Murray, 1903), 250. S. B. D. De Silva, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 237, 239. Patrick Peebles, The Plantation Tamils of Ceylon (London: Leicester University Press, 2001), 38. Roland Wenzlhuemer, From Coffee to Tea Cultivation in Ceylon, 1880–1900: An Economic and Social History (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 249. Karumuttu Thiagaraja Chettiar, ‘Indian Coolies in Ceylon Estates’, The Indian Review (March 1917), as quoted in Asoka Bandarage, Colonialism in Sri Lanka: The Political Economy of the Kandyan Highlands, 1833–1886 (Colombo: Lake House Investments, Ltd., 1983), 209. Wenzlhuemer, From Coffee to Tea Cultivation in Ceylon, 245; and Raj Sekhar Basu, Nandanar’s Children: The Paraiyans’ Tryst with Destiny, Tamil Nadu 1850–1956 (New Delhi: Sage Publications India, 2011), 123. On the Anglicization of Paraiyan as pariah, see Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson, 678. The estimate of 400,000 coolies comes from Ceylon Commission, Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, 1904, Official Handbook of the Ceylon Court (Colombo: George J. A. Skeen Government Printer, 1904), 74. Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt (London: Verso, 2011), 395–403. For details on this system of isolation and surveillance, see Vijya Samaraweera, ‘Masters and Servants in Sri Lankan Plantations: Labour Laws and Labour Control in an Emergent Export Economy’. Indian Economic and Social History Review 18, 2 (1981): 123–55. Eric Meyer does offer critiques and caveats to this notion of total isolation, pointing out that villages and estates did depend upon each other for surplus products. See Meyer, ‘ “Enclave” Plantations, “Hemmed-In” Villages and Dualistic Representations in Colonial Ceylon’, in Plantations, Proletarians, and Peasants in Colonial Asia, eds. E. Valentine Daniel, Henry Bernstein and Tom Brass (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1992), 199–228. Among the few monographs on Ceylon’s labour history, dealing predominately with urban trade unionism, is Visakha Kumari Jayawardena, The Rise of the Labor Movement in Ceylon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1972). The martial aspects of Ceylonese tea estates are described in E. Valentine Daniel, ‘Tea Talk: Violent Measures in the Discursive Practices of Sri Lanka’s Estate Tamils’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, 3 (1993): 568–600. On the

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abolition of the kangany system, see Amarjit Kaur, ‘Kangani System’, in Southeast Asia: A Historical Encyclopedia, from Angkor War to East Timor, ed. Ooi Keat Gin (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004), 710; and Frank Heidemann, Kanganies in Sri Lanka and Malaysia: Tamil Recruiter-cum-foreman as a Sociological Category in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (Munich: Anacon, 1992), 85. On the shift from agrarian time to factory time, see E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism’. Past & Present 38, 1 (1967): 56–97. I have used Seymour Drescher’s timeframe for the Age of Abolition (from the 1780s to the 1880s). Drescher, ‘Whose Abolition? Popular Pressure and the Ending of the British Slave Trade’. Past & Present 143, 1 (1994): 136–66. Slave traders shipped at least 11,863,000 slaves across the Atlantic. See Paul E. Lovejoy, ‘The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa: A Review of the Literature’. Journal of African History 30, 3 (1989): 368. Historian Gunther Peck discusses the ‘geography of labour mobility’ when conceptualizing how the labour power of workers became commodified through spatial dislocation. See Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2. For more on the dimensions of this emerging area of study, see Edward D. Melillo, ‘The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840-1930’. American Historical Review 117, 4 (October 2012): 1028–60. For more on the environmental and social aspects of unequal exchanges in world history, see Alf Hornborg, ‘Zero-sum World Challenges in Conceptualizing Environmental Load Displacement and Ecologically Unequal Exchange in the World-System’. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 50, 3–4 (2009): 237–62. Robert B. Smallwood, Sir Thomas Lipton: England’s Great Merchant Sportsman (1850–1931) (New York: Newcomen Society in North America, 1953), 14–15. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). On Victorian notions of gardens as a woman’s place, see Sarah Bilston, ‘Queens of the Garden: Victorian Women Gardeners and the Rise of the Gardening Advice Text’. Victorian Literature and Culture 36, 1 (2008): 1–19; and Dianne Harris, ‘Cultivating Power: The Language of Feminism in Women’s Garden Literature, 1870-1920’. Landscape Journal 13, 2 (1994): 113–23. For a useful discussion of portrayals of Asian and African women in British advertisements during this period, see Anandi Ramanmurthy, Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). William Boyd, ‘Autobiography of a Periya Durai’. Ceylon Literary Register 3 (1888): 410.

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42 Anon., as quoted in L. A. Wickermerante, ‘The Establishment of the Tea Industry in Ceylon’, in The Sri Lanka Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. John Holt (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 279. 43 Lakshman Yapa, ‘The Poverty Discourse and the Poor in Sri Lanka’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 23, 1 (1998): 101. 44 On the emergence of soil science in Sri Lanka, see Adam Pain, ‘Agricultural Research in Sri Lanka: An Historical Account’. Modern Asian Studies 20, 4 (1986): 758. On erosion resulting from tea cultivation in Sri Lanka, see Hans-Joachim Fuchs, Tea Environments and Yield in Sri Lanka (Weikersheim, Germany : Margraf Scientific Publishers, 1989), 274. For more about planters’ awareness of the connection between tea cultivation and nutrient loss, see T. C. Owen, The Tea Planter’s Manual (Colombo: A. M. & J. Ferguson, 1886), 38. 45 Webb, Tropical Pioneers, 2. 46 Lareef Zubair, ‘Challenges for Environmental Impact Assessment in Sri Lanka’. Environmental Impact Assessment Review 21, 5 (2001): 470. 47 P. Wickramagamage, ‘Large-scale Deforestation for Plantation Agriculture in the Hill Country of Sri Lanka and its Impacts’. Hydrological Processes 12, 13–14 (1998): 2015–28. On biodiversity losses resulting from the creation of tea plantations, see Enoka Priyadarshani Kudavidanage, ‘Effects of Landuse Change and Forest Fragmentation on the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning in the Tropical Lowlands of Sri Lanka’ (PhD diss., National University of Singapore, 2011). 48 Webb, Tropical Pioneers, 105. Hugh Fraser Macmillan, Tropical Planting and Gardening with Special Reference to Ceylon, 2nd edn (Colombo: H. W. Cave & Co., 1914), 24–31. 49 Alfred Arthur Reade, Tea and Tea Drinking (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1884), 21. 50 Duncan, In the Shadows of the Tropics: Climate, Race and Biopower in Nineteenth Century Ceylon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 145. 51 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), 198. The enclosure movement in Britain built upon earlier expropriations of native peoples’ lands during British colonization of North America. Thanks to Benjamin L. Madley for this insight. 52 Sidney Mintz, ‘The Caribbean as a Socio-Cultural Area’, in Peoples and Cultures of the Caribbean, ed. M. Horowitz (Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1971), 24. 53 This argument is explored more fully in A. R. T. Kamasang, ‘Tea – Midwife and Nurse to Capitalism’. Race & Class 51, 1 (2009): 69–83. 54 Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 4.

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55 Jessica Sewell, ‘Tea and Suffrage’. Food, Culture and Society 11, 4 (December 2008): 487–508; and Robert L. Heilbroner, ‘Labor Unrest in the British Nationalized Sector’. Social Research 19, 1 (1952): 69. 56 For more on the notion of commodities as possessors of social biographies, see The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 57 Twentieth Century Impressions of Ceylon: Its History, People, Commerce, Industries and Resources, ed. Arnold Wright (London: Lloyd’s Greater Britain Pub. Co., 1907), 442. 58 Calculated from statistics in Peter Mathias, Retailing Revolution: A History of Multiple Retailing in the Food Trades based upon the Allied Suppliers Group of Companies (London: Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd., 1967), 335–6. 59 Ashwini Sukthankar and Kevin Kolben, ‘Indian Labor Legislation and Cross-Border Solidarity in Historical Context’, in Global Unions: Challenging Transnational Capital Through Cross-border Campaigns, ed. Kate Bronfenbrenner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 73. 60 Zubair, ‘Challenges for Environmental Impact Assessment in Sri Lanka’, 470; and P. Sivapalan, ‘Tea Industry in Sri Lanka’, in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Tea Science and Human Health, ed. N. Kumar (Calcutta: Tea Research Association, 1993), 77–85. 61 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), 15. 62 Allister Macmillan, Extract from Seaports of India and Ceylon: Historical, Descriptive, Commercial, Industrial Facts, Figures and Resources (London: W. H. & L. Collingridge, 1928), 433. Among the best works on smell in history is Alain Corbain, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Also see, Mark S. R. Jenner, ‘AHR Forum: Follow Your Nose? Smell, Smelling, and Their Histories’. The American Historical Review 116, 2 (2011): 335–51. 63 James E. Wilson, Terroir: The Role of Geology, Climate and Culture in the Making of French Wines (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1998), 58. Karl Marx frequently used the German term Stoffwechsel, or metabolism, when discussing productive relations between humans and nature. In his analysis of the rise of industrial agriculture, Marx introduced the notion of ‘an irreparable rift in the interdependent processes of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country.’ Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 949. For more on the centrality of the metabolic metaphor in Marx’s writing, see John Bellamy Foster, ‘Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology’. American Journal of Sociology 105, 2 (1999): 366–405; and Jason W. Moore, ‘Environmental Crises and the

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Metabolic Rift in World-Historical Perspective’. Organization & Environment 13, 2 (2000): 123–57. 64 Stuart Hall, ‘Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities’, in Culture, Globalisation and the World System, ed. Anthony D. King (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1991), 48–9. 65 Imperial Economic Committee Report on Tea (1 June 1931), as quoted in C. R. Harler, The Culture and Marketing of Tea (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 362. 66 I have borrowed the concept of ‘culinary patriotism’ from Kaori O’Connor, ‘The King’s Christmas Pudding: Globalization, Recipes, and the Commodities of Empire’. Journal of Global History 4, 1 (2009): 127.

Select bibliography Appadurai, Arjun (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Bandarage, Asoka. Colonialism in Sri Lanka: The Political Economy of the Kandyan Highlands, 1833–1886. Colombo: Lake House Investments, Ltd., 1983. Chatterjee, Piya. A Time for Tea: Women, Labor, and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Daniel, E. Valentine. ‘Tea Talk: Violent Measures in the Discursive Practices of Sri Lanka’s Estate Tamils’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, 3 (1993): 568–600. De Silva, S. B. D. The Political Economy of Underdevelopment. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Duncan, James S. ‘The Struggle to Be Temperate: Climate and ‘Moral Masculinity’ in Mid-Nineteenth Century Ceylon’. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21, 1 (2000): 34–7. Fromer, Julie E. A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian England. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. Lipton, Sir Thomas. Lipton’s Autobiography, 2nd edn. New York: Duffield and Green, 1932. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. McClintock, Anne. ‘Soft-Soaping Empire: Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising’, in Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement, eds. George Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis and Tim Putnam New York: Routledge, 1994, 128–52. Melillo, Edward D. ‘The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840-1930’. American Historical Review 117, 4 (October 2012): 1028–60.

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Moxham, Roy. Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003. O’Connor, Kaori. ‘The King’s Christmas Pudding: Globalization, Recipes, and the Commodities of Empire’. Journal of Global History 4, 1 (2009): 127–55. Peebles, Patrick. The Plantation Tamils of Ceylon. London: Leicester University Press, 2001. Samaraweera, Vijya. ‘Masters and Servants in Sri Lankan Plantations: Labour Laws and Labour Control in an Emergent Export Economy’. Indian Economic and Social History Review 18, 2 (1981): 123–55. Thompson, E. P. ‘Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism’. Past & Present 38, 1 (1967): 56–97. Webb, James L. A., Jr. Tropical Pioneers: Human Agency and Ecological Change in the Highlands of Sri Lanka, 1800-1900. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002. Wenzlhuemer, Roland. From Coffee to Tea Cultivation in Ceylon, 1880–1900: An Economic and Social History. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Wesumperuma, Dharmapriya. Indian Immigrant Plantation Workers in Sri Lanka: A Historical Perspective, 1880–1910. Nugegoda, Sri Lanka: Dharmapriya Wesumperuma, 1986.

5

Africa, Europe and the Birds Between Them1 Nancy J. Jacobs

The migration of birds from the temperate north to warmer southern climes is both eternal and seasonal, but for thousands of years human knowledge about birds was local. Their yearly disappearance was mysterious until, slowly and through their own travel, some Europeans acquired and recorded information about where the birds went when winter came. Then, around 1900, a few experimenters in Europe took advantage of the birds’ movement to send communication, in the form of rings on the legs of the birds, to other people who met birds on their travels. As European scientists amalgamated the data, the astounding scale and complex ecology of the migration to Africa became known. Bird ringing gave rise to new knowledge and new associations between people. What was local became intercontinental. But the birds do not just fly between continents. They fly between Africa and Europe, human spaces with monumental and hierarchical associations. Over the past century, the particulars of the triad Europe–migrating birds–Africa have changed. In the age of empire, Europeans extending claim over the colonies identified with birds that bred in the north and wintered in Africa. Now, in the age of international development that followed the end of empire, Europeans contribute money to support conservation programmes for threatened Palearctic migrants to Africa. Over the past century and a half, bird behaviour that had always been local has become defined by human relations across the largest canvasses of history.

Hemispheric connections and local knowledge, 1500–1800 The seasonal travel of birds between northern and southern landmasses has repeated itself for millennia.2 The scale, numbers and difficulty of the migration

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are awe inspiring, but quantifying this epic hemispheric event is difficult. Current ornithology accounts for 215 species in Palearctic–Afrotropical migration systems. According to the ornithologist Ian Newton, the range of possible numbers is wide: 3,500–5,000 million land birds, ‘millions’ of shorebirds and waterfowl ‘and also seabirds’. The migrants spread across the entire region, joining an estimated 70,000–75,000 million birds that breed in Africa.3 Through birds, spaces separated by extreme distances were – and are – united in ecological relationships between species. On either end of the migrations and all along their length, people and birds have engaged, as farmers and foragers in cultivated fields, as predator and prey and through the exchange of microorganisms and in the co-production of habitats. These material relationships have intertwined with discursive ones to make a network of both humans and non-humans.4 From early times, the reappearance of birds widely marked the season for planting and sowing.5 People formulated explanations about where the birds might go during the months of their absence. Historical and ethnographic evidence from southern Africa conveys understandings that birds hid away in cold seasons. Xhosa schoolchildren in the twentieth century reported that kites went to rocky shelters, where they moulted all their feathers, and quails went underground, where they turned into frog-like creatures.6 Texts dating to medieval Europe convey similar notions of hibernation, whether in trees, caves, underground or under water. This is not to say that no one noticed that birds flew in certain directions. Aristotle reported that birds went south to avoid the cold. Other Greeks stated that they went to Egypt. In the thirteenth century, the German emperor and bird expert Frederick II discerned that birds flew south for food and postulated that they did not breed there.7 Mid-nineteenth-century testimony from the Sahara conveyed a similarly specific understanding of routes: ‘The natives are perfectly familiar with the fact of the swallow’s migration, as they say they go to visit Timbuctoo, the El Dorado of Arab and swallow.’8 The birds did carry evidence about their travels, but people were not in a position to interpret it. One European breeding bird, the Marsh Warbler (Acrocephalus palustris), signalled where it had been, testifying to its travels with imitations of African birdsong, but until recently no human broke the code and absorbed the lesson.9 Other messages from birds arrived more sporadically, but would have been easier to decode. Sometimes birds returned to breeding grounds bearing witness of attack by people with foreign technologies. The first documented occasion was in 1822 when a white stork impaled with a spear arrived in Rostock, Germany. This stork became known as der Pfeilstorch (meaning ‘arrow stork’, a technically incorrect name because a spear, not an arrow, ran through

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the bird). Somehow, it was able to live through the spearing, escape its hunter and make it back to Germany for the breeding season (Figure 5.1). A German newspaper surmised that it must have been speared in Africa, based on the type of wood and on the sort of iron tip. Since then, other birds bearing weapons have been recorded. It is fair to imagine that these clues appeared before 1822, as well; but, with no means or incentive to track the provenance of the weapons, they did not lead to understandings of hemispheric migration. Direct knowledge about the birds’ other places came with European exploration. By the early modern period, Europeans were travelling to their winter territory. In 1686, a Dutch ship, the Stavenisse, was wrecked on the Indian Ocean coast of what is now South Africa. Survivors found refuge among ‘Magoses people’ – meaning the amaXhosa, who were Bantu-speaking agropastoralists in what is now South Africa. Upon their rescue, the sailors reported to the Dutch

Figure 5.1 Der Pfeilstorch (‘arrow stork’). Source: Reproduced courtesy of the Zoological Collection, the University of Rostock.

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geographer Nicholaas Witsen that storks were ‘found there during the time that they are not in Holland, although not in great numbers’.10 The great English ornithological pioneer John Ray may have been influenced by classical writers or by contemporary mariners when he described birds flying to Africa in 1691. But theories of migration did not displace the hibernation thesis; in his 1757 Migrationes avium, Linnaeus averred that swallows hibernated at the bottom of lakes. What birds did in winter remained a real debate among the bestinformed naturalists of Europe into the nineteenth century.11 Most vernacular knowledge of the hemispheric network created by migrating birds was doubly local, in its distribution and in its vision of the birds’ spaces. Compared with the hemispheric migration system, people’s knowledge operated on a more limited spatial scale. These sites of knowledge about bird migration were distributed along the routes and associated only loosely. Perhaps because the birds were consistent, the isolated understandings of migration exhibited consistency.

Avian geography and human geography, 1700s–1800s Early modern European geographers mapped the globe for the first time, learning the size and shape of the African landmass. Dominated by the slave trade and confined to the coasts, their engagement with Africa led them to map it mentally as a space of barbarism and mystery. Avian life in Africa was also unknown. In the tenth edition (from 1758 to 1759) of the Systema Naturae, Linnaeus listed only twenty-two African species. Revising for the twelfth edition (from 1766 to 1768), he drew on the publications of the ornithologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson and included fifty-two more birds from Africa.12 European explorations of Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century revealed many birds previously unknown, and publications detailing species accumulated.13 By the nineteenth century, Europe and Africa were not mere landmasses but were idealized hierarchical categories of human difference.14 Biologists, too, needed a geography of difference, and here they refined the continental model. Recent work by Kirsten Greer conveys that British military officers in Gilbraltar and Malta in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries used birds to theorize zoogeographic regions.15 Encountering so many familiar species, one proclaimed ‘from an ornithological point of view, the northern coast of Africa, from Tunis to Cape Spartel, is not much more than a province of Europe.’16 This understanding accounted for what the birds were doing, but was also contingent upon the officers’ understandings about the rightful placement of boundaries. Drawing

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on these observations, in 1858 Philip Lutley Sclater proposed a schema of six biological regions. He agreed that North Africa and Europe belonged together, but also added northern Asia to the unit: Europe may be a very good continent of itself, in many ways, and in some respects worth all the rest of the world put together – ‘Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay,’ says the Poet – but it is certainly not entitled to rank as one of the primary zoological regions of the earth’s surface, any more than as one of the physical divisions. Europe and Northern Asia are in fact quite inseparable.17

This region he named the ‘Palearctic’. To its southwest, he placed the ‘Aethiopian or Western Palaeotropical Region’ (including southern Arabia) and to the southeast, the ‘Indian or Middle Palaeotropical Region Region’. The boundary between the Ethiopian and Palearctic regions through the Sahara, traditionally the border between the white and black races, is a familiar one to geographers. There may be excellent zoological and ecological reasons for distinguishing avian populations on either side of that boundary, but its initial placement was not immune from human racial geographies. In his description of avian regions, Sclater cited inspiration from George Gliddon, Josiah Nott and Louis Agassiz, polygenist theorists of separate human ‘races’. He credited them with mapping ‘the principal varieties of mankind’. Continuing, he reflected: I suppose few philosophical zoologists, who have paid attention to the general laws of the distribution of organic life, would now-a-days deny that, as a general rule, every species of animal must have been created within and over the geographic area which it now occupies.18

This avian geography provided the basis for Alfred Russel Wallace’s 1876 master synthesis of zoogeographic regions.19 The spatial units defined by Sclater and Wallace are still accepted, with the ‘Ethiopian’ now known as ‘Afrotropical’.20 Another powerful idea from nineteenth-century biogeography was that the ‘country a bird resorts to for the propagation of its species should be regarded as its true habitat’.21 Birds belonged where they were born. Zoology had territories akin to continents and forms of belonging to citizenship.

Tracking birds from imperial Europe to colonial Africa A map showing scientific knowledge of the geography of migration just before the turn of the twentieth century depicts a truncated world (Figure 5.2).22 It was

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Figure 5.2 The Ornithological Understanding of Migration, c.1900. Source: Ottó Hermann, Recensio critica automatica of the Doctrine of Bird-Migration (Budapest: Royal Hungarian Ministry of Agriculture, 1905), 68.

known that birds breeding in Europe migrated to North Africa and up the Nile. But beyond that, this map, like so many other European conceptions of Africa, remained blank.23 The map underestimated what the birds were doing, which was dramatic: the white stork (Ciconia ciconia) summered as far north as the Arctic and wintered on the south coast of South Africa. Compare this map to the second one (Figure 5.3), which shows what had been learned about stork migration by 1910.24 In the first decade of the twentieth century, human knowledge had finally caught up with the birds. Why did some birds go so far? Because of food. There are enough animals in Africa to consume the food supply; breeding populations are constrained by what can be supported in the leanest seasons, but some habitats produce a seasonal surplus that can accommodate migrants. Transient birds follow rains that boost plant growth and insect populations, floods that spread fish and fires that flush out small animals.25 The greatest numbers of migrants who cross the desert collect in Sudan and Ethiopia, with numbers decreasing from there across two transects to the west across the Sahel and south to the Cape. With its limited seasonable variability, the equatorial forest of west central Africa hosts few

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Figure 5.3 Thienemann’s 1910 Map, ‘The Trek to and in Africa’. Source: Johannes Thienemann, ‘Der Zug des Weißen Storches (Cinconia cinonia) auf Grund der Resultate, die Von der Vogelwarte Rossitten mit den Markierungsversuchen bisher Erzielt Worden Sind’, Zoologische Jahrbücher, Supplementheft 12 (1910): 665–86. The map can be found as ‘Tafel 17’ in the endmatter.

visitors.26 Since the northern winter coincides with the wet southern summer, many birds find reason to fly from Europe not just to the warmth of West Africa, but also to better-watered lands beyond the equator. The limited seasonal variation on southern landmasses explains why migration is not a reciprocal exchange between bioregions. Species breeding in the Afrotropical zone experience no pressure equal to the northern winter and do not compensate by flying to Europe or Asia. Many Afrotropical

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breeding birds do migrate, but within that eco-zone and not beyond it to the Palearctic region.27 The extent of migration became known through the deployment of new technologies after the colonization of Africa. When people of different latitudes made connections along migratory routes, leg rings, letters and newspapers joined birds in carrying information. Knowledge about birds transcended local spaces and travelled, like the birds, across the hemisphere. In 1893, a crane wearing a locket was discovered in Sudan.28 The message inside – written in English, German, French and Russian – reported that the crane had been freed in 1892 by Mr F. R. Falz-Fein, owner of a large estate and nature reserve in south Russia. The communication here was nearly a dead end. Its find came to light three years later through Rudolf Slatin, an Austrian military officer who had been serving as an adviser to the Mahdist state in Khartoum. Although it predates European empire, this case foreshadows others in that a visitor from Europe was responsible for closing the loop between the found bird and the ringer. A Danish teacher, Hans Christian Mortensen, began banding birds in 1899, but did not immediately turn to species that penetrated the Sahara.29 Experimenters in Budapest and East Prussia were the first to put rings on conspicuous migrants who flew to southern Africa, the storks. The Protestant minister and amateur naturalist Johannes Thienemann founded a new sort of scientific establishment, a ‘bird observatory’, in Rossitten, East Prussia (now Rybachy in Russia) that began ringing storks in 1906. Otto Herman of the Royal Hungarian Central Bureau for Ornithology also joined in launching messages to fellow humans on the far end of the birds’ journeys.30 Many banded birds disappeared, and many rings were found and never reported. It takes little imagination, however, to conceive of the amazement created by birds wearing rings. The understanding, demonstrated in some parts of the continent, that birds sometimes bore omens, would have heightened interest.31 Africans who found rings on birds often turned to missionaries, colonial officials, or white settlers who were experienced with the technologies of writing and bureaucracy. New technologies and methods, including communication and bureaucracy, facilitated imperial rule.32 The insertion of colonial officials into the birds’ wintering grounds and their position in the imperial network between birds’ wintering grounds and the metropole made possible the reporting of found rings. Before imperial occupation, the chances that a bird ring would make its way to a literate person who would be motivated to report back to Europe were slim. Thus, under empire, the circle among

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ringers, migrating birds and ring finders was more easily closed than it would have been in earlier decades. A handful of examples illuminates the way that the ring-bearing birds were received and how imperial officials served as conduits of information. In 1908, a native commissioner in Fort Jameson, North-Eastern Rhodesia, wrote to the British magazine The Field: A curious thing happened here last week. A Stork (Ciconia alba) was shot in the garden of the native village nearby. It had a metal ring on one of its legs marked ‘Vogelwarte, Rossitten 163, Germania’. It was flying wild with others when shot. It would be interesting to know whether this bird had escaped from some owner and flown here from Europe, and if the date and other details of its escape are known. I have preserved the skin complete with legs attached bearing the metal ring, and should be glad to forward it to the original owner of the bird if possible.33

In Roseires, Sudan, an official in the Repression of Slavery Department reported on another ring from Rossitten.34 A white farmer in Natal, then a British colony, now part of South Africa, turned to The Times of London to make an early report of a find from Hungary: ‘On January 30, 1909, my nephew shot a stork with his rifle. On examining it he was astonished to find a metal band round one of its legs. On this band was the following inscription: “Ornith. Kozspout, Budapest, Hungaria, 209.” Should you find room for these few lines, I hope they may come to the notice of those who put the band on.’35 Other storks bearing bands were found by Africans. Thienemann himself published news of a 1907 find by a ‘bushman’ in the Kalahari: ‘The aluminum ring, which seems to have been considered by the bushmen to have been of heavenly origin, passed into the hands of a trader on the northern edge of the Kalahari, who sent it, with an account of the way in which it had been obtained, to the Editor of “The Wide World” in London.’36 A group in Lesotho requested the help of a white interlocutor, who wrote to the South African Ornithologists Union’s journal: ‘I heard some days ago of a White Stork (Ciconia ciconia) having been shot in January by a native at Morija, the Paramount Chief ’s village, about 25 miles from here, with a silver ring attached to its leg. I got the chief to send it in for inspection, as he does not want to part with it, and the ring is still attached to the half-dried leg. It bears the inscription “Vogelwarte Rositten [sic] 1265 Germania.” Can one find out the history of the bird, as the natives are much interested in it?’37 A later incident similarly shows that the ring had value as an object.38 The district commissioner of Karonga submitted a recovered ring to the colonial

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government of Malawi with an account of a larger water bird caught in a trap. The commissioner wrote: ‘It was found to bear the ring, which I attach hereto, on its leg. The boys took it to the Chief who looked upon it as a charm and carried it on the shaft of his spear till his death in 1929, when his successor removed the ring and used it as an ornament on his little finger. In this manner it came to my notice.’39 The chief kept it for its potency, perhaps because it had come from an avian messenger from the skies. In this case, the finders did not seek out a human instigator, even if the ring had writing on it. Perhaps these villagers were less literate, less well connected to sympathetic literate whites, or less trusting of white interlocutors than others had been. The recovery of bird rings communicated not only where but also when and how birds migrated. Imagine how riveting this description from a student in the Transvaal of the manner of storks’ leaving would have been to a Europe-bound ornithologist: Towards the end of January and in the first days of February, the storks begin to leave the southern Transvaal. One morning, when they come from their resting places, they do not scatter as usual over the land, but keep close together in their search for food. Beating their wings they are always chasing each other about. Then they fly up in tortuous lines until they come high up in the air, where they continue to fly round in great circles. One of the birds then steers northward like an arrow and the others follow suit. And soon they are all gone.40

An intercontinental conversation via birds had begun.

Europeans become authorities on birds in Africa Ornithologists responded to the ringfinders with gratitude. Writing in 1909, Otto Herman of Hungary enthused that the reports had provided answers to the pressing question of ‘whether our birds going to Africa for winter-quarters, pass the Equator’.41 Another made a plea for further assistance: ‘We would ask our readers to keep this matter before them, as it is only by co-operation (North with South) that we can ever hope to obtain closer acquaintance with the phenomenon of migration.’42 The bird ringers made good use of the reports sent back to them. As sites of data collection, research centres like Rossitten qualify as ‘centres of calculation’ in Bruno Latour’s sense, where information transmitted from the field is simplified and synthesized in equations, tallies, totals, graphs, tables, lists and maps.43 In the United States in the 1920s, the concept of a flyway took

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shape. Naming four discrete routes, biologists identified places with species and seasons.44 Sorting through the data created by birds and their finders, European ornithologists did not use the term ‘flyway’, but similarly charted the parameters and rhythms of the hemispheric migration. Between 1908 and 1913 Thienemann received news of forty-eight recoveries in Africa and 130 in Europe and Asia.45 He plotted the finds and created the 1910 map pictured above (Figure 5.3). After these initial discoveries, further reports had the effect of refining the revolutionary discoveries of the previous decades. Latour postulates the decreasing importance of new data from the field as a function of ‘cycles of accumulation’. In Science in Action, he describes a general pattern: in the early stages of contact, scientists engaged with natives of farflung places about what they knew, but as the accumulation progressed and scientists inscribed facts about new worlds and transmitted them through their network, scientific knowledge became more robust, independent and separate from that of others.46 As a result, they knew bird migration on a scale and with detail that no one had ever known before. Their perspective, effort, investment and rigour gave them authority over the subject of birds, even birds in Africa. How did that position correspond to other relations between Europeans and Africans? What should we make of the fact that this authority was located in Europe and that European empires ruled over Africa? Empire removed the need for international treaties to protect migratory birds, such as in North America.47 But the content of ornithological texts had little to do with the African and imperial context of the research. The resulting publications offered descriptions of the birds’ bodies and where they had been collected. Any sort of references to the social or political context is extremely rare.48 The same was true of ornithological writing on migration. For example, V. G. L. van Someren’s 1931 survey of Palearctic migrant species in East Africa made no reference to human society or politics.49 Yet, the understanding that birds who bred in Europe belonged to Europe defined the enterprise. Even if the politics were only implicit in the content, the achievement of scientific authority was part of the package of Europe’s relation to Africa. Although Rossitten was not shown on Thienemann’s map, it had become an important site in the intercontinental network of people and birds. By holding comprehensive knowledge about birds in Africa, Europeans made claims to speak about what was best for them in Africa.50 When it came to pronouncing on Africans and birds, ornithologists could sound quite imperial. After 1918, Germany was no longer a colonial power, but it remained a centre of research on bird migration, especially through the work at Rossitten.

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Thienemann began his ringing work with help from crow hunters on the Baltic. He arranged with them to catch birds, ring and release them. Hunters elsewhere then caught the crows, ate them and reported back to him where they had found the rings. Thienemann attributed his success to the fact that ‘no hunter leaves a crow unshot when it flies over within shooting distance’.51 Like many other naturalists at the time, Thienemann was a utilitarian conservationist: he believed good species should be preserved, while vermin could rightfully be exterminated. He identified himself so much as a hunter that he usually appeared in public in a hunter’s hat and boots.52 Thienemann’s association with European hunters provides context for his strong views against the hunting of Europeanbred storks by Africans. In 1930, he wrote with dismay about the decline of ‘our dear storks’ suffering the effects of ‘terrible’ hunting by ‘natives’. He also speculated that poisoning of grasshoppers by the South African government had possibly increased mortality among birds that ingested them. Loath to demonize white Afrikaners without empirical evidence, he called for more research.53 Throughout the 1930s and even after the Second World War, Thienemann and his successor at the Vogelwarte Rossitten, Ernst Schüz, published articles about the dangers African hunting posed for migrant storks. It was an assertion of arrogated authority that killing crows in Germany was acceptable while killing storks in Africa was not. Centres of calculation were not the only places where people theorized about the new knowledge. The new knowledge about migration had a life outside the science of the centre, among popular audiences. Early twentieth-century Europe and Africa were imperial spaces, and acceptance of hierarchical relationships permeated the way other Europeans thought of Africa. For them, the birds brought invitations to engage with nature and people, and to re-imagine their own geographies. Popular understandings of the hemispheric scope of bird migration became laden with human meanings of race and continents.

European humans and Palearctic avians in Africa, 1920s–1930s The associations created by migrating birds came full circle when Europeans went to Africa and perceived of birds who bred in Europe as fellow travellers. In popular thought about bird migration, ‘Palearctic’ came to represent ‘European’, and some Europeans used the migrations to make sense of their own presence in

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Africa. It is unremarkable that homesick Europeans would have taken comfort in seeing familiar birds in other lands and that they would have taken an interest in protecting them, but it is noteworthy if nostalgia was inflected with references to imperialism. Such expressions surface occasionally in discussions of Palearctic breeding birds seen in Africa. Considered together, they reveal a common popular meaning across European nations and empires. Historians have frequently noted that connections with nature became a way for Europeans and white settlers to naturalize their presence in Africa.54 By migrating, birds served in this role in a distinctive way. A British bird watcher made a lot of the political connections between whites and European avian migrants in Africa. Cecily Ruggles-Brise published her bird notes from Dar-es-Salaam in the late 1920s. She did not say much about herself, except that she was a recreational bird watcher, motorist and golfer (her notes indicate that she saw many species from her car or on the golf course). She wrote with particular feeling about seeing two species of plain, small birds that breed in Britain, the spotted flycatcher (Muscicapa striata) and the willow warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus): I like to think of the British migrants which spend the cold northern winter with us in East Africa as our bird Empire makers. Neither history nor research is ever likely to tell us what impelled the first bird pioneers to venture on so long and arduous a journey. But during the hot season at Dar es Salaam and elsewhere we are sometimes refreshed by the sight of their descendants who for thousands of years have forged a link between England and her African Empire, and for the sake of that link migration will always be fraught with significance for us.55

Ruggles-Brise states what is implicit in other writing on hemispheric migrants: European breeding sites gave birds something like common citizenship with people. This idea was spoofed in a 1944 film, English Without Tears. It follows an English bird lover, Lady Christabel Beauclerk, who stirs up a crisis over the hunting of ‘British birds’ on the European mainland. In contrast to the platitudes of professional diplomats at the League of Nations, Lady Christabel storms: ‘In future, any British bird going abroad for the winter or returning home for the summer will have the right to claim, by international law, the fullest possible protection from any offence committed against its person’. Shocked diplomats respond with mutterings about British ‘imperialistic schemes’.56 In Sweden, the nature writer and photographer Bengt Berg once mused to a young crane in Lapland: ‘A strange thing, indeed, if one were able to follow

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you, to see how you comport yourself among the negroes and crocodiles and birds.’57 In 1920, Berg decided to follow the birds to their exotic winter quarters. Loaded with fifteen cameras and 20,000 feet of motion picture film, he travelled to Gibraltar, then Egypt and Sudan, to determine where the Lapland birds were going. He found migrants in abundance on the White Nile and published an account of his trip in Swedish in 1922.58 It featured lyrical prose and abundant photographs. The book is whimsical; Berg was capable of laughing at himself, but his reflections on the birds he encountered in Africa clearly affirm their Europeanness. Looking around at countless ducks, waders, herons, pewits and gulls, he commented: ‘In truth, the Arab and the donkey, who are carrying my paraphernalia at dawn across the desert sands, are the only Africans among all these living beings’.59 He wondered whether, based on their experience of hunters, birds differentiate black people from white people, or the naked from the clothed.60 Berg displayed only a secondary interest in African breeding birds.61 He constantly rejoiced to see familiar species of snipe, sandpiper and the nightingale. He differentiated among the migrants, often speculating about the migrants’ place of origin in Europe or Asia. His tone was joking, yet revealing of his notion of a common citizenship with migrants. ‘The sandpiper was born in Kashmir and therefore understood no Swedish, if I had wanted to speak to him’.62 By this period, Sweden was, of course, a country without colonies, but Berg was interested in European empires.63 He asserted that, by controlling malaria, migrating European swallows were unsung contributors to the imperial project: ‘The apostle of civilization who sets forth for Africa for the purpose of slaughtering elephants, will scarcely deign to cast a look at the little northern swallows that flit about his camp and chase away the mosquitoes from his precious head.’64 Readers in temperate climes were enthused about the story of the northern swallows and cranes flying south. The book became an international hit, translated into German, Dutch, English and Danish. Its translation in 1949 in South Africa, by the economist and nationalist J. F. W. Grosskopf, was apparently the first book about birds ever published in Afrikaans. The account about connections between Africa and continental, non-British, Europe might have recommended it to many.65 German children, too, learned the association of Palearctic birds with European people. Fritz Baumgarten, an author of children’s books, portrayed the continental space of bird migration through the depiction of Palearctic chicks in a ‘forest school’ marvelling at the map of Africa, where they would soon be

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travelling.66 As a cultural artefact, Baumgarten’s illustration stands out in the European iconography of Africa for its innocent whimsy. Crossing national boundaries, birds might also become devices for treason. In Russia during the First World War, Falz-Fein (the ringer of the stork found in the Sudan in the 1890s), whose family had emigrated from Germany several generations before, was arrested by the Bolsheviks on suspicion of espionage – because of his bird-ringing project. He was discharged only after the war, when scientists petitioned for his release.67 A most outlandish notion of the strategic potential of bird migration originated with the Nazi SS Chief Heinrich Himmler. In 1942, he authorized research into whether storks could carry pamphlets to Africa. Whites and blacks who chafed under British and French imperial rule might well have struck some Nazis as potential sympathizers. In South Africa, many Afrikaners had wanted to remain neutral during the war or had sympathized with the Nazis. Global politics and the notion of bird citizenship supported the idea of ‘German’ birds able to penetrate rival empires, although the ornithologist Schüz advised Himmler that few pamphlets would find their audience.68

African understandings of the avian link to Europe How did the new understanding of migration affect popular knowledge among Africans? It is hard to say. We can assume that some Africans wondered at the knowledge that familiar birds were flying so far, to a different world. Some engaged with the information as science. In 1975, a teacher in Plumtree, Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) reported the discovery of a bird ringed by the Livingstone Museum in Zambia. A science lesson on bird migration prompted the finder to relinquish a ring. The effectiveness of the lesson made for a proud teaching moment: ‘[It was] found by Cosmos Ncube who brought it to Mayobode School following a science lesson on migratory birds. We therefore inform you that this experiment has tremendously helped us at Mayobode School.’69 Perhaps, also, the scientists’ discoveries about the parameters of the migration trickled down to popular knowledge. Bernhard Grzimek, a German zookeeper and mid-twentiethcentury author of popular works on African animals, uses an ostensible African proverb as an epigraph: ‘A bird that means to fly to Europe will fly there even if you pluck its feathers’.70 Had some Africans absorbed the findings of ornithology to the point of incorporating them in proverbs? Certainly this was possible. It is also possible that Grzimek updated the proverb with a specific geographical reference; he does not give any source for it.

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Mapping networks and narratives on nature Birds were responsible for the migrations, but human interest and authority did not flow evenly through them. This makes it challenging to write a history of the associations among Africa, Europe and the birds between them. Histories of empire and other networks tend to draw on the elite centre, which handles the broadest matters and documents them in the best archives. Some theorists have called for resistance against the centripetal pull.71 If the standard for historical narratives becomes the coherence of evidence and cohesion of processes found in scientific centres, then occurrences away from the centres become all too ephemeral. Nodes on an eco-cultural network are transient and farflung, but they resonate with each other and with the imperial milieu. Alan Lester, reviewing scholarship in recent imperial history, has worked through problems with traditional representations of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ in search of more integrated understandings of all imperial spaces. He finds promise in the idea of networks, especially as the concept has expanded to include ‘contingent and non-deterministic’ connections across the spaces of empire.72 Lester eschews explanations about causes and imperial expansion in favour of explorations of the ‘multiple meanings, projects, material practices, performances and experiences of colonial relations’. Networks could be ‘provisional’ and ‘contingent’, ‘ephemeral’ and ‘even fleeting’, but their work was noteworthy. The cultural traffic about Palearctic migrants and empire carried imperial mutations of the information moving through scientific networks. Science and meaning moved through associations of otherwise distant places and people. As new understandings arrived, people drew on them to make sense of new geopolitical arrangements. The shapes of continents and hierarchies of empires coalesced within the localities and hemispheres of migrating birds. Timothy Mitchell has famously tackled the intellectual difficulties of analysing a heterogeneous network. His analysis ‘Can the Mosquito Speak?’, in chapter one of his book, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity, involves war, agriculture, malaria and international philanthropy in Egypt in 1942, but it is as much about how to come to terms with the concatenation of forces as about the case itself. Some difficulties identified by Mitchell resonate with the history of Africa, Europe, and the birds between them. As he notes: ‘It is as if the elements are somehow incommensurable. They seem to involve very different forces, agents, elements, spatial scales, and temporalities. They shape one another, yet their heterogeneity offers a resistance to explanation.’ This resistance, Mitchell

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suggests, ‘may have something to do with the mixing of the natural and social worlds’.73 Social science writing, Mitchell says, has usually made the connection between these incommensurable forces in a narrative about ‘a quite palpable expansion of Western power, wealth, and technical knowledge’ in which ‘all the actors are human’.74 Here again is the challenge to overcome the bias towards the centre, to avoid letting the easily consolidated narratives of the centre overshadow the fragile ones on the fringes. Mitchell’s case differs from this one by featuring technical intervention and the circulation of capital through the ecological frame. But his conclusions about the changing hydraulic works on the Nile are suggestive for our questions about ornithological science in an imperial context: ‘Nature was not the cause of the changes taking place. It was the outcome.’75 The migration of birds predated twentieth-century science and empire, but bird migration existed for people through the work of ‘authorities’ placed in Europe.

Conclusion: Eco-cultural networks after Empire After the end of Empire, African–European encounters around migrating birds had to be rooted in the fact of African sovereignty. Soon after decolonization, Grzimek, who was a friend of the Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, voiced a new view. Although, like others before him, he claimed European storks as ‘ours’ and associated them with ‘our’ Europeans, he did not blame Africans for threatening them. Rather, he praised independent African governments for their conservation policy and urged Europeans to imitate it.76 More radically, the Ghanaian ornithologist Yaa Ntiamoa-Baidu questioned the ways that Palearctic migrants belonged in the new sovereign nations when she addressed her compatriots in 1988: ‘The question I have very often been asked by Ghanaians is, “Why should we protect birds which belong to the British?” My reply has been that birds which breed in Europe and winter in Africa normally spent 6–8 months in Africa and only some 3 months on the breeding grounds. So if we really want to apportion ownership, they belong to Africa.’77 Ntiamoa-Baidu offered the only postcolonial rejoinder I have seen to the idea that birds belong to the place where they are born.78 Institutional and legal changes in the late twentieth century indicate that authority over the birds of Africa is no longer located solely in Europe. The international community as a whole assumed oversight of migrants in 1971, with the signing of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands and the 1979 Bonn

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Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals.79 Ornithology also expanded beyond Europe. The Pan-African Ornithological Congress was founded in 1957 by white ornithologists in southern Africa. After two decades, the organization began to shed its racial and regional restrictions and became an international meeting with representation from across Africa, as well as other continents.80 Centres of ornithological calculation now exist in Africa, especially the Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town (founded 1959) and the A. P. Leventis Ornithological Research Institute (Aplori) in Nigeria at the University of Jos (founded 2002).81 Yet, the end of imperialism did not produce a levelling of authority over environment. European empires are gone from Africa, but the continent remains uniquely dominated by global opinions and interests that are taken as legitimate, including conservation. It has been noted that some exclusions from the colonial period continue in conservation management; rural Africans are not well integrated into policymaking and have often been excluded from using resources in protected environments.82 This is a widely recognized problem, and ‘community-based conservation’ is now considered imperative. The projects may be participatory, but development and aid define the direction of European– African environmental relations. The political impetus to create white spaces in African nature has declined, but European interests in spaces for Palearctic migrants remain. This is evident in Living on the Edge: Wetlands and Birds in a Changing Sahel (2009), a large, informative and lavishly designed volume produced by a Dutch research team. Providing a detailed set of scientific data and excellent illustrations, it introduces Sahel ecology to a European popular audience. With its scientific authority and a contemporary sensibility, it is not a reincarnation of twentieth-century popular accounts on migration, yet it echoes framings of the region as a habitat for Palearctic migrants. As in the volumes of Berg and Ruggles-Brise, the birds that draw most attention in Living on the Edge are those that breed in Europe, and the illustrations largely feature birds known to Europeans in environments unfamiliar to them. Living on the Edge attends to the status of birds without a European connection in chapters on the general ecology, but dedicates separate chapters to the distribution and migration patterns of twenty-seven Palearctic species. The Dutch authors are more conflicted than Thienemann was about blaming Africans for increased mortality among migrants on wintering grounds. Like Thienemann, they were concerned about falling populations of migrants, but they tag European habitat destruction and chemical use as the

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main culprits for the majority of species. The text identifies drought as the greatest problem for Palearctic migrants in Africa, blaming it on global climate change rather than on Africans’ impact on the environment. At the same time, it also dedicates several chapters to people’s increasing demands on land and water in the Sahel.83 Narratives about African crisis and redemption are powerful. Sentimentality among Hollanders for migrants such as herons and redstarts has elicited a committed response. Vogelbescherming Nederland (the Dutch chapter of BirdLife International) now uses funding from the Dutch Postcode Lottery to promote wetland protection and native species forestry in Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Senegal and Mauritania.84 European interests and planning dominate this arrangement. Yet several factors caution against understanding it as unreconstructed conservationist neocolonialism. Like BirdLife International, the initiative uses inclusive language: ‘partners’ in different countries collaborate with the global organization and each other. Personnel is also inclusive, with African staff managing programmes and conducting research on the southern terminus of the migration.85 Wetland protection motivated out of concern for Palearctic migrants can benefit all members of Sahel ecosystems. Finally, Vogelbescherming Nederland also addresses conservation in Holland.86 The idea of flyways seems to have been more powerful in the Americas, where there was a longer history of treaties between nations, so perhaps it was easier to form decentred networks along them there. Such an organization emerged in the 1980s between North and South America: the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network (WHSRN). The WHSRN brings together government bodies, scientists and volunteers to promote and coordinate conservation management at sites all along migratory routes.87 Its aspiration to be authentic to the hemispheric routes taken by birds represents a further step away from continentally and imperially inflected takes on avian migration: ‘The network forms, in essence, an international reserve defined by the migrants rather than by geography.’88 This model of network now informs organizations dedicated to the well-being of Palearctic migrants in Africa. A 2010 Birdlife project funded by the Mava Foundation echoes WHSRN by bringing together governments and non-governmental organizations as well as scientists and policymakers from many countries.89 And what of the birds? The fact that they migrated provided the necessary stuff for scientific practice and cultural traffic. Yet that practice and traffic entailed so much more than what people could know about their flight. Did the mapping of their migration onto human spaces matter to them? It mattered for

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individual birds who carried the rings, it mattered as humans altered landscapes and it mattered if people found reasons to conserve habitats. New iterations of relations and meanings among birds, Africans and Europeans will continue, even as the birds keep doing what they have always done.

Notes 1 Earlier versions of this chapter have been presented at the CART I workshop at Leiden University; the Department of Anthropology, Cologne University; a conference ‘Indigenous Environments: African and North American Environmental Knowledge and Practices’ at Bowdoin College; Bell Gallery at Brown University; the EnviroThursday Lecture Series, Macalester College; and the North-East Workshop on Southern Africa. For comments, I thank James Beattie, Derick Fay, Sherine Hamdy and Kristoffer Whitney. 2 For environmental histories of bird migration, see Libby Robin, ‘Migrants and Nomads: Seasoning Zoological Knowledge in Australia’, in A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia, eds. Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2005), 42–53; Robert M. Wilson, Seeking Refuge: Birds and Landscapes of the Pacific Flyway (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010); Kristoffer Jon Whitney, ‘A Knot in Common: Science, Values, and Conservation in the Atlantic Flyway’ (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2012). 3 Ian Newton, The Migration Ecology of Birds (London: Academic, 2008), 701–2. 4 For classic statements of human–non-human relations within networks, see Michel Callon, ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay’, in Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge?, ed. John Law, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (London: Routledge, 1986), 196–233; Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). 5 The use of returning migrants as seasonal markers was common. For an early record in Africa, see Nathaniel Isaacs, Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa Descriptive of the Zoolus ... With a Sketch of Natal, ed. Louis Herman, vol. 2 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1936), 62, 152–3. 6 Robert Godfrey, Bird-Lore of the Eastern Cape Province, Bantu Studies 2 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1941), 29, 40; Derek Comins, ‘Quail Hibernation Beliefs’. African Wildlife (March 1962): 82; A. Jacot Guillarmod, ‘Quail Hibernation Beliefs’. African Wildlife (June 1962): 171; for a white South African’s affirmation of quail hibernation, see W. Voges, ‘Letter: Do Our Quails Hibernate?’. Ostrich: Journal of African Ornithology 4 (1933): 84.

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7 For good accounts of early understandings of migration and hibernation, see Tim Birkhead, The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 131–71; Richard Vaughan, Wings and Rings: A History of Bird Migration Studies in Europe (Penryn, Cornwall: Isabelline, 2009). Vaughan, in particular, provided direction to many of the texts cited in this chapter. 8 H. B. Tristam, The Great Sahara: Wanderings South of the Atlas Mountains (London: John Murray, 1860), 398. 9 A pioneering study identified songs of 113 African species imitated by marsh warblers in Europe. Françoise Dowsett-Lemaire, ‘The Imitative Range of the Song of the Marsh Warbler Acrocephalus palustris, with Special Reference to Imitations of African Birds’. Ibis 121 (1979): 453–68. 10 M. L. Wilson, Th. Toussaint van Hove-Exalto, and W. J. J. van Rijssen, Codex Witsenii (Cape Town: Iziko Museums of Cape Town, 2002), 38–9. Witsen’s information did not circulate far. He published the information from the sailors shipwrecked in southern Africa in his work on inner Asia, Noord en Oost Tartarye (1705). Moreover, the book had a small printing, with only a few copies distributed to friends, scholars or libraries. Bruno Naarden, ‘Witsen’s Studies of Inner Eurasia’, in The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks, eds. Siegfried Huigen, Jan L. de Jong and Elmer Kolfin (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 211–39. 11 Thomas Alerstam, Bird Migration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2. 12 William Lutley Sclater, ‘Notes on the Early Sources of our Knowledge of African Ornithology’. Journal für Ornithologie 2 (1929): 184–96. On the earliest systems of classification, see also Paul Farber, Discovering Birds: The Emergence of Ornithology as a Scientific Discipline (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Michael Walters, A Concise History of Ornithology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Valérie Chansigaud, All About Birds: A Short Illustrated History of Ornithology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 13 Kristin Johnson, ‘Type-Specimens of Birds as Sources for the History of Ornithology’. Journal of the History of Collections 17 (2005): 173–88. 14 Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1997); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 15 Kirsten Greer, ‘Geopolitics and the Avian Imperial Archive: The Zoogeography of Region-Making in the Nineteenth Century British Mediterranean’. Annals of the Association of the American Geographers (2013) DOI:10.1080/00045608.2013. 784095. 16 C. Wright, ‘List of Birds Observed in the Island and Malta and Gozo’. Ibis 6 (1864): 44; quoted in Greer, ‘Geopolitics and the Avian Imperial Archive’, 6.

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17 Philip Lutley Sclater, ‘On the General Geographical Distribution of the Members of the Class Aves’. Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society: Zoology 2 (1858): 130–6 (quote, 134). 18 Sclater, ‘General Geographical Distribution’, 131. 19 Alfred Russel Wallace, The Geographical Distribution of Animals, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876). Ornithologists today note that the regions developed by Sclater and Wallace are not equally robust as analytic units: connections between and diversity within them are strong. Yet they are still accepted as useful in both botany and zoology. 20 Ian Newton, The Speciation and Biogeography of Birds (San Diego: Academic, 2003), 109–62. 21 J. Gould, An Introduction to the Birds of Great Britain (London: Taylor & Francis, 1873), 8. 22 Ottó Hermann, Recensio critica automatica of the Doctrine of Bird-Migration (Budapest: Royal Hungarian Ministry of Agriculture, 1905), 68. Although this book was published in 1905, the latest references were from 1896. 23 For a sense of mid-nineteenth-century understandings of migration system bounded by northern Europe and North Africa, see A. Leith Adams, ‘Migrations of European Birds’. The Popular Science Review 4 (1865): 324–34. Only at the end of the article does Adams conceive of some species penetrating the Sahara and continuing to tropical Africa. 24 J. Theinemann, ‘Der Zug des Weißen Storches (Cinconia cinonia) auf Grund der Resultate, die Von der Vogelwarte Rossitten mit den Markierungsversuchen bisher Erzielt Worden Sind’. Zoologische Jahrbücher, Supplementheft 12 (1910): 665–86. The map can be found as ‘Tafel 17’ in the endmatter. 25 Newton, Migration Ecology of Birds, 704–15. 26 See the map, Newton, Migration Ecology of Birds, 712. 27 Newton, Migration Ecology of Birds, 369–79. This was most famously discussed in Monty Python and the Holy Grail by the guards on the battlement, who questioned Arthur’s possession of coconuts. European swallows were not capable of carrying them, at least individually. African swallows, they granted, might be another story, but – sealing the joke – the Pythons raised an objection that was hilariously obscure and anachronistic for Arthurian soldiers: African swallows did not migrate to Europe. 28 Rudolf Carl Slatin, Fire and Sword in the Sudan: A Personal Narrative of Fighting and Serving the Dervishes, 1879–1895, trans. F. R. Wingate (London: Edward Arnold, 1896), 498–9, 618–9. I originally found reference to Slatin in Bengt Berg, To Africa with the Migratory Birds (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1930), 78 and 268. Berg asserts that the bird was tried as a spy and condemned to death, but this detail is not in Slatin’s original. A literature in German, English and Russian conveys the history of Falz-Fein’s ancestors, who were German settlers who came

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Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire at the invitation of Catherine the Great. Russian-language sources report that FalzFein began ringing in 1892, but no history of that project seems to exist. Personal communication by Douglas Weiner, 6 February 2010. Weiner directed me to another source in English mentioning Slatin: Bernhard Grzimek, Wild Animal, White Man: Some Wildlife in Europe, Soviet Russia and North America, trans. Michael Glenny (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), 35–7. Vaughan, Wings and Rings, 53–68. Vaughan, Wings and Ring, 153. For good samplings of vernacular bird knowledge, see Robert Godfrey, Bird-Lore of the Eastern Cape Province (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1941) and Johnston Kassagam, What is This Bird Saying?: A Study of Names and Cultural Beliefs about Birds amongst the Marakwet Peoples of Kenya (Nairobi: Binary Computer Services, 1997). Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). This letter from H. Thornicroft, dated 16 December 1907, was quoted in ‘A Marked European Stork in Rhodesia’. Ibis, 9th Series, 2 (1908): 389–90. The finder was Frank Atterbury. It was reported to Ibis by a correspondent in Khartoum. A. L. Butler, ‘Letters, Extracts, and Notes’. Ibis, 9th series, 3 (1909): 386. The Times, London, Weekly Edition, 4 February 1909, quoted in ‘Ringed Birds’, Bird News, November–December 1909. http://www.archive.org/stream/ birdnews01avic/birdnews01avic_djvu.txt. ‘Letters, Extracts, and Notes’. Ibis, 9th series, 3 (1909): 387. J. P. Murray, ‘Letter: Marked White Stork in Basutoland’. Journal of the South African Ornithologists’ Union 5 (16 March 1909): 115–6. The editors reported that Murray had returned a second ring. A version of this letter also appeared in ‘Ringed Birds’, Bird News, November–December 1909. http://www.archive. org/stream/birdnews01avic/birdnews01avic_djvu.txt. For a slightly later report of two findings of a smaller species, see H. F. Witherby, ‘Swallow Ringed in Ayrshire and Recovered in Orange Free State’. Journal of the South African Ornithologists’ Union 10 (1915): 22–3. On South African-based research on migration, see also E. H. Ashton, ‘South African Ornithological Society’. Bokmakierie 32, 2 (1980): 28. Some European bird preservationists worried that bird rings might give hunters a new reason to kill birds. This concern was not specifically directed towards Africa; during the first decades of the twentieth century the practice of ringing was controversial within Europe. Walters, Concise History of Ornithology, 162. A report from Ghana in the 1980s similarly described the use of bird rings for decoration or being collected with the expectation of a reward. Yaa Ntiamoa-Baidu, ‘Terns in

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Coastal Ghana’, in Proceedings of the Seventh Pan-African Ornithological Congress, Nairobi, Kenya, 28 August – 5 September 1988, ed. Leon Bennun (Nairobi: PanAfrican Ornithological Congress, 1992), 42. The official found the ring and reported it in 1930, but he was told the bird had been shot five years earlier. The ring and report were passed along to the ornithologist C. W. Benson, who archived it among his papers. ‘Benson (C. W. & F. M.) Closed Correspondence’, in Correspondence File N (Cambridge, UK: University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge University), ‘Nyasaland Bird Notes 1939–1952, vol. 1’, letter from DC Karonga to Chief Secretary Zomba pinned to page 43 of the correspondence. Undated letter in Studies in Bird Migration, Being the Collected Papers of H. Chr. C. Mortensen, eds. P. A. Jesperson and A. Vedel Tåning (Copenhagen: Dansk Ornitologisk Forening, 1950), 220–1, quoted in Vaughan, Rings and Wings, 73. The Times, London, Weekly Edition, 3 March 1909, quoted in ‘Ringed Birds’, Bird News, November–December 1909. http://www.archive.org/stream/ birdnews01avic/birdnews01avic_djvu.txt. A Marked Stork in South Central Africa’. Journal of the South African Ornithologists’ Union 3–4 (1908): 132. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 219–32. Wilson, Seeking Refuge. Johannes Thienemann, Vom Vogelzuge in Rossitten (Neudamm: J. Neumann, 1931), 172. Latour, Science in Action, 211–9. Mark Cioc, The Game of Conservation: International Treaties to Protect the World’s Migratory Animals (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2009), 58–103. Most ornithological publications about the birds of Africa involved species description. In this sense, ornithology about African birds differed little from that about birds elsewhere. Kristin Johnson, ‘Type-Specimens of Birds’. On the consistency of scientific research between Britain and the British Empire, see Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). A particular politics of ornithology in colonial Africa emerges through biographical study of the participants: Nancy J. Jacobs, ‘The Intimate Politics of Ornithology in Colonial Africa’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 48 (2006): 564–603. V. G. L. van Someren, ‘Catalogue of the European and Asiatic Migrants to Kenya and Uganda with a Brief Outline of the Subject of Migration of Birds’. The Journal of the East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society, Special Supplement 4 (1931): 1–40.

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50 Landmark syntheses include Reginald Moreau, The Palearctic-African Bird Migration Systems (London: Academic, 1972); Kai Curry-Lindahl, Bird Migration in Africa: Movement between Six Continents, 2 vols. (London: Academic, 1981). 51 Raf de Bont, ‘Poetry and Precision: Johannes Thienemann, the Bird Observatory in Rossitten and Civic Ornithology, 1900–1930’. Journal of the History of Biology 44 (2011): 171–203 (quote, 182). 52 Raf de Bont, ‘Poetry and Precision: Johannes Thienemann, the Bird Observatory in Rossitten and Civic Ornithology, 1900–1930’. Journal of the History of Biology 44 (2011): 189. 53 Thienemann, Vom Vogelzuge in Rossitten, 173. Thienemann, Rossitten, 225. British officers in the Mediterranean expressed similar outrage about the hunting of migrant species. Greer, ‘Geopolitics and the Avian Imperial Archive’, 9. 54 Jane Carruthers, The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1995). See many essays in Social History and African Environments, eds. William Beinart and JoAnn McGregor (Oxford: James Curry, 2003); David Hughes, Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 55 Cecily J. Ruggles-Brise, Notes on Some Birds of Dar Es Salaam (Norwich: Jarrold & Sons, [1927?]), 89. Kirsten Greer quotes a record from the Crimean War of an officer who delighted in seeing a robin, ‘a lovely little songster’ that ‘our minds always associate with England’. See ‘Untangling the Avian Imperial Archive’. Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 20 (2012): 65. 56 Harold French, English without Tears (Great Britain, 1944). The film was also released under the title Her Man Gilbey. I found reference to this film in Melbourne University Up Close Podcast, episode 32 (2008), interview by Sian Prior with Lewis Mayo, ‘Birds, Nations and Empires’, accessed 23 December 2012, http://upclose.unimelb.edu.au/embed-widgets/83e98499f78a5f0bbe4e0d0be8705e c8-672/content. Mayo discusses birds as symbols for empires, nations and society in general. The film-makers may have been aware of the Weeks-McLean Law, or Migratory Bird Act, passed in the United States in 1913, which put migratory birds that passed through US territory under federal protection. Cioc, Game of Conservation, 69. 57 Bengt Berg, To Africa with the Migratory Birds (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1930), 72. 58 The original publication was Berg, Med tranorna till Afrika (Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & Söner, 1922). Berg also produced a three-reel documentary movie in 1925, Birds of Passage, but I have not located a copy. Judging from a newspaper advertisement in the Cass City [Michigan] Chronicle of 11 September 1925, the film circulated widely through the United States.

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Berg, To Africa with the Migratory Birds, 93. Berg, To Africa with the Migratory Birds, 192, 195. See also 132. Afrotropical birds gain his attention two hundred pages later, in Chapter 15. Berg, To Africa with the Migratory Birds, 107. On relations between another European country without colonies and Africa, see Patrick Harries, Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2007). Berg, To Africa with the Migratory Birds, 103. The ‘apostles of civilization’ here were big game hunters. Berg’s point was directed specifically to naturalists who ignored European migrants. Berg, Met die Kraanvoëls na Afrika, trans. J. F. W. Grosskopf (Pretoria: J. L. van Schaik, 1949). Grosskopf was an author of the 1932 Carnegie Commission report on poor white poverty in South Africa. The illustration was originally published as an unnumbered plate in Fritz Baumgarten, Die Waldschule (Stuttgart: Titania, [1935]). It may be seen online as the cover illustration for Die Waldschule: Nostalgische Bilderbücher von Fritz Baumgarten. Personal communication, Douglas Weiner, 6 February 2010, quoting Vladimir Evgen’evich Boreiko, Don Kikhoty: Istoriia, liudi, zapovedniki [Don Quixote: History, People, Nature Reserves] (Moscow : Logata, 1998), 251–2 and Evgen’evich Boreiko, Slovar’ deiatelei okhrany prirody, izd.vtoroe, dopolnennone [Dictionary of Nature Protection Activists] (2nd. expanded edn.) (Kiev : Kievskii ekologokul’turnyi tsentr, 2001), 430–5. ‘Flugblätter für Afrika’, Der Spiegel, 10 January 1994, accessed 23 December 2012, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13687293.html. This was not the last or most famous example of strategic interest in bird migration. During the Cold War, the US Army was motivated by its interest in the transmission of biological pathogens to sponsor research on trans-Himalyan bird migration. When the research became public, the Indian ornithologist Sálim Ali and his American collaborator Dillon Ripley weathered a storm of controversy. Michael L. Lewis, Inventing Global Ecology: Tracking the Biodiversity Ideal in India, 1947–1997 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2009), 81–108. Livingstone Museum, Livingstone Zambia. Ornithology Department, Letter from M. M. Moyo, Mayobode School in Plumtree, Zimbabwe, 7 July 1975. Grzimek, Among Animals of Africa, trans. J. Maxwell Brownjohn (New York: Stein and Day, 1970), 11. Such critiques are numerous. On the homogenizing tendency of Network Theory, see Susan Leigh Star, ‘Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions’, in A Sociology of Monsters: Power, Technology, and the Modern World, ed. John Law (London: Routledge, 1991),

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Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire 26–56. On the core–periphery tension in imperial history, see Alan Lester, ‘Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire’. History Compass 4 (2006): 124–41. Lester, ‘Imperial Circuits and Networks’, 131–6. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics and Modernity (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2001): 27. Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 29. Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 35. Grzimek, Wild Animal, White Man, 216, 232, 349. Yaa Ntiamoa-Baidu, ‘Save the Seashore Birds: A Program of Conservation Action and Education in Ghana’, in Proceedings of the Seventh Pan-African Ornithological Congress, Nairobi, Kenya, 28 August – 5 September 1988 (Nairobi: Seventh PanAfrican Ornithological Congress, 1992), 445. For another case of such thinking, see Camilo Quintero’s study of ornithology in Colombia in the first half of the twentieth century. Colombian ornithologists were motivated to include as many birds as possible on the country list, which took on the status as a ‘national treasure’. Quintero characterizes these ornithologists as assigning a nationality to birds. He analyses the work of American ornithologists in Colombia in the framework of imperialism. Yet, the Colombians and American cooperated. Camilo Quintero, ‘Trading in Birds: Imperial Power, National Pride, and the Place of Nature in U.S.-Colombian Relations’. Isis 102 (2011): 421–5. Cioc, Game of Conservation, 149–53. Pan-African Ornithological Congress, accessed 13 May 2013, http://www.paocafrica.org/about-us/who-is-paoc/. Aplori, accessed 13 May 2013, http://www.aplori.org/. Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, accessed 13 May 2013, http://www.fitzpatrick. uct.ac.za/. Jonathan Adams and Thomas McShane, The Myth of Wild Africa: Conservation without Illusion (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1997); Roderick Neumann, Imposing Wilderness: Struggles over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1998). Leo Zwarts, Rob G. Bijlsma, Jan van der Kamp and Eddy Wymenga, Living on the Edge: Wetlands and Birds in a Changing Sahel (Zeist: KNNV Publishing, 2009). See especially Chapter 44, ‘The Impact of the Sahel on Eurasian Bird Population Trends’. See also the brochure, Summary of Living on the Edge: Wetlands and Birds in a Changing Sahel, accessed 23 December 2012, http://en.mava-foundation.org/ wp-content/uploads/2012/11/living_on_the_edge_summary.pdf. The brochure expands upon the book in its advocacy for conservation in European breeding, as well as African wintering, areas.

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84 Vogelbescherming Nederland, ‘Sahel project: Living on the Edge’, accessed 23 December 2012, http://www.vogelbescherming.nl/flyways/actueel/living_on_the_ edge. 85 For a list of the other partners, see ‘Living on the Edge: Birds and People Sharing the Sahel’, accessed 23 December 2012, http://www.birdlife.org/living-on-theedge/?page_id=30. 86 BirdLife International, ‘Netherlands Society for the Protection of Birds (VBN)’, accessed 23 December 2012, http://www.birdlife.org/worldwide/national/ netherlands_the/. 87 Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network’, accessed 23 December 2012, http://www.whsrn.org/western-hemisphere-shorebird-reserve-network. 88 J. P. Myers, R. I. G. Morrison, Paolo Z. Antas, Brian A. Harrington, Thomas E. Lovejoy, Michel Salaberry, Stanley E. Senner and Arturo Tarak, ‘Conservation Strategy for Migratory Species’. American Scientist 75 (1987): 23, quoted by Whitney, ‘A Knot in Common’, 71. 89 African-Eurasian Waterbird Agreement, ‘BirdLife/MAVA project to boost waterbird conservation along the coast of West Africa launched’, accessed 23 December 2012, http://www.unep-aewa.org/news/news_elements/2011/dakar_ workshop.htm. The project title is ‘Strengthening networks for the conservation of migratory birds and their habitats along the west coast of Africa’. The AfricanEurasian Waterbird Agreement is a programme for the implementation of the Bonn Convention on migratory species.

Select bibliography Birkhead, Tim. The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology. New York: Bloomsbury, 2008. Bont, Raf de. ‘Poetry and Precision: Johannes Thienemann, the Bird Observatory in Rossitten and Civic Ornithology, 1900–1930’. Journal of the History of Biology 44 (2011): 171–203. Cioc, Mark. The Game of Conservation: International Treaties to Protect the World’s Migratory Animals. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2009. Curry-Lindahl, Kai. Bird Migration in Africa: Movement between Six Continents. 2 vols. London: Academic, 1981. Greer, Kirsten. ‘Geopolitics and the Avian Imperial Archive: The Zoogeography of Region-Making in the Nineteenth Century British Mediterranean’. Annals of the Association of the American Geographers 103 (2013): 1317–1. —‘Untangling the Avian Imperial Archive’. Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 20 (2012): 59–71.

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Harries, Patrick. Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa. Oxford: James Currey, 2007. Hughes, David. Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Jacobs, Nancy J. ‘The Intimate Politics of Ornithology in Colonial Africa’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 48 (2006): 564–603. Johnson, Kristin. ‘Type-Specimens of Birds as Sources for the History of Ornithology’. Journal of the History of Collections 17 (2005): 173–88. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Lester, Alan. ‘Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire’. History Compass 4 (2006): 124–41. Lewis, Martin and Karen Wigen. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1997. Lewis, Michael L. Inventing Global Ecology: Tracking the Biodiversity Ideal in India, 1947–1997. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2009. Mitchell, Timothy. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techo-Politics and Modernity. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2001. Moreau, Reginald. The Palearctic-African Bird Migration Systems. London: Academic, 1972. Quintero, Camilo. ‘Trading in Birds: Imperial Power, National Pride, and the Place of Nature in U.S.-Colombian Relations’. Isis 102 (2011): 421–45. Tilley, Helen. Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Vaughan, Richard. Wings and Rings: A History of Bird Migration Studies in Europe. Penryn, Cornwall: Isabelline, 2009. Whitney, Kristoffer Jon. ‘A Knot in Common: Science, Values, and Conservation in the Atlantic Flyway’. PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2012. Wilson, Robert M. Seeking Refuge: Birds and Landscapes of the Pacific Flyway. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010.

Part Two

Local Eco-Cultural Networks

6

Peradeniya and the Plantation Raj in Nineteenth-Century Ceylon Eugenia W. Herbert

My conviction is strong that no establishment in the colony is so essential to its interests as the Royal Botanic Gardens of Peradenia. –Sir Emerson Tennent (1860) The founding of the Royal Botanic Garden at Peradeniya followed close on the heels of the British conquest of the Kingdom of Kandy in 1815. Within a few years, it became a must-see on the itinerary of visitors to Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). In 1825, Rev. Reginald Heber, Anglican Bishop of Calcutta, took advantage of the newly constructed road from Colombo to Kandy to tour the gardens as part of his wide-ranging travels throughout a See, which stretched from the Bay of Bengal to north-west India. He found gardens ‘only in their infancy, but very flourishing’.1 Peradeniya, however, was more than a tourist attraction; it became one of the world’s pre-eminent botanical gardens. At the same time, it played a pivotal role in the development of Ceylon’s plantation economy and the culture that sprang from it.

‘What though the spicy breezes blow soft o’er Ceylon’s isle’:2 The cinnamon economy The best cinnamon in the world grew in Ceylon, and it was cinnamon that had led the Portuguese and then the Dutch to conquer the coastal regions of the island.3 This was the logical foundation for the new colonial economy. The tree grew wild in the wet, sandy soils of the western lowlands, and became the main reason for the prominence of Colombo. The bark was stripped and processed by

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Figure 6.1 Map of Ceylon showing tea districts. Source: Henry W. Cave, Golden Tips: A Description of Ceylon and its Great Tea Industry. London: S. Low, Marston & Co., 1900, opp. 1.

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a specialized caste of Sinhalese cinnamon peelers. To protect their monopoly of the precious spice, the Dutch had experimented with cinnamon plantations of their own, including the famous Cinnamon Gardens, now part of Colombo, but these had been left uncared for and were swallowed up in jungle by the time of the British take-over in 1796. One of Governor North’s first acts was to clear the existing gardens and create new ones far beyond Colombo itself to the coastal area stretching from Negumbo to Matura, seeing them as a ‘valuable branch of revenue’ – which indeed they were, quickly becoming ‘the wealth of Ceylon’.4 Land was leased to the cinnamon peelers who were required in turn to fill a quota of cinnamon that could only be sold to the government. By 1804, exports to England totalled some 368,000 lbs, for which the East India Company paid £60,000 and shipped the cargo to England at its own expense (bales of cinnamon were packed with pepper from the Malabar Coast of India to keep moisture out).5 The commodity was so valuable that anyone cutting a branch was punished with a fine – in Dutch times it was punishable by death.6 While the bulk of this came from government plantations, a lesser amount came from the Kandyan territories, which remained outside of British control until 1815. This was harvested from trees growing wild in lowland forests and was considered coarser and of poorer quality than the cultivated variety. Shipment to Europe was banned ‘to prevent the character of the Ceylon cinnamon from being depreciated in the public esteem’. Some cinnamon apparently went to South America to provide daily rations for slaves working in the mines, and some was sold to Indian merchants for trade in ‘eastern markets’, although it appears that in both cases it was not cinnamon of the highest quality.7 Cinnamon gardens offered not only wealth, but also aesthetic delight. ‘Nothing can exceed the luxury of riding through the cinnamon grounds in the cool hours of the morning’, wrote the Rev. James Cordiner. But, he adds, ‘[t]he fragrance, however, is not so powerful as strangers are apt to imagine’. In fact, ‘when the trees are growing in tranquillity’ they have no scent at all. So much for Bishop Heber’s ‘spicy breezes’.8 The cinnamon idyll was short lived. The Ceylon government’s determination to hold onto its cinnamon monopoly had two effects. First, it encouraged a clandestine trade, mainly in the hands of Indian merchants. Second, by keeping the price high, it stimulated investment in other sources of the spice: on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts of India and, more disastrously for Ceylon, in the East Indies and southern China. Ironically, Dutch planters who had immigrated to Java from Ceylon to escape British rule became prime competitors, growing cassia, an inferior, but much cheaper form of the spice. Even when the British

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finally abolished their monopoly in favour of more liberal trade, they slapped a heavy duty on exports to make up for lost revenues, resulting in a rapid decline of the industry in the early 1840s. Ceylon’s cinnamon might still be the best, but it could not compete with cheaper varieties produced elsewhere.9 As for the legendary annual pearl fisheries, the first three years after the British conquest (1796–8) had been unusually lucrative, but further experience demonstrated just how unreliable they could be. In good years they were very good indeed, pouring as much as a million pounds sterling into government coffers, but in bad years they might be a total failure.10 Since it was Holy Writ that all British possessions must be self-supporting, Ceylon clearly needed to find other sources of wealth to survive.

The Royal Botanical Garden at Peradeniya As Lord Valentia observed in 1803: ‘The whole natural history of the island [Ceylon] is little known, and no where [sic] is a finer field open to the botanist, or collector in other branches of natural history.’11 In fact, a number of accounts did exist, but they were confined to the coastal lowlands, thanks to their long history of European occupation. With the expansion of British rule to the entire island a more scientific inventory was a matter of urgency, especially in the field of botany. The early history of Peradeniya parallels that of the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew in its uncertain beginnings and uncertain purposes. Like Kew, it also went through a period of doldrums (or decline in Kew’s case), before being revived by an energetic director. Botanical gardens had their genesis in the royal garden on the one hand and the physic garden on the other. As glorified kitchen gardens, the first were expected to supply produce and flowers for the monarch’s table, as well as to display the ‘virtue of authority’ and add lustre to the court through their collection of exotics. On a more mundane level, the physic garden supplied medicinal cures for the populace. In time, however, the botanical garden took on an increasingly important scientific mission to identify and propagate flora from across the globe, and a commercial role to develop ‘useful’ plants or even to serve as a nursery for horticulturists. Added to all this was the growing pressure on the garden to serve as a public park. The result was frequently a tug of war between competing demands.12 In Ceylon, Governor North had appointed a Frenchman, Eudelin de Jonville, not only as superintendent of the cinnamon gardens on Slave Island in Colombo,

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but also as head of a recently established botanic garden at the governor’s villa at Peliyagoda. Jonville had a passion for natural history and produced three remarkable volumes devoted to a wide range of subjects, concerning not only his scientific researches, but also commentaries on native religion and customs, music, dress – and even ancient sites. Three years after his appointment, however, Jonville disappears mysteriously from the historical record. Peliyagoda’s lowland location was not well suited for a botanical garden and in any case had been destined more to supply fruit and vegetables for the governor’s enjoyment than for the advancement of science. Indeed, General MacDowall, the senior military officer in the administration, created his own private garden to satisfy his passion for exotic flora. He imported plants from the Calcutta Botanic Garden as well as from China and Europe.13 All this was on too modest a scale and too dependent on transient officials to satisfy the grandiose dreams of ‘imperial Kew’ and its visionary director, Sir Joseph Banks. Banks envisioned a network of botanical gardens, staffed by Kew-trained specialists, throughout the Empire. This emerging eco-cultural network fused imperial ambition, agricultural science and a host of botanical collectors located in far-flung colonies, not to mention enlisting the plants themselves and their properties in such exchanges. Colonial botanic gardens, he declared in 1810, should have as their aim ‘the collecting together and carefully cultivating all the plants of the Colony and its vicinity known to be useful in Medicine, or in the Arts or in any way advantageous to the interests of Mankind’. Samples sent to the ‘Mother Country’ could then be assessed for their potential as articles of trade for the colony. In addition, the garden should collect plants from all parts of the world that showed promise of benefiting the colony. Even in a small colony, climatic and soil conditions might vary widely, and such variations needed to be taken into account in acclimating new plants. Emphasizing the practical, Banks argued that the pursuit of botanical knowledge for its own sake was an entirely separate matter and had no place in a colonial botanic garden; it should be left to the mother country, ‘where Scientific Education is carried on, but of no use in a Colony’. Likewise, the final say about identification and nomenclature should remain with home – that is Kew – botanists on the basis of samples sent to them.14 Banks’ handpicked candidate to head the new Royal Botanic Garden in Ceylon was William Kerr. Kerr had spent nine years botanizing in China, and Banks was convinced that he could successfully introduce a range of Chinese fruits and other plants into the Garden. Further, he repeated his instructions to look for plants with medicinal or commercial potential. Kerr was convinced that the Slave Island site in Colombo was too small and too low-lying, and consequently

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made plans to move it to a more promising site at Kalutara. Before he could implement this strategy, however, he died. In fact, early deaths would haunt the botanical enterprise in Ceylon for the next thirty years. Nevertheless, before he, too, died young, Kerr’s successor, Alexander Moon, was able to take advantage of the British conquest of the Kandyan Kingdom in 1815 to move the Garden from the coast to inland Peradeniya, just outside the city of Kandy. King Kirthi Sri Rajasinghe had created a royal garden there in 1780; still earlier, since 1371, it had been an orchard supplying the Kandyan court and serving as a pleasure garden. It was an ideal location. It lay within a loop of the Mahaweli Ganga at an altitude of 1,300 feet (396 m). Plants from both highlands and lowlands could grow here without fear of excessive heat or frost.15 Because of the rapid turnover of directors, Peradeniya was slow to get started. The garden may have impressed Bishop Heber, but in fact it served for a time as little more than a market garden for Colombo, with only occasional efforts at botanical identification and experimentation. This mirrored the rudderless decades of Kew between the death of Banks in 1820 and the accession of William Hooker in 1841. In 1844, Peradeniya at last took on new life with the appointment of George Gardner as superintendent. Trained as a doctor in Glasgow, Gardner had spent five years in Brazil collecting plants on a large scale, and once in Ceylon set about restoring and expanding the garden as a serious botanical research centre. A gifted Sinhalese artist, Harmanis de Alwis, had long been employed to gather plants in the wild, illustrate them and prepare herbarium specimens. De Alwis, however, had no training in the specialized craft of botanical drawing, so Gardner taught him how to depict plants in a manner acceptable to professional publications. Gardner also saw the Garden as a proper place for the public to relax: nature was there to be enjoyed even by those with no great interest in science. Earlier directors of the Garden had taken a sporadic interest in coffee and its agricultural potential in Ceylon. By Gardner’s time there was even pressure to turn over large portions of the botanic garden to coffee cultivation. He resisted. An early conservationist, he worried that clearing huge tracts of land suddenly and indiscriminately would lead to the extinction of indigenous species. He warned, too, of the danger of investing so heavily in a single crop, a warning that went unheeded and proved all too prophetic.16 Gardner’s career – so full of promise – came to an abrupt end when he died of apoplexy in 1849 at the age of thirty-seven. The curse of the garden’s directorship was finally broken with the appointment of G. H. K. Thwaites (1812–82). Thwaites might have seemed an unlikely choice. He did not come by way of Kew, had never collected in the field and had never set foot in Ceylon before his

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arrival. His heart must have sunk at his first glimpse of Peradeniya: much of it was a tangle of jungle and scrub. Nevertheless, he served for thirty-one years and died aged seventy, without ever having taken a holiday or left the island. Just as Sir William Hooker’s accession as director of Kew ushered in a long period not just of stability, but also of brilliance, so Thwaites transformed Perideniya into one of the great botanical gardens of the world. Slim and slight of build, Thwaites already struck some as elderly by his early 60s, but he must have been of deceptively robust constitution to have lasted so much longer than his predecessors. Almost everyone who met him seems to have fallen under the spell of ‘the dear old gentleman’.17 Sir William Gregory, who served as governor of Ceylon from 1872 to 1877, came to cherish him. ‘There was no one with whom I lived on such terms of extreme intimacy as with him during the whole period of my appointment’, he wrote. Bereft at the death of his wife, Gregory took refuge with Thwaites when he could bear no other company.18 The famed botanical artist Marianne North called him ‘one of the most perfect gentlemen I have ever known’. When the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, stopped off in the garden in 1875 during his brief tour of Ceylon, the party was ‘received by Mr. Thwaites … who did the honours of the place with charming vivacity and scrupulous care, allowing no object of the many extraordinary and beautiful specimens of tropical vegetation to escape unnoticed’.19 Thwaites, in Anthony Trollope’s estimation, must surely be ‘a happy man if there be one to be found anywhere, and not as yet driven out of Paradise’.20 To be sure, Thwaites had a few eccentricities. He insisted on retaining a portion of the garden in ‘a scrubby, disreputable state’ and refused to label any of the plants in the garden in spite of pleas from visitors and from ‘scientific men at home’. He was also adamant about the ‘inviolability of the flying foxes’ that tended to congregate in the garden at certain times of the year and to hang from tree branches – most people considered them a blight on Peradeniya’s paradise. For the visiting Prince of Wales, whose instinct was to shoot anything that moved, they were irresistible targets. ‘Thwaites had to “retire groaning” ’ while the Prince bagged a few ‘not without a considerable expenditure of powder and shot on the part of the extraordinary fowling piece’.21 Thwaites was in touch with major scientists of his day, such as William and Joseph Hooker and Charles Darwin, and their correspondence provides a glimpse into Thwaites’ day-to-day concerns. Still, pace Trollope, he must often have felt isolated: in a letter to Joseph Hooker, he wrote: ‘If I could be secure in [undecipherable] visits from dear friends, beginning with yourself, this place would be a perfect paradise to me.’ In another letter, he fantasized about a

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Figure 6.2 Peradeniya: India Rubber Trees. Source: John F. Hurst, Indika. The Country and the People of India and Ceylon. New York: Harper & Bros., 1891, 257.

year’s leave in England to reacquaint himself with his homeland and to volunteer at the Kew Herbarium, but this never came to pass.22 What did Peradeniya look like during its ‘Thwaitesian’ heyday and the decades immediately following? Trollope called it ‘simply the most beautiful park that I ever entered. … If, as some say, Eden was in Ceylon, this must have been the spot.’ What immediately astonished any visitor was the entrance itself with its ‘row of indiarubber [sic] trees of great height and size. Their huge roots spread widely above the ground, looking like the intertwined limbs of prehistoric monsters, or uncanny tentacles of gigantic cuttlefish’ (Figure 6.2). The world traveller, Constance Gordon Cumming, declared, ‘[s]urely no other botanical gardens in the world have so stately and unique an approach’. To her, the coils of roots looked like a ‘nightmare of writhing pythons’. Scarcely less impressive were the magnificent palms: palmyra, date, coconut – palms from Havana, from Guinea, from the Seychelles, from Brazil. Towering over all of them was the great talipot palm, Corypha umbriculifera (Figure 6.3). The bamboos struck Marianne North as ‘the finest I ever saw, particularly those of Abyssinia, a tall green variety 60 or 100 feet (18 or 30 m) high’. The trees in the Garden were massed together ‘most picturesquely’ or scattered over the meadow in blocks. The creepers growing over them delighted North, but terrified William Howard Russell – the elephant creepers seemed to ‘seize the trees in giant folds, as if intent on their destruction, an object in which, it is said, indeed, these tremendous vegetable reptiles too often succeed’.23

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Figure 6.3 Peradeniya: Palms. Source: John Ferguson, Ceylon in 1903. Colombo: A. M. & J. Ferguson, 1903, opp. 110.

Somewhat later, the writer Bella Woolf commented that, ‘[p]robably no spot in Ceylon has more admiration lavished on it than the Peradeniya Gardens, “an Earthly Paradise” is in fact none too extravagant a description’. Its great virtue, to her mind, was that it was above all an exemplar of ‘the natural style of gardening. … It is a case of Nature unadorned adorned the most’. This was Thwaites’ master plan, but it was not quite as ‘natural’ as it might have seemed. Not only did he artfully arrange the trees and bamboos, he also brought in ornamental exotics to mix with native flora: Amherstia nobilis from Burma (Figure 6.4), Saraca declinata from Sumatra, Brownea grandiceps from Brazil, Delonix regia from Madagascar. However, he cared little for conventional flowers or for ‘inventions of the modern gardener’, such as vistas and riband-borders: ‘He deemed flowers of very small account, his affections being all absorbed by trees and foliage … picturesquely sprinkled over well-kept verdant lawns.’24 Even if Peradeniya had ‘none of the stiffness of a botanical garden’ about it, it had a serious scientific and economic mandate.25 Mr Mudd, the botanist attached to the Prince of Wales’s entourage, ‘went about in a subdued ecstasy, knife and book in hand, attended by a native gardener speaking English, who seemed an excellent botanist’. With help (fully acknowledged), from de Alwis, father and son, and from Joseph Hooker, Thwaites had compiled and published in instalments his Enumeratio plantarum Zeylaniae. He had initially planned to follow it up with a popular flora to fit into William Hooker’s schema for a series of colonial floras. This never appeared, perhaps, historian Ray Desmond suggests, because Thwaites succumbed to his first love, cryptogamic plants (ferns

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Figure 6.4 Peradeniya: Amherstia nobilis.

and fungi). His friends, the Chief Justice William Norris and the businessman George Wall, shared his fascination with ferns and were serious collectors. Indeed, Thwaites inspired a number of government officials and planters to supply him with plants from areas of the island little known to botanists. At the same time, his interests extended to other areas of natural history. Marianne North savoured his ‘exquisite collection of butterflies’ and was pleased by his promise to give her some of his ‘spares’. He carefully preserved specimens not only of insects, but also of mammals to send to the British Museum.26 Besides collecting, inventorying and exchanging native species and preparing herbaria, Thwaites experimented with a number of potentially ‘useful’ plants. In the garden, Russell found growing ‘nearly all the products which are valuable for commerce … – cloves, nutmegs, vanilla, tea, chocolate [cacao], arrowroot, tapioca, ginger, mangoes, lichens [lychees], and every fruit known to the East.’ To this list could be added sugar, cotton, Shiraz tobacco and Manila hemp. While the temperate climate of Paredeniya suited most economic plants, Thwaites convinced authorities to establish subsidiary gardens at Hakgala (1860), at a higher altitude for cinchona, and at Heneratgoda (1876) in the lowlands for rubber.27

King coffee There was a time, when, from one end [of the Vale of Dumbera] to the other, the sweet aroma of the coffee blossom, blended with fragrance from the lime and orange flowers, loaded the air with perfume. One long undulating stretch of

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coffee gardens, from Rajahwella at one extremity, to Yahagaha Pitiya at the other, gave pleasant homes and busy occupations for a dozen Europeans whose wellkept bungalows were dotted through the valley. It was a good morning’s ride from one end to the other; and in those days when coffee fields were interspersed with jungle and wild spots of low underwood and swampy ground, there was game to be found for the seeking – game in abundance, large and small.

This is John Capper’s description of the golden age of coffee in Ceylon, no doubt coloured by nostalgia.28 What is most amazing is how quickly it came about. Peradeniya had been involved with the coffee economy almost from its birth, as it would be in its death throes. The Dutch had experimented with production in a small way, but had no incentive to compete with their own well-established exports from Java. The same was true with the British and the West Indies. However, the abolition of slavery in 1834 made West Indian production less and less competitive. Instead, many West Indian planters looked to Ceylon as a promising alternative. While a few settled there in person, most were content to invest from a distance, leaving the creation of estates to hired agents, an instance of the importance of capital from one part of the Empire being invested in resource frontiers elsewhere. Almost from the minute they took over the island, the British – everyone from governors down to clergymen – eagerly plunged in. As ‘coffee fever’ spread, they saw to it that tariffs on exports were abolished and crown lands in the former Kandyan Kingdom opened up to European settlement on favourable terms.29 The problem was that almost nobody knew anything about growing coffee. Ceylon’s soils and climate zones were quite different from the West Indies. True, Kandyan farmers had been planting coffee in their home gardens and in Buddhist temple gardens (for the sweet scent of the blossoms) well before the British arrived, but initially on a small scale. Not long after the garden at Peradeniya was established, Superintendent Moon began experimenting with a combination of Sinhalese and European techniques. Peradeniya gardeners relied on elephants rather than buffalo for deep ploughing, a departure from both native and European practice. By the early 1840s, the gardens were supplying seedlings. All planters faced a shortage of labour – it was hard work clearing forest, setting out plants, weeding and finally picking and drying. Sinhalese were willing to do some of the clearing, but baulked at other work. As a result, the kangany system emerged in response to these shortages (Chapter 4). Unlike indentured labour, this entailed personal recruitment of workers, whereby a labourer already working on a plantation would be sent back to his home village to recruit more workers. Added to these problems, Peradeniya was usually short of money.

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In spite of these halting beginnings, coffee took off spectacularly in the early 1840s, just as cinnamon was in free fall. It was as much a boom in speculation as in actual production, with investors buying up large tracts of lands in the highlands without even viewing the sites. ‘So dazzling was the prospect’, wrote Sir Emerson Tennent, ‘that expenditure was unlimited; and its profusion was only equaled by the ignorance and inexperience of those to whom it was entrusted.’ Another writer, a planter himself, likened it to an addiction: ‘An infatuation’, he wrote, ‘appears to have possessed them [the European planters] and they slumbered on like the narcotized opium smoker … .’30 Kandyan peasants, too, had been expanding coffee growing into cleared forest fields, taking advantage of the programme of road building, primitive as it was, that finally ended their isolation and allowed access to a global market; indeed, until the late 1840s their share of coffee exports far exceeded that of European planters.31 In the space of a few decades, coffee, whether grown by Kandyans or Europeans, changed the face of Ceylon in a way that centuries of cinnamon never had. Nothing illustrates this more vividly than another vignette by John Capper.32 In 1840, he visited a new estate being hacked out of the forest 40 km from Kandy. He had to ride on horseback because the Matale Coach was not yet up and running. As he approached a ‘clearing’ (something of a misnomer): ‘[p]ile on pile of heavy dark jungle rose before my astonished sight looking like grim fortresses defending some hidden city of giants. … Before us were … fifty acres of felled jungle in wildest disorder.’ Giant trees that had weathered storms and sheltered elephants lay crushed and splintered on the ground, waiting till ‘sufficiently dry for the torch that would blacken their massive trunks, and calcine their many branches into dusty heaps of alkali’. Next, they came to a tract of forest, ‘where the heavy, quick click of many axes told us there was a working party busily employed’ clearing the next field. Capper marvelled at the dexterity and precision of these ‘low country Cingalese [sic].’ They cut through the trees but left just enough to keep them standing. They then moved to the topmost row of cut trees and at a command sank their gleaming axes into them, working with perfect synchronization, so that each row fell on the trees below. ‘The whole of the forest-world’ seemed to be ‘tumbling to pieces’. The main branches were lopped off and then they too were left for the ‘burn’. The European superintendent was dressed in ‘full jungle costume’ with wicker helmet and padded white cloth hanging down his neck. The most important part of his attire were ‘immense leech-gaiters’ fitting close inside his boots – leeches have always been prolific throughout the rural areas of Ceylon. The planter took the visitors to his ‘bungalow’ for lunch. It was a ‘miserable little cabin’, barely 6 by

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12 feet (1.8 ⫻ 3.6 m), with a low thatched roof and huddling under a projecting rock ‘half hid[den] by thorny creepers’, but their host assured them that it was a lot better than his first habitation on the estate. This consisted of nothing more than two or three huge talipot leaves hung across a ridge-pole with mats at each end. He lived there for three months, ‘and that, too, during the rainy season’. Ironically, the ‘Lines’, the mud huts for the ‘coolies’ working on the estate, ‘appeared much more comfortable than their master’s dwelling’. And so they had to be; workers were so scarce that they had to be well cared for or they would leave. He relied already at this early date on south Indians – Malabars – to clear the ground for the ‘Lines’ and the nurseries of young coffee plants (Figure 6.5). It was a lonely existence, unimaginable for those living in the luxury of Colombo. Six years later, in 1846, Capper paid a second visit to this estate, curious to see the changes. Where earlier the fertile valley through which he rode ‘was one unbroken mass of heavy jungle … now, a dozen large estates, with bungalows and extensive works, were to be seen;’ all along his route, in fact, lay ‘mile upon mile of coffee’ – from young seedlings just put out, to ‘bushes laden with red ripe berries’ (Figure 6.6). Arriving at his destination, he found it more like ‘a magnified garden than an estate. … I could scarcely recognize it as the same property’. Now the superintendent lived in a large, imposing bungalow, surrounded by a wide veranda, ‘the white pillars of which were polished like marble’. There was a Bengali servant, elegant furniture and a ‘delightfully hot’ curry. It was harvest time and a stream of ‘coolies’ filed into a large, zinc-roofed building, bearing

Figure 6.5 Log cabin life – a working day. Source: D. M. Forrest, A Hundred Years of Ceylon Tea, 1867–1967. London: Chatto & Windus, 1967, 3a.

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Figure 6.6 Coffee berries.

sacks of ripe coffee on their heads. There were kanganies to check off each man’s gathering and issue chits to be redeemed at the end of the month. The rest of the description makes clear that this was now a sophisticated, almost industrial operation, not only growing coffee, but also preparing it for shipment to coffee mills in Colombo for final curing on the ‘barbacues’ before it could be marketed, exported and sold (see Chapter 4).33 In Ceylon, the weak link in the whole system was transportation. Plantations tried to raise their own cattle to convey the crop to market in Kandy and thence to the capital, but with limited success.34 Hiring carts to haul coffee from remote plantations to Kandy and thence to Colombo was expensive and prey to pilfering along the way – it cost twice as much to convey the coffee the 160 km or so from plantation to port of shipment as it did for freight all the way to England, some 25,000 miles (40,234 km).35 In 1847, just as European production was coming into its own, the price of coffee collapsed, partly because of economic depression in Europe, partly because many growers had no idea what type of lands were suitable for coffee, and partly because speculation had driven land prices to irrational and often heavily mortgaged heights. Recovery, however, came within a few years and coffee expanded on an even grander scale than before, moving ever deeper into the highlands as experimentation proved that it could grow at higher elevations than the 3,500 feet (1,067 m) earlier assumed to be the limit – in fact, it could grow at elevations up to 5,000 feet (1,524 m) under the right conditions. By the

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early 1860s, Ceylon briefly led the world in coffee exports. The opening of the railroad between Colombo and Kandy in 1867 was, as Capper anticipated, ‘of incalculable benefit’. It was extended beyond Kandy, and more roads were built under pressure from planters, thereby demonstrating how British demand led to environmental changes in its colonies.36 Then, in 1869, a fungus appeared on coffee bushes on certain plantations. It was not the first disease to strike coffee, but in time it would prove the most serious – hence its ominous name: Hemileia vastatrix. Thwaites sent samples of the fungi to Kew where it was identified by a mycologist. His had been a voice crying in the wilderness against the dangers of monoculture and urging plantation owners to diversify: ‘Year after year he foretold its [coffee’s] downfall.’ As his friend Governor Gregory ruefully acknowledged: ‘I should have been a much richer and less worried man had I hearkened to his advice’. Few did ‘hearken’. Quite the contrary; segments of the settler community continued their habitual grumbling about Peradeniya – ‘the murmur of ill-informed utilitarianism against the expenditure bestowed upon the botanic garden’, as Tennent put it.37 When Thwaites declared flatly, ‘I see no reason to suppose, that so long as coffee trees remain in Ceylon … the disease will disappear’, the planting community, unable to accept it, reviled the man instead.38 They cleared still more land for coffee to compensate for abandoned fields – and for a few years benefited from rising prices as output declined. While the volume of Ceylon’s coffee exports peaked in 1870, ironically the value of exports reached its highest point in 1877.39 As the devastating effects of the fungus and the lack of any cure finally became impossible to deny, planters belatedly looked to Peradeniya for salvation in the form of new crops. These they found first in cinchona and then in tea. Under Henry Trimen, Thwaites’ able, if less colourful, successor as director of the garden between 1880 and 1890, the transformation from a coffee to a tea economy was completed.

Queen tea The highland garden of Hakgala lies a few miles from Nuwara Eliya, the hill station to which Ceylon’s officialdom retreated during the hottest months (Figure 6.7). At an elevation of 1,745 metres, it is even lovelier than Peradeniya, commanding a magnificent view of the hills and valleys of Uva. Hakgala rock (‘elephant’s jaw rock’) shelters it from monsoon blasts: ‘Like

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Figure 6.7 Hakgala.

the mists which watered Eden, so here mists roll up from the low country dreamy and still, and float spirit-like, enfolding each separate tree and shrub in a cool filmy veil’.40 Thwaites founded the garden in 1860 with the express purpose of introducing cinchona cultivation to the highlands. Cinchona bark provided quinine, the only known treatment in the West for malaria in the nineteenth century. It was native to the Andes (hence the name ‘Peruvian bark’), where the Spanish crown zealously maintained a monopoly of the plant, while British and Dutch equally zealously sought to smuggle out plants for their own tropical botanic gardens to bring down prices, which had sky-rocketed with ever increasing global demand – by the 1850s the British were spending more than £40,000 per year to supply the Bengal Presidency alone with quinine. Soon after, Kew successfully obtained seeds and sent them to Ootacamund (now Udhagamandalam) in the Nilgiris of southern India and Hakgala in Ceylon. The problem that faced botanists in both places was to ascertain which of the several species of cinchona was best suited to local environments, how to propagate it and encourage its large-scale cultivation – then to deal with the problems of drainage, diseases and its susceptibility to wind damage. Unfortunately, the cinchona established in Ceylon and at Ootacamund had a much weaker concentration of quinine than another species developed by the Dutch in Java, a species for some unknown reason ignored by Thwaites and his lieutenants at Hakgala (and ignored by Hooker at Kew, for that matter). Nevertheless, Hakgala supplied thousands of seedlings to highland plantation owners, who could with

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proper drainage grow it on the same fields cleared for coffee. Ironically, they soon fell victims to their own success: they produced so much cinchona that prices fell below the level of profitability – the planter Frederick Lewis claimed he was looked upon as ‘wild Cassandra’ for even suggesting this possibility. As well as overproduction, Ceylon faced competition from Java, which produced higher-grade quinine and had lower transport costs. Production peaked in the mid-1880s, then tumbled precipitously until the 1890s, when Ceylon provided only an insignificant amount of the world’s cinchona.41 And so the curtain rises on the final act: tea. For a brief period the three crops overlapped. ‘In many districts’, noted the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel, who visited the highlands in 1882 at the key moment of transition, ‘we now see the sweet-scented tea shrub and slim Cinchona tree, alternating with the coffee plants, the original occupants of the soil.’42 By the end of the century, however, tea had the stage to itself, as it does to this day (Chapter 4). In the early 1830s, the British East India Company faced a desperate situation. Its monopoly of the tea trade with China was about to end just as tea was fast becoming the national drink. The obvious solution seemed to be to find new sources of tea, to grow it in India or other possessions. Calcutta Botanic Garden sent tea seeds and seedlings from Assam to Peradeniya. These were planted on a highland plantation and then heard of no more. And so it remained until the early 1860s, when the indefatigable Thwaites cultivated tea at Peradeniya and Hakgala and provided seed to the handful of adventurous planters. These early assays, however, were curiosities rather than commercial efforts to grow tea; tea did not really take off until it was clear that coffee’s collapse was irreversible.43 There is an apparent exception to this chronology. On his tour of the highlands in 1846, Sir Emerson Tennent, Colonial Secretary of Ceylon under Governor Torrington, visited the Pusilawa Estate run by the Worms brothers, cousins of the Baron de Rothschild. The brothers managed a beautiful and extensive coffee plantation, but Tennent was startled to come upon a tract planted in tea: ‘The plants thrive surprisingly, and when I saw them they were covered with bloom.’ The experiment had hitherto been ‘defeated’, however, by the impossibility of finding skilled labour to dry and manipulate the leaves. Soil and climate were fine, but ‘should it ever be thought expedient to cultivate tea in addition to coffee on Ceylon … artisans from China’ would have to be introduced to process the tea. Tennent did not say where the tea came from, but a nephew of one of the brothers later wrote that his uncle had brought the first tea plants directly from China to Ceylon in September 1841 and used them to propagate more in a

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nursery. When Tennent visited therefore they would have just reached maturity. But how on earth had the Worms brothers managed to smuggle out plants in the midst of the First Opium War (1839–42)?44 Tennent’s comments about needing ‘artisans from China’ were well taken.45 ‘Viewed through superficial eyes, tea growing appears to be an effortless process: God makes the tea flush and man strips it as it grows’, but the reality was far more complex. True, tea was even more accommodating than coffee or soil. Under the climate conditions in the highlands, it could grow at higher altitudes (varieties could also grow in the lowlands) than both and was long-lived and relatively resistant to disease.46 It could be planted in abandoned coffee fields once the stumps were cleared. But, as with coffee earlier, Ceylon’s planters initially had no idea how to carry out the intricate succession of operations to prepare it for market: pruning, plucking only the ‘two leaves and the bud’, then withering, rolling, fermenting, firing and grading. The litmus test was the ‘strong dark infusion, and … brown leaf ’ demanded by the London market (Chapter 4). There was a long period of trial and error before planters got it right – James Taylor admitted that the first batch he made ‘was pretty nearly rank poison’.47 Furthermore, to compete with already well-established growers elsewhere such as in Assam and Darjeeling, a great deal of new capital – far more than planters had at hand – was required to purchase the heavy machinery manufactured in Great Britain for processing tea. As one observer put it, ‘Ceylon tea was born in penury and reared in economy’.48 Picking was a delicate art that could only be done by hand, mostly by women and children – Cave rhapsodizes about the ‘dusky maidens sorting their freshly plucked leaf at dewy eve’. Weeding and pruning also had to be done manually, but the rest of the process soon became heavily mechanized until one came to the final conclave of – male – tea tasters in this eco-cultural network.49 The first shipment of tea from Ceylon – a mere twenty-three pounds – reached England in 1873. Exports rose gradually until by the 1890s it had eclipsed coffee and cinchona to dominate the export economy. Thanks to the promotional genius of Sir Thomas Lipton, who had bought his first tea estate in 1890, Ceylon tea became known all over the world and commanded high prices at the auctions in Mincing Lane (Chapter 4).50 With the introduction of tea, the transformation of the highlands was complete; the dense jungles encountered by the first ‘pioneers’ had fallen to the Sinhalese woodsman’s axe and the European estate agent’s torch. While some admired the great expanses of tea ‘gardens’ with their ‘regal green’ that blanketed the hillsides (Figure 6.8), Raven-Hart is of a different mind: ‘A tea-estate,’ he writes, ‘has all the romantic charm of a field of cabbages, and without exception

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Figure 6.8 Tea gardens.

the tea-factories are hideous. … The only redeeming feature is that trees are planted with tea, some for shade and wind-cover, some to help the nitrogen of chemical manures to reach the roots.’51

The world the planters made To the Secretary of State’s question, ‘Who are these coffee planters who are beginning to agitate Ceylon?’, the answer might be: ‘A turbulent hill tribe, probably of Bohemian or Bulgarian origin, constantly on the borders of insurrection, but showing vague signs of a crude civilization by a hankering after roads, bridges and other visionary impossibilities.’52

In fact, the tribesmen were more apt to be Scots than Bulgarians, but this quotation underscores the perception that the world of the planter was a world apart from officialdom and the coastal elites. When planters were not clamouring for roads and railroads, they were berating Peradeniya for being too distracted by science to focus fully on their concerns – or for not coming up with a cure for all the ills afflicting their crops. And yet for all the posturing, planters and officials were united in their economic goals and these centred on the European population – never more than 10,000 out of a total population of well over two million.53 Ceylon was a plantation and settler colony in a way that India never was, except for a few pockets such as Assam, Darjeeling and the Nilgiris. The Ceylon equivalent

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of the ‘heaven-sent’ – officialdom – might be at the top of the pecking order, closely followed by the military, but the health of the colony depended on its ‘box wallahs’. Early administrators realized this and encouraged plantation agriculture, investing in it themselves until forbidden by the home government on the grounds of conflict of interest. Even then, one suspects this did not end the practice, judging from Governor Gregory’s laments about his investments in coffee. By venturing into uncharted lands, nineteenth-century planters have been called ‘pioneers’, and with good reason. To be sure, they were preceded by Kandyan peasant farmers also expanding into chena (slash-and-burn) land at the same time, but they had remarkably little interaction with them. Instead, they drew their field labour from southern India. Major Thomas Skinner had written to the governor in 1840 suggesting that it would ‘confer a blessing on humanity to be the means of removing some 20,000 of the panting, half-famished creatures from the burning sandy plains of Southern India to such comparative paradise [of Ceylon]’. It would benefit all concerned, he insisted, including the Sinhalese living on the margins of the wilderness, who would be attracted to the new estates. And so it came to pass, at least as far as southern Indians were concerned; they did indeed become the mainstay of Ceylon’s plantation economy. Coffee relied on seasonal migrants coming for the harvest months, after which they tended to return to their own farms at home. As Chapter 4 shows, tea, however, was harvested throughout the year and demanded a permanent labour force – essentially a resident colony of workers who came to be known as ‘estate Tamils’ (as opposed to the long-established Jaffna Tamils in the north), recruited like their predecessors in south India among the Tamil population, but now on a much larger scale.54 At first labour was scarce such that workers had to be cosseted, if one is to believe Capper. But, as migration increased in scale and came under the control of professional recruiters, conditions became all the more appalling: while some workers sailed directly from Tuticorin to Colombo, most were landed at Mannar in north-western Ceylon after a rough crossing from India. They then had to walk 130 miles (210 km) to Matale, where they either walked or, in later years, entrained to their final destinations. Huge numbers died along the way, spreading cholera and other diseases in the villages through which they passed. On the plantations, they were housed ‘in lines’ – long rows of barracks-like buildings divided into single-room dwellings into which varying numbers of workers were stuffed. As Cave acknowledged, ‘[t]hey do not enjoy the luxury of much space; but their ideas of comfort are not ours’.55

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The planters’ world was also unstable. They were at the mercy of a fickle nature and a fickle market – and fickle capitalists. Like most colonies, Ceylon did not have the resources to finance its economic development, but relied on investors who were at best transient rather than permanent residents. John Ferguson, the island’s inveterate statistician, estimated that only about 10 per cent of planters actually made their fortunes in coffee and those that did, repatriated their profits as quickly as possible rather than investing in the long-term development of the economy. ‘Money was sent out to Ceylon to fell its forests and plant them with coffee, and it was returned in the shape of copious harvests to the home capitalist, leaving in some cases the bare hillsides from whence their rich harvests were drawn.’56 Many estates changed hands a number of times during the century. But what was financial ruin for some, meant cheap prices for others, who rapidly acquired abandoned fields, counting on a new boom. The actual management of an estate was in the hands of a superintendent. As each new crop was introduced, there was a period of experimentation and later, too, constant debate about all aspects of cultivation. In the early period, the superintendents lived rough in remote and rugged terrain. They quickly gained a reputation for boorishness that they never entirely lost. With prosperity, conditions quickly improved, at least until the next crisis, but it could still be a lonely existence, and even more so for women than for men. Novelist Michael Ondaatje writes of ‘the sleepy green landscape that held [his mother] captive’, and this at a much later date when communication was far easier. As a corollary to their isolation, planters’ hospitality was proverbial. Still, Haeckel was taken aback when he found he was expected to dress for dinner. Not only had ‘English etiquette’ made its way into the ‘mountain wilds’, but Scottish and English names – Abergeldie, Culloden, Fairieland – were also taking their place among euphonious, but often lengthy, Sinhalese plantation names: Loolecondera, Kawandanuwara, Doombagastalawa. Here planters were ‘to all intents and purposes, little kings within their own limited kingdoms’. They had their bungalows ‘replete with European comforts’, their clubs, their hunts – and their land measured in ‘perches’, an archaic unit equal to one-fourth the length of a cricket pitch.57

Conclusion Looking back on the progress of the century just concluded, Henry Cave declared that the Botanic Garden at Peradeniya had been ‘intimately connected with the agricultural prosperity of the country’. It had largely fulfilled its charge of

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discovering ‘products likely to increase the wealth of the colony’. He added that native agriculture had benefited along with the European-dominated plantation sector, by receiving ‘seeds, advice and instruction free of cost’. This is debatable. Peasant farmers had expanded coffee land largely on their own in the late 1830s and 1840s. They tried cinchona on a small scale, and a few experimented with tea after the collapse of coffee – Thwaites encouraged planting roadside gardens in the province of Uva, but these did not catch on. Peradeniya’s subsequent director Henry Trimen even argued against tea growing by indigenous farmers. In practice, Sinhalese agriculture ran parallel to European agriculture, concentrating especially on coconut, rice and areca nuts.58 The plantation economy of Ceylon would probably have followed much the same trajectory without the help of Peradeniya and its satellites. Nevertheless, the gardens did have a significant impact. They gave out thousands of seedlings together with advice, based on extensive experimentation, which contributed to the incredibly quick transitions that rescued the economy in its successive crises. This was particularly important in the case of cinchona which was developed at Hakgala with considerable foresight by Thwaites and his staff and served to tide planters over during the perilous interlude between the downfall of coffee and its replacement by tea – without cinchona, the effects of the coffee blight would have been far more ruinous. By the time cinchona was on the decline, tea plants had come into production. Under its most effective nineteenth-century directors – Gardner, Thwaites, Trimen – the Garden not only developed ‘useful plants’, but also tried to put its cultivation on a scientific path. They were in fact always a step ahead of the planters, not only in experimenting with the main crops of cinnamon, coffee, cinchona and tea, but also with cacao, rubber and spices that could be cultivated separately or in tandem with the main crops in some areas. Had planters followed their urgings to diversify, rather than putting all of their eggs in the basket of the crop that seemed to promise the quickest returns, they would have been spared ‘Nature’s revenge’, at least in its most virulent form. Diversification would have provided not only a cushion against failure of the primary crop; it might well also have slowed the spread of diseases. The lesson was finally learned by the end of the century, when it became far more common on tea estates at lower elevations to find fields devoted also to cardamoms, cacao and rubber – and even to some coffee.59 For all their ups and downs, there was a large element of serendipity in the fortunes of the plantation raj. Most of Ceylon’s soils were poor, comprising only a thin layer of topsoil clinging to a rocky or sandy base. Planters were just plain

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lucky that cinnamon loved the hot, damp sandy soils of the coast and its interior, and that coffee for a short time thrived on the rugged hillsides of the highlands. They were luckier still that tea grew in both lowlands and highlands, thriving at even higher altitudes and on even more precipitous hillsides than coffee. But at what price? Certainly the botanists attached to Peradeniya and Hakgala advanced science through their collecting and documenting of native species as well as their experimentation with commercial crops. Their commitment to conservation, however, conflicted with their commitment to developing ‘useful plants’. By the turn of the century, virtually all of Ceylon’s pristine forests were gone. Indigenous flora were disappearing and with them the habitats of elephants, leopards, sambhur and other fauna – those, that is, which had not been hunted almost to extinction. When he first arrived in the colony in 1897, John Still found that ‘the planters of coffee and then of tea had cleared the valleys of their primeval forests, and stark uniformity, duller than a market garden, had taken their place except where, in ravines or swamps too steep or too wet for tea, wild scrub still harboured a few mongooses, a few wild cats, rare porcupines, and rarer jackals’.60

Notes 1 Reginald Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India … 1824–1825, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1828), vol. 2, 258. The Anglican Church of New South Wales was administered by an archdeacon within the diocese of Calcutta until 1835. 2 The line is from Heber’s hymn, ‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains’. 3 For a detailed description of the cinnamon gardens during the early years of British rule, see Robert Percival, An Account of the Island of Ceylon, Containing its History, Geography, Natural History, with the Manners and Customs of its various Inhabitants … (London: C. & R. Baldwin, 1805), ch. 15; Rev. James Cordiner, Description of Ceylon: An Account of the Country, Inhabitants, and Natural Productions, 2 vols. (London: Longman et al., 1807), vol. 1, ch. 13; Heber, Narrative of a Journey, 174; Rohan Pethiyagoda, Pearls, Spices and Green Gold: An Illustrated History of Biodiversity Exploration in Sri Lanka (Colombo: WHT Publ., 2007), ch. 1, 31. 4 Cordiner, Description of Ceylon, vol. 1, 413; Percival, An Account of the Island of Ceylon, 338. 5 Cordiner, Description of Ceylon, vol. 1, 413–14. 6 Rowland Raven-Hart, Ceylon: History in Stone (Colombo: Associated Newspapers of Ceylon, 1964), 226.

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7 Cordiner, Description of Ceylon, vol. 1, 414–15. 8 Cordiner, Description of Ceylon, vol. 1, 420. 9 K. M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (London: Hurst/ Berkeley : University of California Press, 1981), 239–40, 243–5, 249, 271. Later in the century, cassia was in fact introduced into Ceylon via Peradeniya: H. F. Macmillan, Tropical Planting and Gardening with Special Reference to Ceylon, 3rd edn (Colombo: The Times of Ceylon, 1925), 333–4. 10 Pethiyagoda, Pearls, Spices and Green Gold, 26–9; Lennox A. Mills, Ceylon Under British Rule (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 16. 11 George, Viscount Valentia, Voyages and Travels, 4 vols. (London: C. & J. Rivington, 1811[1809]), vol. 1, 274. 12 Eugenia W. Herbert, Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India (Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2011/New Delhi: Penguin India, 2013), 141–5; Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2000), chs. 4–6. 13 Pethiyagoda, Pearls, Spices and Green Gold, 57–8; Ray Desmond, The European Discovery of the Indian Flora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 159–60. 14 Reprinted in Webb, Tropical Pioneers, appendix 1. 15 On the history of botanical gardens in Ceylon, see especially: Pethiyagoda, Pearls, Spices and Green Gold, 57–91; Desmond, The European Discovery, 159–169; James L. A. Webb Jr. Tropical Pioneers: Human Agency and Ecological Change in the Highlands of Sri Lanka, 1800–1900 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2002), 55–7, appendix 5, and passim. 16 Webb, Tropical Pioneers, 104; Pethiyagoda, Pearls, Spices and Green Gold, 69. 17 Marianne North, A Vision of Eden (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980), 116. 18 Lady Gregory (ed.), Sir William Gregory, K. C. M. G., Formerly MP and Sometime Governor of Ceylon: An Autobiography, 2nd edn (London: John Murray, 1894), 284–5; Brian Jenkins, Sir William Gregory of Coole: The Biography of an AngloIrishman (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1986), 236. 19 William Howard Russell, The Prince of Wales’s Tour (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1877), 263. 20 Anthony Trollope, The Tireless Traveler: Twenty Letters to the Liverpool Mercury, ed. B. A. Booth (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1978 [1876]), 61. 21 Gregory, Governor of Ceylon, 284, 348; Russell, The Prince of Wales’s Tour, 264. 22 Thwaites to Hooker, n.d. [September 1866] and 28 September 1866, Director’s Correspondence 1852–79, vol. 162, Herbarium Library, Kew. In a letter to Hooker of 28 January 1867, he writes, ‘Remember me to Darwin and other excellent friends.’ Director’s Correspondence 1852–79, vol. 162, Herbarium Library, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Six letters from Darwin to Thwaites are available online with useful annotations: Darwin Correspondence Project (www.darwinproject.ac.uk). Hooker did visit Thwaites at Peradeniya in 1873: Webb, Tropical Pioneers, 140.

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23 These descriptions are taken primarily from Trollope, The Tireless Traveller, 60; Gregory, Governor of Ceylon, 283; North, A Vision of Eden, 116; Russell, The Prince of Wales’s Tour, 263; Constance Gordon Cumming, Two Happy Years in Ceylon (London: Chatto & Windus, 1892), 264–71 (quote, 265); Sir James Emerson Tennent, Ceylon: An Account of the Island, Physical, Historical, and Topographical …, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, & Roberts, 1860), vol. 2, 208–9. For a slightly later period, see Henry W. Cave, Golden Tips: A Description of Ceylon and its Great Tea Industry (London: S. Low, Marston & Co., 1900), 78–88; Alan Walters, Palms and Pearls, 61–4; J. C. Willis, Ceylon: A Handbook for the Resident and the Traveller (Peradeniya: Colombo Apothecaries, 1907), 221–6; and Bella Woolf, How to See Ceylon (Colombo: The Times of Ceylon, 1912), 91. 24 Woolf, How to See Ceylon, 91; Desmond, The European Discovery, 164; Gordon Cumming, Two Happy Years, 267; Trollope, The Tireless Traveller, 61. 25 Gordon Cumming, Two Happy Years, 267. 26 Desmond, The European Discovery, 164–5; Pethiyagoda, 73–5; North, A Vision of Eden, 116. 27 Russell, The Prince of Wales’s Tour, 263–4; Desmond, The European Discovery, 164, 166; Pethiyagoda, Pearls, Spices and Green Gold, 75. 28 John Capper. Old Ceylon-Sketches of Ceylon Life in the Olden Time (Colombo: Ceylon Times Press, 1877), 140. 29 Webb offers an excellent history of Ceylon’s coffee industry, but from an ecological rather than a social and cultural vantage point: 60–2, 76–89 and passim. 30 Tennent, Ceylon: An Account, 2: 231; James Duncan, In the Shadows of the Tropics: Climate, Race and Biopower in Nineteenth-Century Ceylon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 81. 31 Webb, Tropical Pioneers, 70. Kandyan farmers continued to produce coffee into the 1880s. 32 Capper, Old Ceylon, 31–44. For a wonderfully illustrated history of Ceylon planters, see John Weatherstone, The Pioneers: The Early British Tea and Coffee Planters and their Way of Life (London: Quiller Press, 1986), ch. 4, 5. 33 Capper, Old Ceylon,162–74, describes the process at length in the 1860s, as does William Sabonadière, The Coffee Planter of Ceylon, 2nd edn (London: E. & F. N. Spon, 1870 [1866]), passim. 34 Webb details the many difficulties of raising cattle in the highlands, especially the lack of good pasture and the prevalence of disease: Webb, Tropical Pioneers, 93–9 and passim. 35 Capper, Old Ceylon, 44. On Ceylon’s nineteenth-century transport history, see Mills, Ceylon Under British Rule, ch. 12. 36 Sabonadière, The Coffee Planter, 3–7. 37 Desmond, The European Discovery, 165; Gregory, Governor of Ceylon, 285; Tennent, Ceylon: An Account, 209–10. In 1864, planters had even urged that

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43 44

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Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire the Garden be disbanded, but the Governor vetoed this. Desmond, European Discovery, 166. Frederick Lewis, Sixty-Four Years in Ceylon (Colombo: Apothecaries Co., 1926), 28, 82–3. Webb gives a table of coffee exports from 1849 to 1899. Webb, Tropical Pioneers, 113. Ludowyk claims that over a million acres had been devoted to coffee when the crop failed, but this is probably an exaggeration. E. F. C. Ludowyk, The Story of Ceylon (London: Faber & Faber, 1962), 200, but cf. Mills, Ceylon Under British Rule, 237. Gordon Cumming, Two Happy Years, vol. 1, 216. On the history of cinchona in Ceylon, see Thwaites to Hooker, letters of 1866, Director’s Correspondence 1852–79, vol. 162, Herbarium Library, Kew; Webb, Tropical Pioneers, 166–28 and App. 4; Desmond, The European Discovery, 166; Pethiyagoda, Pearls, Spices and Green Gold, 33, Lewis, Sixty-Four Years, 78. Ernst Haeckel, A Visit to Ceylon, trans. Clara Bell, 2nd edn (Boston: Cassino, 1883), 282; Webb, Tropical Pioneers, 128 and table 5.4: Highland Acreage in Coffee, Cinchona, and Tea, 1867–1900. D. M. Forrest, A Hundred Years of Ceylon Tea, 1867–1967 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967), 50–3, 66–7. Tennent, Ceylon: An Account, 2: 251–2; Forrest, Ceylon Tea, 52–3. James Taylor also seems to have obtained some seeds from China, but it was principally Assam that supplied seeds and seedlings to Peradeniya by the time tea began to be planted on a significant scale: Forrest, Ceylon Tea, 67–70. This was the same problem faced earlier by would-be tea growers in Assam: local populations did not dry the wild tea growing in their midst and had no interest in working on plantations: Herbert, Flora’s Empire, 137–8. Robert Standish, Elephant Walk (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 97. Standish was a planter. It has been estimated that 70 per cent of the bushes being picked in 1967 were the same ones put out by planters before 1885: Forrest, Ceylon Tea, 49. Forrest also tells of coming across a scattered group of some 30 tea bushes ‘still growing rather leggily on a lawn and under huge trees in the center of [Peradeniya’s] gardens’, which he surmises are the remnants of the large nursery established with stock from Assam in 1868: Forrest, 70. The Morice Report 1867, repr. Forrest, Ceylon Tea, appendix I; Taylor, quoted in Forrest, 71, note 1. Sir Edward Rosling, quoted in Forrest, Ceylon Tea, 118. Quoted in Cave, Golden Tips, 2. For detailed descriptions of the ‘manufacture of the “flush” into tea’, see also C. R. Fay, ‘Plantation Economy’. The Economic Journal 46, 154 (December 1936): 627–44; Harry Williams, Ceylon: Pearl of the East, 2nd edn (London: R. Hale, 1963 [1950]), 114–31; Lewis, Sixty-Four Years, 186, 190–2. Williams and Lewis were both planters.

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50 Webb, Tropical Pioneers, 133–7; Weatherstone, Pioneers, 127–9, 133; Forrest, Ceylon Tea,153–4. 51 Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (London: Vintage, 1993 [1982]), 167; Raven-Hart, Ceylon, 281–2. Forrest comments that many of the highland districts would have been prettier during the period of transition because of the variety of crops growing there – coffee and cinchona as well as tea: Ceylon Tea, 101. 52 Forrest, Ceylon Tea, 176. 53 S. A. Pakeman, Ceylon (New York: Praeger, 1964), 106; Alan Walters, Palms and Pearls, 44–7. 54 Quoted in Forrest, Ceylon Tea, 233. Sinhalese peasants may have been more involved in the labour force of nineteenth-century tea plantations than is generally thought: L. A. Wickremeratne, ‘The Establishment of the Tea Industry in Ceylon’. Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies 2 (1972): 284–94. They also grew tea on their own land. 55 Cave, Golden Tips, 159; Forrest, Ceylon Tea, 108–12. From c.1900, conditions for migrant workers began to improve significantly. 56 John Ferguson, Ceylon in 1903 (Colombo: A. M. & J. Ferguson, 1903), 82–4. 57 Ondaatje, Running in the Family, 165; Haeckel, A Visit to Ceylon, 285–6, Forrest, Ceylon Tea, 101–3, appendix 5; Lewis, Sixty-Four Years, 6; Tennent, Ceylon: An Account, 2: 231; David Robson, Geoffrey Bawa: The Complete Works (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002), 13. Planters still had a reputation as a ‘rowdy lot’ later in the century: Standish, passim; Leonard Woolf, Growing, 135; Edward Lear’s Indian Journal, ed. Ray Murphy (London: Jarrolds, 1953), 222, 224. 58 Cave, Golden Tips, 78; Forrest, Ceylon Tea, 107; Webb, Tropical Pioneers, 135–6. 59 Ferguson, Ceylon in 1903, 66; Cave, Golden Tips, 68–9, 99–100. 60 John Still, The Jungle Tide (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1930), 9.

Select bibliography Capper, John. Old Ceylon – Sketches of Ceylon Life in the Olden Time. Colombo: Ceylon Times Press, 1877. Cave, Henry W. Golden Tips: A Description of Ceylon and its Great Tea Industry. London: S. Low, Marston & Co., 1900. Desmond, Ray. The European Discovery of the Indian Flora. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Duncan, James. In the Shadows of the Tropics: Climate, Race and Biopower in Nineteenth-Century Ceylon. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Ferguson, John. Ceylon in 1903. Colombo: A. M. & J. Ferguson, 1903. Forrest, D. M. A Hundred Years of Ceylon Tea, 1867–1967. London: Chatto & Windus, 1967.

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Gordon Cumming, Constance. Two Happy Years in Ceylon. London: Chatto & Windus, 1892. Gregory, Lady (ed.), Sir William Gregory, K. C. M. G., Formerly MP and Sometime Governor of Ceylon: An Autobiography, 2nd edn. London: John Murray, 1894. Heber, Reginald. Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India … 1824–1825, 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1828. Herbert, Eugenia W. Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India. Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2011; New Delhi: Penguin India, 2013. Hurst, John F. Indika. The Country and the People of India and Ceylon. New York: Harper & Bros., 1891. Lewis, Frederick. Sixty-Four Years in Ceylon. Colombo: Apothecaries Co., 1926. Mills, Lennox A. Ceylon Under British Rule. London: Oxford University Press, 1933. North, Marianne. A Vision of Eden. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980. Pethiyagoda, Rohan. Pearls, Spices and Green Gold: An Illustrated History of Biodiversity Exploration in Sri Lanka. Colombo: WHT Publ., 2007. Sabonadière, William. The Coffee Planter of Ceylon, 2nd edn. London: E. & F. N. Spon, 1870 [1866]. Tennent, Sir James Emerson. Ceylon: An Account of the Island, Physical, Historical, and Topographical …, 2 vols. London: Longman, Green, Longman, & Roberts, 1860. Walters, Alan. Palms and Pearls: or, Scenes in Ceylon. London: Bentley, 1892. Weatherstone, John. The Pioneers: The Early British Tea and Coffee Planters and their Way of Life. London: Quiller Press, 1986. Webb, James L. A., Jr. Tropical Pioneers: Human Agency and Ecological Change in the Highlands of Sri Lanka, 1800–1900. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2002. Wickremeratne, L. A. ‘The Establishment of the Tea Industry in Ceylon’. Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies 2 (1972): 279–94.

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Eco-Cultural Networks in Southern China and Colonial New Zealand: Cantonese Market Gardening and Environmental Exchange, 1860s–1910s1 James Beattie

Take one of the Chinese gardens in the outskirts of any of the New Zealand cities, multiply it a million-fold, and the result is China.2 Arthur S. Adams (1900) British imperialism and Chinese migration established eco-cultural networks that transformed environments in New Zealand and China. In New Zealand, southern Chinese established market gardens, introduced plants familiar to them and engaged in widespread environmental modifications. The money they sent back to southern China also transformed environments there, as did the need to cater to returning Chinese, both living and dead. These connections also made the landscape of North China familiar to colonial journalists like Arthur Adams and his readers. Adams made his comparison between Chinese in New Zealand and the landscape of the North China Plains while accompanying British imperial forces sweeping towards Peking to crush the anti-foreign Boxer Uprising (1900). The uprising provoked yet more foreign aggression in China, the repercussions of which were also felt throughout the British Empire. The First Opium War (1839–42) signalled the start of a more aggressive British policy towards China that set the tone for interactions later that century and into the next. As a result of Britain’s resounding victory, the First Opium War set up the pre-eminence of the colonial entrepôt of Hong Kong (Chapter 9). This had far-reaching implications for Chinese migrants because it connected them with

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international shipping networks and newly opening British imperial commodity frontiers. In turn, Chinese institutions, families and businesses that made use of these networks moved people, goods and money to and from South China. As this chapter demonstrates, these networks also carried all manner of Cantonese environmental knowledge, technologies and organisms to New Zealand, often via other regions first. This chapter principally focuses on the operation and impacts of such eco-cultural networks in New Zealand, rather than in China. Examining such networks can significantly enrich the environmental histories of China, New Zealand and the world, as well as adding new perspectives to studies of Chinese diaspora. As this chapter shows, Cantonese migrants introduced into New Zealand new gardening techniques, new plants and new ways of looking at nature that offered opportunities of exchange and interaction among Europeans, native peoples and Chinese otherwise prevented by linguistic and cultural barriers.3 In exploring these dimensions, this chapter first discusses Chinese and New Zealand environmental history and demonstrates how an eco-cultural approach can enrich both. Next, it examines the eco-cultural networks underpinning Chinese–New Zealand exchanges, before providing case studies of market gardening and environmental exchange that demonstrate the manner in which Cantonese migrant, transportation and business networks facilitated the introduction of new plants, agricultural techniques and landscape attitudes.

Historiography Through its focus on eco-cultural networks, this chapter expands the frameworks of Chinese and New Zealand environmental history. Both generally take the present borders of each respective nation-state as the boundaries of their study, or else adopt regional frameworks defined by the borders of the British and Chinese Empires and their spheres of influence. Indeed, most environmental historians of China either examine the area we today call the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in isolation, or place China in relation to either other Chinesespeaking territories or the broader East Asian region.4 Environmental historians of China are only now starting to study the Chinese diaspora.5 Many scholars of New Zealand environmental history have also adopted a national framework to define their studies. If they look further afield, they generally examine New Zealand alongside other white settler colonies or Britain, or else focus on connections among Maori and the Pacific Islands.6 Environmental historians of

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New Zealand have ignored China and the Chinese just as their counterparts in China have ignored both the overseas Cantonese and the influence of returning Cantonese.7 In examining the eco-cultural connections between China and New Zealand, this chapter answers historian Micah Muscolino’s invitation for scholars to situate Chinese environmental history within global trends.8 In primarily exploring local-to-local case studies in Canton and Otago, this chapter ranges beyond the boundaries of both the British Empire and the Qing Empire (1644–1911) to demonstrate the role Cantonese migration played in New Zealand’s environmental history, in addition to hinting at some of the influences the other way. It also demonstrates how analysis of the spatial and environmental dimensions of Chinese migration can enrich Chinese diaspora studies. Most scholarship on diaspora concentrates on Chinese self-help societies, political organizations, and business and migration networks, in addition to racism and identity issues.9 This chapter argues that environmental modifications, plant introductions and landscape views were immensely important aspects of the material, cultural and intellectual worlds of overseas Cantonese and, as such, are richly deserving of scholarly attention. Raising food plants provided sustenance and served as a cultural identifier, while market gardening offered a livelihood. Experience of landscapes in the British Empire also provoked debates about the cosmological limits of portents, ghosts and spiritual power emanating from China.10 As Adam McKeown has observed, research on the Chinese diaspora focused ‘on institutional and imaginative links can provide a framework from which to describe’ the experiences of the Chinese, one that is cognizant of change over time and of the importance of particularity and place ‘in moderating more general trends’.11 This chapter extends such scholarly perspectives on diaspora by examining how migrant networks also helped to shape Cantonese environmental transformations and attitudes in Otago.

Cantonese migration in New Zealand The focus of this chapter is on Cantonese migrants in New Zealand, most of whom came to the southern province of Otago (Figure 7.1). Invited by the Otago Provincial Council to work the goldfields, the first organized parties of Chinese arrived in Otago from Victoria, Australia, in late 1865. Most of the later migrants arrived directly from Canton. By the 1870s, the Chinese represented a significant presence on some of the Otago goldfields: in 1871, for

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Figure 7.1 Maps showing the origins and destination of many Cantonese coming to New Zealand in the nineteenth century.

instance, Chinese constituted 25 per cent of Tuapeka’s (Central Otago) mining population.12 The disproportionate male Chinese population of New Zealand peaked at 5,004 in 1880/1.13 Thereafter, it declined for several reasons, including but not limited to less easily accessible gold, a colonial economic downturn and racially exclusionary immigration policies.14 Several long-run textual and visual sources document the experiences of the Chinese in New Zealand. Diaries and published articles by the Presbyterian missionary Rev. Alexander Don (1857–1934), and by the catechists William Chan and Timothy Fay Loie, among others, provide insight into Chinese lifestyles and landscapes in Otago. For nearly three months for almost every year from 1883 to 1916, Don ministered to Chinese, mostly in Otago. Although he travelled on the expanding railway networks, he also spent a lot of time on foot: By 1911, Don calculated he had walked over 36,769 miles (59,174 km) during his ministration to the New Zealand Chinese. The Chinese he met over the period from 1883 to 1913 later appeared in ‘Don’s Roll’, a remarkable document recording some 3,500 names, and including as much biographical information as Don could gather.15 Since generic descriptions of Chinese abounded in European depictions of the time, an advantage of relying on missionary sources is that, unlike most other observers, the missionaries spoke Cantonese, read Chinese script, knew Canton or – as in the case of Loie or Chan – came from that region.

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Together, these sources record aspects of the miners’ day-to-day lives. They contain records of conversations, excerpts of translated letters and priceless other information on Chinese material culture, landscape views and environmental change. Reliance on second-hand accounts – mostly produced by a European observer – to piece together the lives and landscapes of Chinese in Otago is necessary in the sometimes complete absence or paucity of such records produced by the Chinese themselves. The Chinese left few written records, in part due to high illiteracy rates. In 1901, for example, of the 2,857 Chinese in New Zealand, only 13.5 per cent could read and write English, and 29 per cent could read and write Chinese. This compared with an 85 per cent literacy rate among Europeans in New Zealand, and one likely also to have been high among Maori.16 For Chinese, a lifestyle spent on the move, with few possessions or persons interested or able to preserve records after their death, further mitigated against the likelihood of both the keeping of written records and their survival. In addition, among Chinese there was a traditional reluctance to name the dead and describe their exploits.17

Cantonese landscapes Most Chinese in New Zealand came from the region known more broadly as Lingnan, which can mean ‘South of the Mountains’. Lingnan refers to the area of southern China that now takes in the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi. Although occupied for centuries by Han Chinese, most Chinese migrants initially settled on higher ground, fearful of the impenetrable swamps of the region, its dense tiger-harbouring jungles and its malarial climate. Only really during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) did considerable numbers of settlers – and with them, settled agriculture – spread onto the Lingnan river valleys and into what became the Pearl River Delta. Like their counterparts in medieval Europe, Han settlers cut forests, drained land, extended (rice) cultivation and established farms. By late imperial China, they had contributed to making this region one of the wealthiest and most productive in the Chinese Empire, and the world.18 The rice fields and cultivated landscapes of the Pearl River Delta – which supported high population densities – reflected this long history of settlement, and a particular need, especially from the seventeenth century, to intensify agricultural production. As Don noted of a visit to the region in the mid-1890s, ‘every inch of ground is laid under tribute’; everywhere he looked, he saw

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evidence of the age of fields and cultivation.19 A Chinese gold miner made a similar observation in contrasting ‘the fatness of his native district’ with Otago’s ‘barrenness’.20 Fat it certainly was. Canton’s monsoonal and subtropical climate supported two crops of rice and in hard times, another rice crop or some other grain like wheat or barley. In the north of the Delta, fruits such as litchi flourished, as did staples such as sweet potato, in addition to cash crops like tobacco.21 By the nineteenth century, much of China’s environment was under great stress. Double-cropping, more intensified land-use aided by introductions of New World crops and staples (notably the sweet potato), reclamation and the spread of agriculture into more marginal land increased population yet also precipitated a looming environmental crisis. In the nineteenth century, there was no more new land in China to absorb a growing population, necessitating the settlement of China’s hinterlands (Chapter 3). China’s population increased from around 60 million in 1391 to 295 million by 1800. By 1848, it had reached an estimated 426 million.22 Much of it was also concentrated in the agriculturally and culturally productive area of south China. Southern China’s high population created resource shortages that generated environmental degradation, and fomented resource conflict and social unrest, problems punctuated by periodically devastating droughts and floods. Whereas earlier, imperial granaries and effective water management had ameliorated many such problems, now bureaucratic inefficiencies only compounded them. A series of rebellions – most famously the Taiping Revolt (1851–64), and the rise of so-called secret societies (the triads) – fed off growing resentment exacerbated by environmental problems. Western aggression further stretched imperial resources and energy.23 Within these general patterns, the localized impact of these wider migration from Canton needs to be understood. Many of the first Chinese to arrive in Otago came from Siyip (Four Districts; Mandarin, Siyi), north of Canton city. By the 1870s and 1880s, men from Panyu – north-west of Canton, part of Sanyip (Three Districts; Mandarin, Sanyi) – predominated among New Zealand Chinese (Figure 7.1).24 Several areas around Canton experienced an economic downswing in the 1830s. Many Cantonese left the wider region, in part too, because of a deepening social-environmental crisis, an example of an eco-cultural network with negative feedback loops for humans and ecosystems. Harvest failure owing to marginally cooler weather compounded economic pressure and competition over scarce resources. As a whole, the fortunes of the Pearl River region dipped in the 1840s as commercial activity shifted from Canton to the new entrepôt of Hong Kong.25 Yet, as Adam McKeown notes, the Chinese who left did not come from the very poorest regions of China, so historians should consider

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such migrants as opportunity-seekers, rather than as individuals simply forced to migrate by adverse circumstances.26 Situated at the mouth of the Pearl River Delta, Hong Kong was perfectly placed economically and geographically to offer the Cantonese living in its hinterland a wealth of opportunities. Hong Kong connected migrants with international ports and shipping networks, while Chinese merchants provided the cash, infrastructure and support networks to facilitate migration. Cantonese migration also built upon existing trading experience with foreigners and knowledge of foreign lands. For many families, migration offered an opportunity of spreading the risk in an increasingly competitive market for land and other resources.27

Market gardening in colonial New Zealand By the late 1870s, easily accessible gold was starting to run out in Otago; with it, the employment opportunities for many Cantonese dried up. In response, some Chinese opted to move to the West Coast goldfields, migrate elsewhere in the New World, or to return to China. As a consequence of the decline in gold mining, by the later part of nineteenth century, market gardening assumed importance to the remaining Chinese. The first Cantonese market gardeners and orchardists lived in the gold-mining regions of Otago, where the main population of Chinese first came. From the late nineteenth century, the remnant Cantonese population – ageing and declining in number – began shifting to the North Island, such that by the twentieth century, the cities of Wellington and Auckland had the largest Chinese population in the colony. For example, in 1926, New Zealand’s Chinese population of 3,374 was concentrated in Wellington (1,163) and Auckland (1,086).28 This demographic shift reflected the impact of continued declining gold returns. Notwithstanding growing racism towards them from the late 1870s, Cantonese market gardens dominated the supply of vegetables in late nineteenth-century New Zealand.29 In 1881, the year in which the first racially exclusionary laws were introduced against Chinese, The Otago Witness reported that the Chinese had a near ‘monopoly on the vegetable trade’ in Otago’s largest city, Dunedin.30 In 1885, Dunedin had 150 Chinese market gardeners. According to historian James Ng, it is likely that many of these supplied ships calling into nearby Port Chalmers on the Cape of Good Hope–Cape Horn route, as, at that time, Dunedin simply did not have the population to consume that much produce.31 A similar pattern was exhibited in the North Island by the late nineteenth century

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as regards settler reliance on Chinese produce. As a parliamentarian noted in 1896, Wellington’s citizens ‘are almost solely dependent upon’ Chinese ‘for vegetables; and but for these industrious Chinamen the people would generally go short’.32 The story was similar for Auckland. Its citizens, reported the Auckland Star in 1887, were ‘now largely dependent upon’ Chinese gardeners for the ‘supply of vegetables’.33 Many small towns also had a Chinese market garden of one size or another, some several.34 In New Zealand, Chinese market gardening, like gold mining, generally operated along county of origin concentrations. For example, in the early 1900s, most of Dunedin’s market gardeners – and many of Wellington’s 140 fruit sellers – came from Zengcheng District. In the smaller North Island centres of Palmerston North and Whanganui – and in the Dunedin suburb of Kaikorai Valley – men from Panyu predominated among market gardeners.35 In running such gardens, Cantonese adapted traditional Chinese societal organizations. In China, place, family and – especially in Lingnan – lineage provided the social glue of Chinese society and the lynchpin of Confucianism. Surname or lineage groups recognized a common ancestor descended through the male line, an ancestor who bound together families into larger units and also tied together the family’s past and present generations. Lineages were very often associated with particular places, usually villages or small towns in the case of the Cantonese coming to New Zealand.36 Such a village might have one or more lineage groups. In death as much as in life, all the Chinese sections of local graveyards are arranged according to county groupings.37 Although cleaving to family and lineage, the Cantonese in New Zealand and in other places elsewhere also formed county groupings, incorporating all of those born in a particular county or associated counties with a common history and dialect. Unlike lineages, members of clans could not always identify common genealogical linkages with each other, but they offered further comradeship and mutual support, particularly to overseas Chinese.38 In establishing gardens in New Gold Mountain – as New Zealand was called in contradistinction to California, known as Gold Mountain – the Cantonese relied on gardening traditions from home, shaped, for some, by prior experience in Australia or elsewhere. South China’s small-sized land holdings, coupled with its high population densities, made Cantonese gardeners experts at raising large harvests from small areas.39 They successfully adapted these techniques to the very different climates and soils of the gold-mining areas of Australia, California and Otago. Those who moved to successive gold rushes adapted their practices from one place to the next.40 Typically, Chinese gardeners planted out vegetables

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in tight rows, keeping them well watered and well fertilized with manure and other organic waste.41 Maximizing the area of cultivable land sometimes often involved planting between rows of crops.42 Having plants ripen at different times of the year also probably ensured a better-distributed annual income. The Cantonese in New Zealand adapted their market gardening techniques from home and from Australia in several ways. New Zealand’s soils and climate – varying greatly by region – encompass the high rainfall, subtropical regions of northern New Zealand to the cooler temperate environments of the south. The west coast regions also receive high rainfalls, while east coast areas commonly lie in a rain-shadow. Inland areas such as Central Otago experience very hot summers and very cold winters – here, Otago’s significantly reduced growing season contrasted markedly with the year-round growth of warm and wet Guangdong.43 Like their European counterparts in New Zealand, the Cantonese had to experiment to determine which vegetables grew best where, and how best to maximize a locality’s soil productivity.

Water technology The extensive Cantonese experience of water technology proved invaluable to both market gardening and gold mining in New Zealand. Known as ‘water dragons’, Chinese water race technology drew upon many centuries of experience. For example, given the scarcity of water in Central Otago, water races – some stretching tens of kilometres – were vital to gold mining, also often providing water for drinking and irrigation. Chinese built many water races for Europeans, suggesting how highly colonists valued the construction skills of the Cantonese. Water dragons also irrigated Chinese market gardens. For example, two water races underpinned the commercial success of the business owned by market gardener and orchardist Lye Bow, whose fields near Alexandra, Central Otago, presently receive on average only 370 mm of annual rainfall. Lye Bow had a flourishing and expanding business, and regularly won prizes for his productions. In 1894, he grew 1,200 apple trees. In 1903, in addition to apple trees, he had 1,000 apricot – as well as 200 peach and 200 greengage plum – trees.44 Cantonese experience with water technology proved of great benefit to market gardeners in other parts of New Zealand, especially in gold mining, as I explore elsewhere.45 An excellent illustration of the adaptation of tried and true Cantonese technology comes from Figure 7.2 – this depicts a gardener in

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Figure 7.2 Unnamed Chinese market gardener, Forbury, Dunedin, operating pedal waterwheel. Date unknown, 1940s? Source King’s High School, courtesy of Lin Phelan and James Ng.

Forbury, Dunedin, likely making use of a traditional pedal waterwheel. As Don noted, where ‘in China they use [a machine] to raise the water from streams up to their ricefields, here [in Forbury on low-lying ground the Chinese use the pedal waterwheel] to raise the water off their gardens into the street[’s] open drains to run off ’.46 Such a description is uncommon. As archaeologist Neville Ritchie observes, determining the extent to which Chinese utilized water technology from their homeland is difficult. Written sources on the topic are scattered and imprecise, while material evidence has long since disappeared.47 Generally, it seems, the Chinese made extensive use of Chinese and EuroAmerican technology in New Zealand, much of which they would have known first-hand from the Californian and Victorian diggings. This technology included, for example, the Californian Pump, which resembled the Chinese pump, but which had slats and pins instead of a belt.48 In New Zealand, from the 1870s the Chinese, as well as Europeans, made use of technology originating in California and Victoria – hydraulic sluicing. Cantonese also introduced or pioneered new methods of gold extraction in New Zealand derived from overseas technology. For example, hydraulic elevating – the process of forcing gold-bearing gravel upwards under high-pressure water – originated in California, but

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was extensively undertaken in New Zealand by Choie Sew Hoy (c.1836–1901) and his son, Choie Kum Poy (1867–1942). Likewise, in the late 1880s, Sew Hoy developed the first dredge able to work river beds, beaches and flats. With modifications, this became known as the New Zealand Gold Dredge and served as the prototype of gold and tin dredges around the world.49 With technologies adapted or borrowed from China and elsewhere, Chinese market gardeners raised vegetables familiar to the European table while also growing Cantonese varieties for themselves. A European observer visiting a market garden in Dunedin in 1878 recorded Chinese growing ‘large quantities of cabbages, spinach, onions, parsnips, turnips, leeks, lettuces, radishes, peas, beans, and some red cabbages and culinary herbs’, in addition to ‘hemp and canary seed’ – all for the European market.50 There is no evidence of where Chinese gardeners obtained their seeds from, but it seems likely that some would have come from European nurseries in New Zealand, with others perhaps coming from Chinese in Australia or from even further afield. Once a garden was established, seeds – when carefully dried after the first harvest – could provide the sources of next season’s planting. Chinese introduced into New Zealand the seeds of plants familiar to them from Canton, growing Bok Choy, Chinese cabbage, as well as most probably ginger, and perhaps also water chestnuts and rhubarb – for domestic consumption.51 Cantonese imported much of their medicine, only occasionally it seems, making use of local plants to make up potions.52 ‘As native medicines are so expensive’, noted Don in 1884, ‘some of the [Chinese] men concoct for their own use … glue, dragon’s bones, deer’s sinews, antelope’s horns, bamboo, sap, dried scorpions, black-tailed snakes, ground amber, stalactite dust, cicada exuviae, dried centipedes, &c., &c., in the list.’ Don recorded a miner who showed him ‘a bottle containing “medicine for bruises and falls”; he made it from a berry growing at Round Hill which he called “seven star berry,” soaked in’ alcohol.53 The reliance on medicines made from local plants was, however, rare among the Chinese. The seeds of some plants growing in New Zealand would have been introduced from Canton or from other areas where Chinese lived, most likely the Victorian goldfields, and possibly other areas of significant Chinese settlement, such as California or South East Asia. Evidence of plants introduced by Chinese abounds. For example, in 1883, Don recorded ‘a man carefully carrying a stock of turnip seed grown in China; the seed, like all other Chinese productions, he considered immensely superior to the foreign article’.54 Chinese also appreciated aesthetic varieties. At Round Hill, for example, ‘Banner of Joy’

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proudly showed Don his neighbour’s rose bush.55 They most probably introduced several aesthetic varieties from home too (see below).

Settler/Cantonese gardening exchanges The Cantonese had a remarkable suite of species available to them, something like 30,000 varieties.56 Coupled with their extensive horticultural knowledge and considerable gardening success in New Zealand, dozens of Chinese entered colonial agricultural and horticultural competitions. Even at the height of legislative racism in the 1900s, a handful of Cantonese became members of the Dunedin Horticultural Society. In these shows, Chinese mostly exhibited vegetables familiar to a European gardening public, although a few also entered ornamentals from China and one, even three rare ‘Chinese geese’.57 In March 1871, Dunedin market gardener Wong Koo, displayed Chinese narcissus at the Dunedin Horticultural Society, winning a special ‘prize for his exhibits of lilies and feather ornaments’. ‘Chinese Narcissus’ could be Narcissus tazetta var. chinensis (Chinese Sacred Lily or daffodil). Colonial gardeners rightly admired Wong Koo’s ‘Chinese Narcissus’ as they too prized rare Chinese ornamentals like these. Europeans generally obtained their rare Chinese plants, not from China, but from British or Australian commercial nurseries.58 Despite their importance, New Zealand environmental historians have ignored the role of Cantonese in introducing exotic plants into New Zealand, instead focusing on Europeans and their acclimatization societies as agents of environmental change.59 As a bulb, the Chinese Sacred Lily introduced by Wong Koo could have easily survived a voyage from China to New Zealand. Evidence suggests it was first offered for sale in New Zealand in 1891 by the Dunedin nursery firm of Nimmo and Blair, a firm which was known to have commercial dealings with Chinese in Dunedin. Advertisements around this time stress its rarity and novelty, so it is entirely possible that Chinese had introduced the bulb into New Zealand some twenty years earlier, although without it circulating among colonial gardeners.60 When considering such eco-cultural networks, it seems likely that Cantonese would also have introduced other plants – like vegetables – from China into New Zealand, as well as from New Zealand into Canton, but such evidence is not yet forthcoming. There is evidence, however, of exchanges of gardening techniques among Europeans and Cantonese. Observers record Chinese using what they identify as European methods of planting,61 in addition to European horticultural

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equipment such as hoes and shovels. While colonists’ identification of Chinese using European planting methods may have represented a case of the same techniques being developed in parallel, it would have made sense for Chinese to make use of European gardening implements if they found them superior to their own tools or could not obtain them from their homeland. Many Europeans also greatly admired Chinese gardening techniques, especially in 1870s Otago, a decade when relations among Chinese and Europeans were relatively cordial.62 Several colonial authors outlined what Europeans could learn from Chinese gardening. A series of articles published in the Otago presses in the 1870s, for example, held up Cantonese market gardening techniques in Australia as models worthy of emulation by Otago colonists.63 ‘The strong points in Chinese gardening’, summarized the writer in the Otago Witness in 1878, ‘are constant watering and manuring and continual stirring of the soil. This system is, no doubt, the result of a much older experience in the culture of the soil than that of Europeans, and we maintain that with all our science and so called civilisation, we have something to learn from the heathen.’64 Another author praised Chinese methods of clearing, manuring and watering tobacco plants as worthy of emulation by Europeans.65 Even if no direct evidence points to their actual implementation, Otago’s colonists openly discussed the benefits of introducing certain Chinese methods of gardening. This was in marked contrast with colonial Victoria, where, although European and Chinese used many of the same gardening techniques, this arose because of the parallel development of similar methods, rather than from technology transfer.66

Chinese commercial networks and exchanges For a handful of Chinese, market gardening brought them social and financial success in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New Zealand and China. Chan Dah Chee (1851–1930) – commonly known as Ah Chee – lived the Cantonese dream: starting with nothing, he made his fortune in New Gold Mountain and retired to China a wealthy man. Ah Chee began by selling vegetables in 1870s Auckland. In the next decade, he leased land for a market garden. The profits he made from this enterprise allowed him to diversify his business interests: he rented more land for market gardening, bought shops and restaurants in Auckland and, later, added ginger and banana plantations in Fiji, to go with the several other market gardens he by this stage owned in New Zealand.

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Like many other Chinese merchants, he relied upon kin networks to run his businesses. His nephew, Sai Louie, oversaw Ah Chee’s Fijian enterprises; his wife, Joong Chew Lee – fluent in English and Chinese – guided his business transactions. Like other Chinese merchants, Ah Chee sponsored the travel of, and provided accommodation for, kin to enter New Zealand: his market garden served as a conduit for ongoing migration networks, and as a basis for his material and social success in New Zealand and China. In New Zealand, he socialized with leading members of colonial society. On retirement, he and his wife bought a villa in an affluent area of Canton, which – incidentally – had a ‘European room’, reflective of the influence of their time in New Zealand.67 Another whose career had similarities with Ah Chee’s was Chew Chong (c.1830–1920). Chew Chong spent several years in Singapore and Australia before arriving in Dunedin in 1866. In New Zealand, he was pivotal in establishing two major nineteenth-century export industries: the edible fungus trade and the butter industry. During his travels through the North Island, Chew Chong identified the edible tree fungus, Auricularia polytricha, growing in many forests. The fungus was a delicacy prized in China, and Chong began buying it from settlers and Maori in the late 1860s. In 1870, Chew Chong established stores in New Plymouth, along with branches elsewhere in the Province. Once collected and dried, the fungus would be sent to Dunedin for export.68 Most shipments went to China, with some also going to Sydney for New South Wales’ Chinese community. The fungus generated significant export revenue for European and Chinese traders; from 1880 to 1920, New Zealand fungus exports totalled £401,551.69 Chew Chong himself became a wealthy man. Chew Chong invested profits from the edible fungus enterprise into the dairy industry in Taranaki. Like Sew Hoy and his development of a dredge, Chew Chong championed new Western technology, pioneering the use of mechanical refrigerated storage and transportation, and developing a new type of butter churn and air cooler. Costing over £7,000, his Jubilee Butter factory opened in 1887 and brought him great success in the short term. By insisting on paying farmers in cash, rather than in goods, as was the norm, Chew Chong’s entrepreneurial skills revolutionized Taranaki’s flagging economy. He also financed farmers to develop their properties.70 Such successes opened doors to Chew Chong and his family in colonial society. Typical of attitudes recorded of him, a contemporary newspaper noted that he ‘well merited the high esteem in which he was held by all classes because of his high principles and generous instincts’.71 Chew Chong was a Member of the Chamber of Commerce, and had married a European woman

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in 1875. Maori society held him in high regard too: in 1879, the United Tribes of New Zealand awarded him the title of ‘regional chief ’ in recognition of the contribution he had made to the Maori community. The examples of Ah Chee and Chew Chong demonstrate how influential Chinese merchants could develop eco-cultural networks drawing together different places, different peoples, different institutions and different ecologies in parts of China and the British Empire. Such individuals utilized the opportunities presented by the British Empire – its shipping connections and legal apparatuses – and tied them in varying measures with their own networks of expertise and knowledge from China and elsewhere. Ah Chee employed Chinese labour and introduced into colonial Auckland Chinese practices of market gardening, while Chew Chong’s knowledge of Chinese tastes provided a market for edible fungus. Both men also drew upon British and other networks of knowledge to introduce new technology to further their business ventures. In their activities in this period, Ah Chee and Chew Chong – no less than some of their kin in mining or gardening elsewhere in New Zealand – contributed to the same urge to transform colonial nature into commodities engaged in by European settlers and, to varying degrees, Maori. Chew Chong’s exports of edible tree fungus connected natural resources in New Plymouth Province with markets in Sydney and China. His export venture, like Ah Chee’s market gardening in Auckland, supported the establishment of other networks of exportation and resource transformation – for Chew Chong, the refrigerated butter industry, which exported to England and Australia, and for Ah Chee, his Fijian plantations. Chew Chong’s demand for milk also helped to stimulate the wholesale environmental remaking of Taranaki. Responding to the demand for dairy products, settlers burnt and felled timber. Farms replaced forest. Fertilizers and stock changed the make-up of the soil. Introduced grasses, shelter-belts and animals transformed the region’s environment. Railways and roads accompanied such changes, cutting through the landscape and providing bridgeheads of new resource extraction. While Chew Chong was not solely responsible for all of this transformation alone, he nonetheless played a vital role in pioneering the early development of such commodity frontiers.72 Nor is Chew Chong an isolated case of a Chinese entrepreneur able, through British imperial markets, legal frameworks or resources, to drive forward colonial environmental transformation. The Chinese-owned Te Aro Seed Company – established in Wellington in 1899 – catered to a broad and mainly European market. Its marketing drew upon British and European images to give

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itself cachet in the colony, but also – more fundamentally – through sales of seed, it actively participated in New Zealand’s environmental remaking. Like advertisements for tea (Chapter 4), those for seeds emphasized the product’s Englishness, in this case by boasting how the company obtained its seed ‘from the best English and Continental houses’, and only sold plants that were hardy and already acclimatized into New Zealand, rather than those ‘from warmer districts’.73

Networks of belief: fengshui, gods, ancestors and ghosts Just as scholars of environmental history have neglected Cantonese ecological change in New Zealand, so have they also ignored Chinese perceptions of such environments. In coming to New Zealand, the Cantonese brought very different ways of viewing environments, the very nature of which connected them with the landscapes of China. Central to understanding a key aspect of Chinese views of nature in New Zealand is geomancy – or fengshui. This provides a system and set of rituals for managing human–nature relations.74 According to its principles, ‘land forms and bodies of water direct the flow of the universal qi, or “cosmic currents” ’. Like water, qi was believed to flow through everything – and, like the tide, waxe and wane cyclically. Chinese took great efforts to consult specialists to advise on how to advantageously direct qi so as to enhance such things as ‘wealth, happiness, longevity and procreation’. Avoidance of its baneful influences was also important – for ‘a malicious flow of qi’ could result in disaster, leading to bankruptcy or even death.75 Of central importance in Chinese peasant belief, qi – also called ‘dragon’s breath’ – manifested itself through the mutually interdependent forms of yin – ‘the bright and active male principle’ – and yang – ‘the dark and passive female principle’.76 Chinese brought these ways of viewing and manipulating nature to New Zealand. In 1907, at Cromwell, Otago, Don recorded that ‘ “Chinatown’s” 21 dwellings are nearly all set at different angles’. ‘Long, straight lines’, he explained, ‘are “unlucky,” since [Chinese believed] the demons can thus easily travel’. Chinese held that Chinatown ‘is a lucky place, for besides crooked lanes it has a fine river to carry off the evil telluric vapours’. For Chinese, too, ‘Dunedin with its Octagon is the luckiest city in the Dominion’. Cantonese pronounce the number eight similar to the character forming part of the word for ‘to prosper’ or ‘to grow wealthy’.77

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Geomancy provided a flexible set of principles guiding both landscape change and landscape interpretation. As archaeologist Neville Ritchie notes, while the Cantonese in New Zealand ‘are unlikely to have neglected the deeply-entrenched notions of feng shui when they established their settlements and homes on the goldfields of southern New Zealand’, difficulties arise in ascertaining precisely how much influence to attribute to geomancy in the orientation of dwellings.78 While Chinese living in Cromwell and Arrowtown seem to have consciously avoided placing structures in straight lines, in 1882 Lawrence’s Chinatown was redesigned, its formerly higgledy-piggledy lanes and rough abodes replaced by orderly roads and better-quality housing. According to geomantic principles, the use of slanted roofs rather than angled beams in Chinese dwellings in New Zealand would have enabled the easy passage of evil spirits. Other devices could, however, obviate the ill-luck such designs might produce. Mirrors, for one, could deflect unwanted energy79 while at Lawrence, the existence of large stones brought from several kilometres away to stand in doorways may have represented attempts to prevent entranceways from directly opening out onto the street, and thereby allowing in evil influences. The stones might have fulfilled a guardian function, much like stone lions which traditionally fulfilled demon-scaring duties at the entranceways of palaces, temples, imperial offices and homes of the wealthy. Such accommodations to geomantic principles reflected not just the eminent practicality of the concept, but also the economic insecurity of many Chinese and their sojourner status – in other words, their inability and unwillingness to invest in more permanent and expensive structures built in a manner similar to the structures they knew from home. ‘No people in the world’, a missionary journal noted, ‘excel the Chinese at adapting themselves to circumstance. The material nearest to hand is readily appropriated for building. Scores of huts are made of cobblestones and clay, other scores of adobe where stones are scarce.’80 Both the living and the dead inhabited these huts and the landscapes in which they were situated, because Chinese believed that gods, ghosts and ancestors intermingled, interposing daily in the events of the living. As Arthur P. Wolf noted, ‘Chinese religion … mirrors the social landscape of its adherents’.81 In China, ancestor worship was very important. It was, as noted earlier, the primary purpose of lineage groups. It buttressed the ideals of Confucianism since the living family provided a pivot between the past (through ancestor worship) and the future (through progenitation) generations. Ancestor worship brought

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together lineage members to uphold rituals, performed in lineage halls before ancestral tablets – which Chinese believed held one of the deceased’s souls. Burial in one’s ancestral homeland just as much as upholding the practice of ancestral veneration was vitally important for the individual, the family and the lineage. Deceased lineage members whose ancestral tablets were not kept up, or whose body remained overseas, risked becoming troublesome ghosts liable to cause mischief – or more serious harm – to lineage members. This explains the fears held by Cantonese in New Zealand of dying alone and un-venerated, so many thousands of kilometres from home. It also accounts for the considerable efforts they took to repatriate the bones of deceased Chinese for reburial in their villages. By 1908, possibly as many as 1,000 Chinese had died in New Zealand.82 Repatriation of hundreds of bodies took place: for example, 230 in 1883 and 499 in 1902 – many of the bodies of the latter were sadly lost with the sinking of the ship, the SS Ventnor, conveying them.83 (It has only recently emerged that Maori buried the bodies that were washed ashore near where they lived.) Exhumation and repatriation was costly. Chinese estimated it had cost around ₤4,000 to return the bodies on the Ventnor.84 Given the costs and numbers of bodies involved, the Poon Fah grouping formed a burial society, called Cheong Shing Tong, to repatriate bodies. This met the needs of Chinese from Panyu and Hua districts, and was the largest county grouping in New Zealand.85 In this way, the repatriation of bodies from Otago to Canton fashioned ecocultural networks that changed landscapes in New Zealand and China just as associated death rituals and ancestor worship wove together colonial landscapes into China’s cosmological space by bringing together Chinese in New Zealand with Chinese in Canton. Death rituals and ancestral worship also connected the deceased’s spirit with others of the lineage, and thereby one generation with another. Death rituals ushered in land-use changes in New Zealand and China since Chinese deaths required land for burial. While most Chinese graves in New Zealand remained modest affairs, a few took on new and sometimes more elaborate forms. For example, Sam Chew Lain’s mausoleum in Lawrence Cemetery is an imposing European structure set in the Presbyterian section and is reflective of Sam’s involvement in the Masonic brotherhood and his Presbyterian faith. The mausoleum’s situation – overlooking the surrounding hills – would also have adhered to traditional geomantic principles governing the placement of such sites. For the majority of Cantonese, who wished to return home, land use and ritual uses of land in South China changed as the remains of

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‘former men’ returned home. For example, near Shek Moon in Upper Panyu, the Cheong Shing Tong ‘maintained a cemetery and mortuary temple’ and kept up a society house in Hong Kong for its members.86 The deaths of lonely Chinese in New Zealand had a perceived impact on Chinese in New Zealand, possibly by increasing the number of wandering ghosts – malevolent gui who would disrupt the daily routines of the living. Recall that one person’s ancestor could be another’s ghost and such fears can be easily understood. The use of the term gui reflects both the ambiguity of ghosts and emphasizes once more the lack of boundaries between the living and the dead, for gui could denote non-Chinese as well as potentially threatening spirits.87 For this reason, Chinese in Otago would not countenance living anywhere in the vicinity of the hut of a deceased countryman. For example, they avoided the hut and immediate vicinity of Moa Creek, where ‘Literary Hero’ died in 1903. As Don explained: ‘The dead man’s ghost would not tolerate … [any occupation] on the part of the Chinese. They would either scare [away] the intruders by awesome noises at night, or bring ill-luck in their work.’88 At first, some Chinese believed that because so few of their countrymen had died in New Zealand, the colony was not yet populated by ghosts – Chinese seem to have ignored European and Maori ghosts, believing perhaps that ghosts only haunted those of the same ethnicity. Later debates on ghostly visitations from China, nevertheless shed light on how Cantonese believed such spirits, in connecting Chinese–New Zealand landscapes, could circumvent time and space. In 1883, ‘The Ox’ – so named because of his over 6 foot height and ‘big-boned and thunder-toned’ physique – noted that while ghosts were commonplace in China, ‘he had not seen any in New Zealand’. Dr Chow disagreed. He initially dismissed the very idea that ghosts could exist in the colony, ‘till he “saw” one in New Zealand – the spirit of an old friend who had died years before.’89 In another instance, when discussing the fate of the Chinese bodies that disappeared with the sinking of the SS Ventnor, several Chinese described the ‘former men’ as having ‘died a second death’. As one miner puzzled, Chinese ‘had always been taught that the spirits of the dead have ling (spiritual energy). How then could not 500 of them save themselves and the ship?’90 Both examples demonstrate how deaths and associated beliefs about the behaviour of spirits fashioned eco-cultural networks connecting the cosmological and physical landscapes of Otago and Canton. Another pervasive characteristic of Chinese belief came to New Zealand with the Cantonese, one which also, through ritual, helped to connect the landscapes of Otago and Canton. For the Chinese, ‘[t]he government of ghosts’, as Charles Benn notes, mirrored ‘the government of the living, at least in the

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sense of the judicial system’.91 Chinese believed that just as the Emperor ruled over the Earth (and mediated between Heaven and Earth), so the Jade Emperor ruled over Heaven. This hierarchy descended right through to the various lower levels of the bureaucratic netherworld, down to the ten Kings of Hell who – depending on an individual’s beliefs – would decide upon a soul’s fate. As on earth, bureaucrats of the afterlife made mistakes: they might select the wrong person or take someone too early, yet, as on Earth, in such cases officials of the afterlife could be bribed and the mistake rectified.92 In China, interceding with supernatural bureaucrats – or gods – was as important as interceding with living officials, and other otherworldly beings like ghosts and ancestors. At Butcher’s Gully in 1910, Don came across a ‘large shrine, without image or pictures’. On the back was written: Top: Heroic and Majestic Official Centre: Venerable Sire ch’an Sui Tsing [sic]. Imperially appointed Preserver of The Empire and Protector of the People. Right side: Spiritual Virtues Strong as the Hills. Left side: Springs of Wealth Deep as the Ocean.

Offerings of wine and fresh flowers were placed in three tiny wine-cups and two vases before the shrine.93 Here, Cantonese enlisted the productions of Otago – the fresh flowers placed before the shrine – in rituals which helped to break down the geographical and temporal distance between New Zealand and the supernatural world, thus providing a further example of how Cantonese fashioned eco-cultural networks by bringing aspects of New Zealand’s environment into traditional systems of worship. Another necessitated by the impermanence of Cantonese settlement in New Zealand involved the widespread employment of ‘an inscription on red paper, or a picture’. This ‘generally takes the place of an image in hut, shop, or joss house’.94 Couplets written on red paper connected Otago and Cantonese landscapes through Chinese belief in the power of the form, colour and materiality of writing to shape daily life, including in interventions with the supernatural.95 Particular practices, such as Ah Chee’s naming of his garden in Auckland, the ‘Garden of Prosperity’, illustrates in this instance belief in the efficacy of Chinese characters to transform the fortunes of those living in particular landscapes. In other ways, the names Cantonese bestowed on places in Otago signify alternative ideas about places and their qualities which differed from those given to them by Europeans or Maori.96

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Cantonese attitudes to New Zealand’s landscapes Some Cantonese expressed affection for the landscapes of Otago. A former New Zealand gold miner, now resident in Canton, told Don that: ‘Though my body is in China, my heart is in the Gold Hills.’97 Another Cantonese – whose explanation hinted strongly at the influence of fengshui – gave the following reason for moving back to Cromwell: I got £30 a year [at Dunedin] and my keep; but I had only the backyard fence to look at. Here [at Cromwell] the great river is at my door with high hills beyond and around. I would rather be here without the £30.98

By the end of the nineteenth century, gold – and the lifespan of many Chinese – was running out. In 1887/8 – the second of Don’s inland tours – there were 1,258 Chinese in Otago, and by 1909/10, just 429.99 Partly because so many Cantonese left Otago, and partly because of the notable lack of evangelizing success, on Don’s suggestion, the Presbyterian Synod of Otago and Southland established the Canton Villages Mission in 1898. This institution established a regular movement of both missionaries and Cantonese, and accompanying exchanges of knowledge, that set in motion new Otago–Canton eco-cultural networks. For example, local Cantonese landscapes were changed as some Chinese incorporated Christian symbols into their belief-systems: in one unnamed village, there were many crosses on doorways and walls because of local belief in ‘Father Cross’ – ‘a sort of new deity’, who was efficacious in stopping evil influences.100 Don is also said to have assembled at his retirement house in Ophir, Central Otago, an impressive collection of Chinese plants, gathered from his travels around Canton.101 Although beyond the scope of this chapter, further research will hopefully reveal some of the many other ways in which eco-cultural networks facilitated transfers of environmental ideas and material between Otago and Canton.102 The research presented in this chapter also suggests that it is time for imperial environmental historians to re-examine the role of Chinese enterprise and labour in transforming colonial environments. This can be achieved in a variety of ways: through case studies of prominent individuals such as Chew Chong, who travelled from place to place, or through studies of regional connections viewed through clan groups or by enterprise. In writing these environmental histories, we might also consider a series of questions, including: what were the ecological impacts of the plants and animals introduced by the Chinese, and whether any

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escaped and became invasive species?103 My present work on the environmental history of Chinese gold mining in Australasia will hopefully begin to answer some of these key questions

Conclusion British imperialism and Chinese migration facilitated the establishment of ecocultural networks that impacted on environments and environmental attitudes in Canton and Otago. Chinese market gardeners not only supplied most of latenineteenth-century Otago – and other parts of New Zealand – with fresh vegetables, but also introduced Europeans to new gardening techniques and new plants. On occasion, Chinese entrepreneurs like Chew Chong and Sew Hoy helped to open new resource frontiers in New Zealand, in the process contributing to large-scale ecological transformation. The movement of people also connected Otago and Canton in sometimes unexpected ways, notably through the cosmological and biological connections established through death rituals and the repatriation of bodies to China. Examining these eco-cultural networks considerably broadens imperial environmental histories by stressing the importance of Chinese as agents of ecological transformation in the British Empire.

Notes 1 I am indebted to the help and generosity of the following for reading and commenting on my chapter: Duncan M. Campbell, Ondine Godtschalk, Robert B. Marks, Edward Melillo, James Ng, Emily O’Gorman, and the two anonymous reviewers. I also thank Leslie Wong for information about the death of the miner at Moa Creek. I especially thank James Ng for his continuing support of this project, and for making available unpublished archival material. 2 Evening Post, 24 October 1900, 5. 3 Chinese–Maori interactions is beyond the scope of this chapter. On which see: James Beattie, ‘Empire of the Rhododendron: Re-orienting New Zealand Garden History’, in Making a New Land: Environmental Histories of New Zealand, eds. Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking, 2nd edn (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2013), 241–60, 365–7. 4 Mark Elvin and Ts’ui-jung Liu (eds), Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (Yale:

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6

7

8

9

10 11 12

13 14 15

16 17 18

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Yale University Press, 2006); Bao Mahong, ‘Environmental History in China’. Environment and History 10 (2004): 475–99. Fa-Ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2004); Beattie, ‘Making Home, Making Identity: Asian Garden-Making in New Zealand, 1850s-1930s’. Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 31 (2011): 139–59. Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking (eds), Environmental Histories of New Zealand, 1st edn (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002); David Young, Our Islands, Our Selves: A History of Conservation in New Zealand (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2004); Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800–1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). An exception is: Fei Sheng, ‘Environmental Experiences of Chinese People in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Australian Gold Rush’. Global Environment: A Journal of History and Natural and Social Sciences 7–8 (2012): 99–127. Micah Muscolino, ‘Global Dimensions of Modern China’s Environmental History’. World History Connected 6 (2009): 31 pars, accessed 19 January 2012, http:// worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/6.1/muscolino.html. Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2008); McKeown, ‘Conceptualising Chinese Diasporas, 1842 to 1949’, in The Chinese Diaspora in the Pacific, ed. Anthony Reid (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 1–32; Reeves, Lionel Frost, and Charles Fahey, ‘Integrating the historiography of the nineteenth-century gold rushes’. Australian Economic History Review 50 (2010): 111–28; Reeves, ‘Tracking the Dragon Down Under: Chinese Cultural Connections in Gold Rush Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand’. Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies 1 (2005): 41–66. Beattie, ‘Empire of the Rhododendron’. McKeown, ‘Conceptualising Chinese Diasporas’, 5. Of 4,374 miners, 1,083 were Chinese. James Ng, Windows on a Chinese Past: How the Cantonese Goldseekers [sic] and their Heirs Settled in New Zealand, 4 vols. (Dunedin: Otago Heritage Books, 1999), vol. 1, 25. Ng, Windows, vol. 1, 84. Summarized expertly in Ng, Windows, vols. 1–4. Alexander Don, New Zealand Presbyterian Chinese Mission. Inland Tours XXIII and XXIV and Westland Tour 1911 (Dunedin: Otago Daily Times, 1911), 45. The mileage for the following tours was not calculated: 1898–9, 1903/4, or 1904/5. Ng, Windows, vol. 1, 93. I thank James Ng for the last observation. Robert B. Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk, & Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 53–85.

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19 Don, Under Six Flags: Being Notes on Chinese in Samoa, Hawaii, United States, British Columbia, Japan and China (Dunedin, J. Wilkie and Co., 1898), 97. 20 Don, Chinese Mission Work in Otago: Annual Inland Tour (1896–97) (Dunedin: J. Wilkie & Co., 1897), 47–8 quoted in Ng, Windows, vol. 1, 34. 21 Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk. 22 Figures from Figure 4.5 China’s Population and Cultivated Land area, 2–1848 in Marks, China: Its Environment and History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 143. 23 Elvin, ‘The Environmental Legacy of Imperial China’. China Quarterly 156 (1998): 733–56; Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk. 24 In 1896, of the 1,080 Chinese, 67 per cent came from Panyu; 17 per cent Siyi (the Four Districts); 2.5 per cent Zengcheng District; 3.5 per cent Heungshan District; 2 per cent Dungguan District; and only 1 man from Fujian Province. Ng, Windows, vol. 1, 11. 25 See, Marks, ‘ “It Never Used to Snow”: Climatic Variability and Harvest Yields in Late-Imperial South China, 1650–1850’, in Sediments of Time, 411–46; June Mei, ‘Socioeconomic Origins of Emigration: Guangdong to California, 1850–1882’, in Agricultural and Rural Connections in the Pacific, eds. James Gerber and Lei Guang (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 195–233. 26 McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), 64–7. 27 Elizabeth Sinn, Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012). 28 Jessica Heine, ‘Colonial Anxieties and the Construction of Identities: The Employment of Maori Women in Chinese Market Gardens, Auckland, 1929’ (M.A.: University of Waikato, 2006), 26. 29 Lily Lee and Ruth Lam, ‘陈达枝 Chan Dah Chee (1851-1930): Pioneer Chinese Market Gardener and Auckland Businessman’. ENNZ: Environment and Nature in New Zealand 6 (2011): 48. 30 Otago Witness, 18 December 1880, 21. 31 Ng, Windows, vol. 1. 32 New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, 92, 11 June 1896 to 7 July 1896 (Wellington: Government Printer, 1896), 23 June 1896, 254. 33 Auckland Star, 23 April 1887, 4. 34 Ng, Windows, vol. 1, 320–5, 338–41. 35 George McNeur, Feeling the Way in the Canton Villages (Dunedin: Otago Daily Times, 1902), 2. 36 David Faure, Empire and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); Shuk-wah Poon, Negotiating Religion in Modern China: State and Common People in Guangzhou, 1900–1937 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2011).

Eco-Cultural Networks in Southern China and Colonial New Zealand 37 38 39 40

41

42 43

44

45

46 47

48 49 50 51 52

53

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I thank Duncan M. Campbell for this observation. Ng, Windows, vols. 1–3. Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk; Elvin, ‘Environmental Legacy’. Much research is still to be undertaken on this topic. Nevertheless, see: Warwick Frost, ‘Migrants and Technological Transfer: Chinese Farming in Australia, 1850-1920’. Australian Economic History 42 (2002): 113–31; Gerber and Guang, Connections in the Pacific; Stanin Zvonka, ‘From Li Chun to Yong Kit: A Market Garden on the Loddon, 1851-1912’. Journal of Australian Colonial History 6 (2004): 15–34; Sucheng Chan, This Bitter Sweet Soil. The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). Despite allegations of Chinese use of human manure, I can find no evidence in the documentary record of its use in New Zealand. This may have been due to the widespread availability and use of manure from cattle and horses. Also, the common employment of Maori – for whom use of human faeces in gardening was culturally inappropriate – in Chinese market gardens in the North Island may have provided further reason against its utilization. Note, Otago Witness, 1 June 1878, 21. See, James Beattie, Emily O’Gorman and Matt Henry (eds), Climate, Science, and Colonization: New Histories from Australia and New Zealand (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Lee and Lam, Sons of the Soil: Chinese Market Gardeners in New Zealand (Pukekohe: Dominion Federation of New Zealand Chinese Commercial Growers Inc., 2012), 30. Beattie, ‘Expanding the Horizon of Chinese Environmental History: Cantonese gold-miners in colonial New Zealand, 1860s-1920s’ (unpublished MS, currently under review for Environmental History in East Asia, ed. Ts’ui-jung Liu, New York: Routledge). Don, Diary, 1899–1907, item 413, in Ng, Windows, vol. 1, note 77b, 167. Neville Ritchie, ‘Archaeology and History of the Chinese in Southern New Zealand During the Nineteenth Century: A Study of Acculturation, Adaptation and Change’ (PhD diss., University of Otago, 1986), 55–6. Christopher Davey, ‘The Origins of Victorian Mining Technology, 1851-1900’. The Artefact 19 (1996): 54. Ng, Windows, vol. 1, 316. Otago Witness, 1 June 1878, 21. Though this was rarer – most Chinese preferred imported medicines. On which note, for example, Don, ‘Our Chinese Mission’, The New Zealand Presbyterian, 1 August 1882, 28; Don, ‘Our Chinese Mission’, The New Zealand Presbyterian, 1 December 1883, 105. Don, ‘Our Chinese Mission’, The New Zealand Presbyterian, 1 February 1884, 147.

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54 Don, ‘Our Chinese Mission’, The New Zealand Presbyterian, 1 January 1883, 127. 55 Don, New Zealand Presbyterian Chinese Mission: Twenty-first Inland Otago Tour, 1907–1908 (Dunedin: Otago Daily Times, 1908), 5. 56 Maggie Campbell-Culver, The Origins of Plants: The People and Plants that have Shaped Britain’s Garden History (London: Eden Project Books, 2004), 403. 57 Beattie, ‘Empire of the Rhododendron’; Louise Shaw, Southern Gardening: A History of the Dunedin Horticultural Society (Dunedin: Dunedin Horticultural Society, Inc., 2000), 43. Sam Chew Lain exhibited ‘a rarity in the form of three Chinese geese’, Tuapeka Times, 3 September 1887, 3. 58 Beattie, ‘Empire of the Rhododendron’. 59 Note, for example, Thomas R. Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora: Environment and History in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 60 Otago Daily Times, 21 January 1891, 3. A solitary bulb was first mentioned in 1889: Press, 3 June 1889, 6. 61 Although this, of course, could simply be a case of the same techniques being in use among both peoples – not a case of influence from one to the other. See, comments on Leong Foy’s garden in Dunedin. Otago Witness, 1 June 1878, 21. 62 Beattie, ‘Empire of the Rhododendron’. 63 North Otago Times, 2 September 1870, 4. 64 Otago Witness, 1 June 1878, 21. 65 Waikato Times, 26 August 1882, 2. 66 Frost, ‘European Farming, Australian Pests: Agricultural Settlement and Environmental Disruption in Australia, 1800–1920’. Environment and History 4 (1998): 129–43. 67 Lee and Lam, ‘Chan’. 68 No. 2. Mr W. Townsend to Mr W. Seed. (No. 8.) Sib, Custom House, New Plymouth, 15 March, 1873 in ‘Exportation of Fungus to China (Correspondence Relative to), H-39, Appendices to the Journal of the House of Representatives (AJHR), 1873, 1. 69 Calculated from: AJHR, 1880–1920. 70 Ng, Windows, vol. 3, 304–12. 71 The Cyclopedia of New Zealand [Taranaki, Hawke’s Bay & Wellington Provincial Districts] (Christchurch: The Cyclopedia Company Limited, 1908), 119–20. 72 Joan Burnett, ‘The Impact of Dairying on the Landscape of Lowland Taranaki’, in Land and Society in New Zealand: Essays in Historical Geography, ed. R. F. Watters (Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1965), 101–19. 73 Evening Post, 5 August 1922, 17. 74 I have struggled to find appropriate or even approximate terms for Chinese concepts of the non-human world. On the epistemological problems of translation of the term ‘nature’, see: Robert P. Weller, Discovering Nature: Globalization and

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75 76 77 78

79 80 81

82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

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Environmental Culture in China and Taiwan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 19–42. Ole Bruun, ‘The Fengshui Resurgence in China: Conflicting Cosmologies Between State and Peasantry’. China Journal 36 (1996): 48. Jack Potter, ‘Wind, Water, Bones and Souls: The Religious World of the Cantonese Peasant’. Journal of Oriental Studies 8 (1970): 141. Don, Twenty-first Inland Otago Tour, 11–12. Ritchie, ‘Form and Adaptation: Nineteenth Century Chinese Miner’s Dwellings in Southern New Zealand’, in Hidden Heritage: Historical Overview of the Overseas Chinese, ed. Priscilla Wegars (Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company, Inc., 1993), 366. Ritchie, ‘Form and Adaptation’, 366–7. Chinese Missions: 30 Views and Portraits with Notes, 3rd edn (Dunedin: Otago Daily Times, no date), 12. Arthur Wolf, ‘Gods, Ghosts and Ancestors’, in Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, eds. Emily Martin and Arthur Wolf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 130. Ng, Windows, vol. 1, 66. On 1883, see: Ng, Windows, vol. 1, 66. The figure for 1902 derives from Otago Daily Times, 30 October 1902, 7. Don and McNeur, Chinese Mission Work in Otago, N.Z. Annual Inland Tour (1900–1901) (Dunedin: Otago Daily Times Office, 1901), 51. Ng, Windows, vol. 1, 66. Ng, Windows, vol. 1, 64–6. McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks, 126–7. Don, Nineteenth Inland Otago Tour, 32. The N.Z. Presbyterian, 1 December 1883, 106. A voluminous literature exists on the supernatural in traditional China. Note, Pu Songling, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, trans. and ed. John Minford (London: Penguin, 2006). Don, Nineteenth Inland Otago Tour, 1905–1906 (Dunedin: Otago Daily Times, 1906), 9. Charles Benn, China’s Golden Age: Everyday Life in the Tang Dynasty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 281. Benn, China’s Golden Age, 265–89. Don, Inland Tours XXIII and XXIV, 1909–1911, 15–16. Don and McNeur, Chinese Mission Work, 6. Craig Clunas, Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China, 1368–1644 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), 84–111, 103. Note, Don, Nineteenth Inland Otago Tour, 1905–1906 (Dunedin: Otago Daily Times, 1906), 4. Don, Outlook, 23 May 1908, 13.

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98 99 100 101 102

Don, Outlook, 23 May 1908, 13. Don, Inland Tours XXIII and XXIV, 56. Don, Under Six Flags, 118. Don, Under Six Flags, 118. Erik Olssen, based on interview with Don’s neighbour. For some recent possibilities, see: Beattie and Duncan Campbell, Lan Yuan – A Garden of Distant Longing (Dunedin: Shanghai Museum & Dunedin Chinese Gardens Trust, 2013). 103 I am grateful to Robert B. Marks for raising the question of the ecological impacts of introduced organisms and their role as potential invasive plants and animals.

Select bibliography Beattie, James. ‘Empire of the Rhododendron: Re-orienting New Zealand Garden History’, in Making a New Land: Environmental Histories of New Zealand, second edn, eds. Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2013, 241–60, 365–7. —‘Making Home, Making Identity: Asian Garden-Making in New Zealand, 1850s-1930s’. Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 31 (2011): 139–59. —Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800–1920. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Beattie, James and Duncan Campbell. Lan Yuan – A Garden of Distant Longing. Dunedin: Shanghai Museum & Dunedin Chinese Gardens Trust, 2013. Elvin, Mark. The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China. Yale: Yale University Press, 2006. Elvin, Mark and Ts’ui-jung Liu (eds), Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Fan, Fa-Ti. British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2004. Lee, Lily and Ruth Lam. ‘陈达枝 Chan Dah Chee (1851–1930): Pioneer Chinese Market Gardener and Auckland Businessman’. ENNZ: Environment and Nature in New Zealand 6 (2011): 24–54. —Sons of the Soil: Chinese Market Gardeners in New Zealand. Pukekohe: Dominion Federation of New Zealand Chinese Commercial Growers Inc., 2012. Mahong, Bao. ‘Environmental History in China’. Environment and History 10 (2004): 475–99. Marks, Robert B. Tigers, Rice, Silk, & Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. —China, Its Environment and History. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012. Martin, Emily and Arthur Wolf (eds), Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974.

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McKeown, Adam. Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2008. Muscolino, Micah. ‘Global Dimensions of Modern China’s Environmental History’. World History Connected 6 (2009): 31 pars, accessed 19 January 2012, http://www. historycooperative.org/journals/whc/6.1/muscolino.html. Ng, James. Windows on a Chinese Past, vols. 1–4. Dunedin: Otago Heritage Books, 1993–9. Pawson, Eric and Tom Brooking (eds). Making a New Land: Environmental Histories of New Zealand, second edition. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2013. Ritchie, Neville. ‘Archaeology and History of the Chinese in Southern New Zealand During the Nineteenth Century: A Study of Acculturation, Adaptation and Change’. PhD diss., University of Otago, 1986. Sheng, Fei. ‘Environmental Experiences of Chinese People in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Australian Gold Rush’. Global Environment: A Journal of History and Natural and Social Sciences 7–8 (2012): 99–127. Weller, Robert P. Discovering Nature: Globalization and Environmental Culture in China and Taiwan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

8

Colonial Hunting Cultures Kathryn M. Hunter

In his 1988 foundational study The Empire of Nature, imperial historian John M. MacKenzie argued convincingly that hunting underpinned British imperial expansion.1 In Africa and beyond, hunting aided British exploration and surveying, military campaigns, the establishment of mission stations and farms, and the building of railways. According to historians William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, hunting, especially commodity hunting, was one of the ‘material factors that shaped environmental change’ during the nineteenth century, and was an integral part of the ‘commodity frontiers and commodity chains that gave the Empire its character and unity’.2 This character and unity does not allow historians to treat the Empire as a single entity, meaning environmental historians face particular challenges when dealing with the vast array of ecologies over which the British cast their mantle (Chapters 1 and 9). Hunting’s ubiquity in the colonial experience makes it, then, a useful lens through which to examine interactions with the natural world in the long nineteenth century. Colonial hunting cultures emerged from the tangles and collisions of a range of Anglophone discourses about the natural world with local environments and cultures.3 Hunting cultures are an example of geographer Alan Lester’s characterization of imperial spaces as products of the ‘throwing together of a set of incredibly diverse and complex trajectories that were already spatially extensive’.4 This view allows for chaotic and unpredictable results in colonial settings, even within a unified Empire. The game ecologies within which British explorers and settlers found themselves strongly influenced the success of their ventures and were, in turn, shaped by British notions about the natural world, class and, increasingly throughout the nineteenth century, masculinity. Although less well explored by scholars, hunting also provided avenues for local peoples to maintain agency within, and to adapt to, the changing circumstances in which many found themselves throughout the nineteenth century. Similarly,

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examining hunting allows different attitudes towards the natural world among groups of British colonists to be explored, especially illuminating views held by members of the working and soldiering classes (Chapter 9). This chapter investigates cultural and material responses to different and changing environments by exploring three aspects of colonial hunting. First, it uses examples of specific colonial locations and game ecologies to demonstrate how British colonial success was contingent on local conditions and the animals available for hunting in such localities. Local ecologies were also shaped by British philosophies in varying ways. Second, the chapter examines examples of indigenous participation in hunting in the colonial era, revealing a wide range of ways in which local peoples used hunting as a process and hunting as a product in itself – especially in the form of hunting tourism – to engage in trade and work while maintaining some traditions. Third, and linked to indigenous agency in colonial hunting economies, is the extent to which hunting tourism and the products of hunting linked jungles, savannahs and highlands with metropolitan cultures of fashion.

The diversity of imperial hunting At the turn of the nineteenth century, several British colonies and their hunting cultures were well established. The British presence in, and settlement of, colonial spaces such as eastern Canada, North America (by 1800 both settled and lost), India and southern Africa, as well as Asia (Chapter 9), was impacting on the material and cultural worlds of British and local peoples. The commodity hunting of whales, for example, had direct impacts on arenas as diverse as the multiracial nature of whaling-ship crews, street lighting in Bristol and women’s fashions through corsetry. Whaling is an extreme, but illustrative, example of the impact of hunting on patterns of indigenous people’s migrations, nineteenth-century urban geographies, and the shaping of nineteenth-century bodies.5 Local peoples in British colonies exploited local resources and their skills in local environments for trading and political purposes, as well as for status and wealth. They provided workforces for commodity hunters and, increasingly throughout the nineteenth century, were suppliers themselves to scientific and recreational hunters. The commodities produced through hunting were also, by this time, flowing through the British and white-colonial marketplaces as piano keys and bone-handled knives, top hats, plumes for military uniforms, fur stoles, trophies and specimens. Less obviously, but no less importantly, tomahawks, guns, red blankets, European

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jackets and hats circulated through local populations as part of the hunting trade, influencing political power, hunting success and cultural beliefs.6 The turn of the nineteenth century also saw the establishment of a range of new British colonies, especially in the Pacific. Here, the tangling of British ideas about the natural world and hunting with specific local ecologies had remarkably diverse effects. The difference between the fate of the early convict settlements in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania), for example, was in large part due to differences in game ecologies. The New South Wales colony, founded in 1788 on the east coast of the mainland of Australia, was afflicted by increasingly severe food shortages. These caused widespread starvation and, in 1792, more than 450 deaths.7 The suffering endured by the early convicts and their guards cemented the reputation of New South Wales as ‘the fatal shore’.8 Despite the colony having supported a significant local population for thousands of years, the colonists could not hunt enough game to feed themselves. Environmental historian James Boyce points to several reasons for this, including the inaccuracy of contemporary firearms over any but the shortest distances. Also significant was the local game culture shaped by local hunting methods. Local people, particularly the Eora, had hunted accompanied by native dogs (dingos) for generations.9 Kangaroos and emu were, by all European accounts, present in small numbers in the coastal basin around Sydney but were ‘shy’. Plans to release pigs into the forests to create a local population were also thwarted by ‘the natives so frequently setting fire to the country’.10 The hunting grounds created by fire and used by local people were not recognized for what they were by European convicts and marines; grassy areas in the Sydney district were co-opted for introduced livestock and were soon overgrown by unpalatable species because burning had ceased. It was not until the 1813 crossing of the Blue Mountains that wide expanses of grasslands – and hence grazing grounds for herbivores – were discovered by Europeans. By contrast, local populations in Van Diemen’s Land had created grazing grounds for kangaroos and emu close to the coast. Unwittingly, surgeon David Collins described a hunting ‘template’ in his diaries in 1803 when he recorded the ‘grass on good valley soil, timber on crests younger as it descends, ferns and flowers amid fire-prone trees’. This was a land-management system designed to attract game and encourage other food sources. ‘The creek mouth was a swamp in a grassy flat, sheltering birds, eggs, reeds, roots, tubers and wallaby.’11 Boyce argues there were two significant differences between Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales: ‘native herbivores were present in larger numbers than on the mainland, and, second, the kangaroo and wallaby were not adapted to [dogs,] the new predator.’12 Van Diemen’s Land had been cut off from the mainland by rising seas before dogs

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Figure 8.1 Local game and predator ecologies shaped nineteenth-century hunting cultures. British artist Samuel Gill blended a familiar hunting scene with an exotic quarry in his 1850s series on kangaroo hunting in NSW. Source: Samuel Gill, ‘Kangaroo Hunting No. 1, The Meet’, c.1856. Rex Nan Kivell Collection, NK1589, National Library of Australia. http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an6016180

had arrived there. Kangaroo, wallaby and emu were hunted successfully in Van Diemen’s Land by convict hunters who lived year-round in the bush, and the colony prospered until their livestock became plentiful and replaced kangaroo in the government ration in 1812. In both colonies, the extensive grasslands created over thousands of years by Aboriginal management allowed for the growth of herds of cattle and flocks of sheep.13 Pastoralism tended to supplement hunting, however, and game took some decades to fade from the diets of settlers. In New Zealand, the other major settler colony of the region, the local ecology was fundamentally different and resulted in a unique manifestation of hunting culture. Both Van Diemen’s Land and New Zealand had a temperate climate and good rainfall. The key difference between New Zealand and the other British colonies was the complete absence of native mammals. By dint of a geological quirk, no land mammals that existed when New Zealand separated from the Australian continental mass survived, resulting in a megafauna composed almost entirely of birds, as well as a flora that evolved in the absence of browsing mammals. Cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and almost certainly rats were introduced in the eighteenth century by seafarers, whalers and sealers, and by missionaries and European settlers in the nineteenth century. Hunting in the early decades of settlement was therefore chiefly of birds, and of introduced wild pigs and cattle. Local diets by the turn of the nineteenth century were increasingly based on horticulture, with protein being provided through shellfish-gathering and

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fishing. The population of giant moa and other flightless birds had declined, or entirely disappeared, under the pressure of hunting before the arrival of Europeans.14 The arrival of pigs with seafarers was important to locals, and several groups took it upon themselves to increase their numbers through farming them. By the 1840s, visitors to many areas of New Zealand described the country as ‘thick with pigs’.15

Game laws, class and hunting Despite different game ecologies, a common characteristic of the hunting culture of colonies such as Van Diemen’s Land and New Zealand was the access of the lower classes to hunting. Boyce argues that far from experiencing the Van Diemen’s Land convict colony as a ‘fatal shore’, convicts and their families found in the bush ‘a place of redemption from the servitude and subservience that characterised a penal colony’.16 Two reasons for this were meat rations and the chance to live away from the main settlement as a kangaroo hunter. In the free colony of New Zealand, the ability to hunt was also a key part of the lower classes’ experience of migration. While upper-class visitors and migrants found New Zealand lacking in appropriate game and urged the introduction of game species, working-class male migrants wrote home to Britain of the freedom to hunt. Historian of New Zealand settlement, Rollo Arnold, argued that punitive game laws were a ‘push factor’ for lower-class families to emigrate to New Zealand. ‘Hunting and shooting [in England] were class sports, which became more and more fashionable throughout the [ninteenth] century. While the villagers craved for meat, they saw the wild creatures about them protected by the Game Laws to provide sport for their “betters” ’.17 Punitive game laws had been in force in England from the 1670s, and they restricted hunting to those of substantial incomes, those with large land-holdings and to owners of hunting resources. The British countryside was a place of great social antagonism and unrest because ‘commoners relished hunting, coursing, and fishing as much as their social superiors and resented any attempt to restrict these pursuits to the gentry’.18 The persistence of poaching in England and Scotland, even in the face of terrible punishments, is evidence of the widespread resistance to these restrictions. It is not surprising, then, that working-class immigrants in New Zealand enthused about the opportunities for hunting in their letters to friends and relatives in Britain. George Goodwin, who emigrated to Dunedin, wrote to his

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siblings, ‘the policemen [don’t] stop you when coming into town if your pockets are a bit bulky or you have a bag on your back. … You may shoot plenty of rabbits here’. Thomas Green took a bush job on the South Island and wrote home in July 1874: ‘Don’t be afraid of the seas, my fellow working men. … I must tell you that I brought a good double-barrel gun with me, and am not afraid to use it in this country. I can go out and shoot pigs, and all kinds of wild fowls …’. Others urged their families and friends to join them saying, ‘George. … Get the horse whip at my brother Thomas’ and drive him with you to Mr Simmons at once. This place would just suit him for there are thousands of rabbits here and wild ducks, and swamp turkeys, and the farmers are pleased to see anyone shoot them – any amount of rabbits’. Richard Harwood, a twenty-one-year-old gardener, wrote to his father and brother emphasizing his living conditions, telling them he was ‘revelling in shooting pigs, pigeons and ducks, and fishing for eels, the latter under Maori tuition’. Even Joseph Arch, the President of the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union in England, when farewelling immigrants in December 1873, ‘exulted in the plenitude of wild pigs, cattle, goats, rabbits, pigeons and ducks in New Zealand’.19 Wellington in the 1840s and 1850s was remembered by settlers as a place where ‘fishing, swimming and boating were freely indulged in and for those who liked shooting, there were plenty of native pigeons in the bush and also a fair number of wild pigs. … This was a good way of adding to the family larder’.20 In other areas of New Zealand, Maori retained control over the hunting of pigs, usually using them for trading with colonists, but wild fowl were freely hunted in almost all accessible country.21 While working-class hunters revelled in their new environment, upper-class ideals of the natural world demanded more refined hunting experiences than that of chasing wild pigs through the undergrowth. Upper-class immigrants and visitors described a lack of game and encouraged the introduction of game species to New Zealand. Traveller Charles Hursthouse argued in the 1850s that the land’s only fault lay in it having ‘nothing to shoot’.22 Others saw it as unlikely that ‘true sons of Great Britain could be found ready to dwell in a country in which there is so little to shoot, and where some half wild pigs … [and] a few ducks gave the only chance of a fair day’s sport’.23 Individuals, along with the acclimatization societies (formed on a provincial basis from the 1860s), set about rectifying this lack. The introduction of game birds, particularly Californian quail (Callipepla californica) and pheasants, were a mixed success, but deer from England and Scotland, imported and released a handful at a time over four decades, adapted well. In the first decade after its establishment in 1901, the government’s Department of Tourist and Health Resorts also released tahr (Hemitragus

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jemlahicus), chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra), wapiti and moose (Alces alces) into the wild. In all, seven species of deer were established successfully in New Zealand, and Californian quail were the most successful species of game bird (until the 1930s when Mallard duck populations rose substantially. They are now the most numerous wetland bird species in the country).24 While rats, domestic dogs and cats ravaged the bird populations, the lack of large predators, coupled with a temperate climate and abundant feed, meant that deer, in particular, prospered in New Zealand, and by the early decades of the twentieth century, many herds numbered several hundreds.25 Different ideals and philosophies of hunting as interaction with the natural world were a source of conflict in British colonies. The most obvious area of commonality, conflict and contest was that of hunting for food, and this was particularly the case in the settler colonies. Game was essential for the survival and prosperity of both indigenous populations and settlers, especially while agriculture and pastoralism were becoming established. Even as settlements became established and the luxury of butchers’ shops appeared in larger towns, hunting continued to play a large role in provisioning in many colonies. In New Zealand, game continued to be cheaper and often easier to procure than farmed meat. In other colonies, too, such as the expanding settlements of western Canada, remoteness also forced a continuing reliance on game. Supplies of farmed meat were scarce before the extension of the railways, and afterwards, transportation made the costs prohibitive, with meat in Edmonton, for example, costing four times what it sold for in eastern towns even in the 1890s.26 ‘Pot hunters’ – those who hunted for food rather than sport – were a source of anxiety to both those who were concerned with a colony’s progress and who wished to conserve game species for sport-hunting, as was increasingly the case in the late nineteenth century.27 To those promoting agrarian colonies, such as Canada and New Zealand, as Arcadian paradises, pot-hunting smacked of primitivism and deprivation. It undermined visions of the bountiful land, and it continued to tie the settler population literally and metaphorically to the indigenous peoples being displaced.28 ‘Whatever agricultural boosters said about [Canadian] town or regional self-sufficiency’, noted Canadian historian George Colpitts, ‘settlers typically faced chronic food shortages’. The need for food was met ‘by hunters, professional provisioners, individual sport hunters, and game butchers’.29 Changing laws, definitions of ‘game’ and the legitimization of some methods of hunting over others also framed hunting cultures. Several settler governments proceeded on the assumption that those who needed meat could hunt animals

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themselves and directly rejected the reservation of hunting for a particular group in society. In an effort to maintain populations of game, those same governments introduced ordinances on seasons and bag limits by the mid-nineteenth century. As the century wore on, however, campaigns began against what was seen as indiscriminate ‘pot-hunting’, especially for sale rather than for the table. As historian Louis Warren has argued of the United States, ‘conservationist polemic often decried the “wasteful” and “greedy” hunting practices of certain ethnic and social groups, among them American Indians, blacks, and immigrants, especially Italians’.30 These views were shared by colonial governments across the Empire, and, by the beginning of the twentieth century, protection laws targeted local people’s hunting. Indigenous people were involved integrally in the meat, skin, hide and feather markets, using these industries as a borderland where they maintained one foot in their traditional territories and practices and one in the emerging cash economy. In Cape Colony in the early nineteenth century, traveller William Burchell argued that the provision of guns to locals, and therefore the subsequent increase in the numbers of game they could kill, was an essential step to the transition of ‘primitive’ peoples to agriculture. ‘The introduction of fire-arms to them’, he argued, ‘would ultimately operate to the promotion of tillage … the more numerous were the guns and the hunters, the sooner would the game be destroyed or driven out of the country’.31 For this reason, he supported the employment of local hunters by European traders. Less convinced was missionary George Langhorne, who in 1838, complained to the Colonial Secretary that Aboriginal people in New South Wales who had access to guns ‘obtain food and clothing for themselves by shooting the Menura Pheasant or Bullun Bullun [lyrebird] for the sake of their tails, which they sell to whites’.32 In those colonies where treaties existed between local people and the Crown, it was popularly understood that locals might be able to hunt and trade when settlers could not because they retained universal hunting rights. The Cree, for example, used their treaty privileges to trade with meat buyers in northern Manitoba where the moose meat was smoked in woodland camps and then dispatched to butchers’ shops, and the highly valued skins were sent to tanneries in Winnipeg. Up to and during the First World War, Canadian settlers ‘claimed that it was too inconvenient and expensive to buy a hunting permit and ammunition. They purchased wild meat from Amerindian hunters instead’.33 In New Zealand, popular understanding among settlers was that Maori retained hunting rights under the Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840, despite the subsequent passage of game laws. In 1904, the owner of the New Criterion Hotel

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in Whanganui, North Island, pleaded guilty to a charge of possessing game out of season, but argued that his son had bought the kereru (native pigeon), some quail and ducks from a local Maori. The court heard that ‘[h]is son reckoned that the Maoris [sic] were permitted to kill whatever game they liked’.34 A few years later, when a Maori man was arrested in possession of two kerosene tins of preserved kereru, the police advised the Auckland Acclimatization Society that, should they decide to proceed with charges, it was unlikely that ‘a magistrate well versed in Maori lore would convict’. Indeed, the secretary of the society thought the man would only be convicted if the Treaty of Waitangi did not override the Animals Protection Act (1895), and it was unclear whether or not this was the case.35

Local peoples and imperial exchanges The ecologies of colonial spaces and the people who inhabited them shaped hunting cultures in both the metropolis and the colonies. Lester calls these ‘meeting points of [spatialized] trajectories’.36 These meeting points are apparent in the work of several scholars who have explored the ways in which local wildlife – elephants, tigers, lions and antelopes – populated wider Anglophone, and specifically British, spaces and imaginations through mechanisms such as adventure fiction.37 In addition to the snow-covered north, savannahs and jungles formed the scene for British morality tales in books and serialized newspaper stories, and specialized hunting and fishing magazines similarly circulated throughout the Empire. These forms of literature, at best, depicted local people as anonymous and part of nature; at worst, they were highly racialized and derogatory. As can be seen from the discussion above, however, local peoples were integral in many ways to hunting cultures throughout the Empire, and rarely was that role simply one of an obstacle or of subservience. Beinart and Hughes argue that commodity chains gave the Empire its unity and that hunting was central to those chains. Hunting facilitated trade both in the quarry – meat, furs, antlers and fats – and in indigenous and European objects. The seventeenth-century quip overheard by a Jesuit missionary in Canada, that ‘[t]he Beaver does everything perfectly well, it makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread’ is well known because it succinctly captures the inter-penetration of worlds through hunting.38 By the nineteenth century, trade with local peoples was often in transition, between payment in kind and incorporation into an emerging cash economy.

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Many local peoples across the Empire worked directly in the hunting economy. Various African groups were involved in the ivory trade, southern New Zealand Maori and Tasmanian Aboriginal people were working within the sealing and whaling economies, while Métis communities controlled much of the pemmican trade south of the Great Lakes.39 During a debate over local people’s access to firearms in the Bloemfontein newspaper in 1852, the reporter noted, ‘[h]owever much may be said about shooting elephants by traders, it is pretty certain that the ivory market would be but scantily supplied, did not tribes such as Secheli’s and [the] Griquas keep up the stock’.40 Other 1850s southern African newspapers reported regularly on trade with local people in ivory, ostrich feathers and ‘carosses’ or ‘karosses’ (the pelts of animals often worn by chiefly figures). Newspaper correspondents noted that locals had instituted ‘what we would consider … game laws’ in order to manage the wildlife resource, and explorer David Livingstone reported encountering ‘half-caste traders near the Kafue who had got 40,000 lbs weight of ivory by trade and shooting’.41 Local participation in the fur trade in Canada is well known and, as historian Angela Wanhalla has demonstrated, similar connections with and effects on local people occurred during the shorewhaling era in the early nineteenth century in New Zealand.42 Local women were particularly important to these industries, with ‘the continued presence of both the traders and whalers … and the survival of these industries, [being] contingent on intermarriage’.43 The international trade in bird skins and plumes also involved local people, although the historical records are scant. New Zealand ornithologist Walter Buller recorded travelling with Maori kiwi and huia (Heteralocha acutirostris) hunters, and run-holder and naturalist John Enys wrote in 1874 that more than 600 huia skins had been collected from local Maori in 1873.44 The development of hunting as a product in itself in the form of hunting tourism brought local peoples into a range of relationships with hunters from around the Empire and Anglophone world (Chapter 9). For example, James Carnegie, Ninth Earl of Southesk, traded with both local hunters and local women artisans during his 1859 hunting expedition across the northern plains of Canada to the Rocky Mountains. As well as trading for fresh horses and provisions with local people, Southesk periodically employed local women to assist with dressing skins and heads of trophies, as well as drying meat for provisions, and sewing and mending. Encountering skilled artisans on his travels, Southesk commissioned gifts for his wife and daughters – in this case, four pairs of embroidered, smoked-deer hide slippers – and for himself, a mooseleather gun case, which he found far superior to the bison-hide one he had been travelling with.45 Along with the grizzly bear skins, bison heads and antelope

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Figure 8.2 New hunting technologies were rapidly embraced by many indigenous people throughout the Empire. Photographed around 1900 with the swans shot that morning, this group of Maori were, like most other local groups, facing increasing pressure to relinquish customary methods of snaring and trapping. Source: Maori Group with guns, Chatham Islands, New Zealand, c.1900. William Burt Collection, PA-Coll-0104-02, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. http://natlib. govt.nz/records/22500635

skins, these goods made by local women travelled back to Scotland with him – where they remained for the next 146 years. The women artists continued supplying travellers, traders, soldiers and hunters with services and souvenirs.46 Local people also provided a range of services for hunters who travelled to Africa and India to participate in safari or shikar.47 Guides, cooks and gunbearers were the most highly paid among local people in these parties, and many hundreds more acted as porters at lower pay rates. The published accounts of safaris generally make little mention of local workers except occasionally to a particularly highly thought of guide or gun-bearer.48 A little more is revealed in the diaries of hunters from less aristocratic backgrounds, as in the case of New Zealand hunters to Africa in the early twentieth century. Herbert Hart and Vivian Donald, for example, travelled to Northern Rhodesia in 1926 and used the services of a local – rather than a white – guide while on a safari (ulendo). In his diary, Hart described their party for the first part of their trip on the Luapula River as consisting only of ten ‘dusky paddles’ as well as a personal servant, ‘Malinger’ and a ‘cook-boy’, engaged at a rate of 15 shillings and 25 shillings per month, respectively.49 The boat did the job of porters during the fifteen-day

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journey along the river. When their overland party was assembled, it included one capito or head guide, called ‘Moses’, two hunters – ‘Biscuit’ and ‘Chambezi’ – a cook, an assistant cook and Malinger, who stayed on as the ‘personal boy’. Hart employed thirty-three porters, two of whom acted as gun-bearers. The cook remained the most highly paid member of the group. Hart’s records of the safari reveal some aspects of the local hunting economy in this remote area. Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) was a colony protected in many ways by its ecology; its characterization by missionaries and explorers as ‘tsetse country’ from the 1850s ensured it was unattractive to hunters. In concert with this were rumours that local people at the confluence of the Zambezi and Luangua Rivers were ‘ferocious marauders’.50 Even after British expansion into the territory in the 1890s, it was closed to outsiders by sustained outbreaks of ‘sleeping sickness’. Hunting in the remote Luangwa Valley was constrained both by geography and the closure of the area to non-residents from 1912 to 1925 and then again from 1927 to 1935, resulting in the protection of game from tourists’ guns.51 Hart’s diary does not clarify who the porters, cooks and guides he employed were; as with the diaries of most European hunters in Africa, locals from Durban to the Luangwa were simply ‘nigs’ or ‘locals’, written about with casual racism. It is highly likely that the ulendo were Valley Bisa who had entered into the waged economy through mining and hunting tourism.52 The party almost certainly encountered the Bemba, however. In the diary, Hart mentions a ‘sitatunga drive’ being arranged with a local chief, and one of Hart’s photographs shows groups of locals sitting surrounded by nets on poles, a Bemba hunting technique described in the 1930s by anthropologist Audrey Richards. Hart also described locals building rhinoceros traps and burning off bush to encourage new grass, techniques also described by Richards.53 Reference to the game traps in Hart’s writings indicates, too, that despite colonial game laws and restrictions on hunting techniques imposed in Northern Rhodesia at the turn of the century, local people continued with traditional methods well into the 1920s.54 Other traditions survived the changing circumstances. Hart recorded that ‘a local … called last night and offered to show us game’, and Donald went out with a ‘local chief ’.55 This caused a dispute, however, between the locals and the porters. Richards argued in 1930 that among the Bemba ‘the rules governing the ownership of meat are precise. The man who kills the buck has the right to the animal, but he gives a leg to the man who first started the game’.56 On the way back from the day’s hunting, Hart decided ‘to give our guide one whole one [puku] plus one leg. He nearly got away with it while our … [porters were eating] and then they saw him, dashed down and you never heard such a row. One

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would have thought he was stealing their wives the fuss they made’.57 There were clearly strict rules and expectations around the provision of meat and guiding that were being maintained even within new economies. Canadian historian Tina Loo also discusses the involvement of local men as guides and outfitters for visiting hunters in nineteenth-century British Columbia. Guiding formed part of a repertoire of adaptations to the nineteenth-century colonization of British Columbia. Loo notes that ‘as wage labourers, aboriginal men like the Tahltan were not able to shape the terms of their dealings with whites to the extent they had during the fur trade, when relationships between the two were characterized by a rough equality and interdependence’. Nonetheless, by the end of the nineteenth century, Tahltan men could make a living as ‘licensed commercial guides, helping tourist-hunters bag trophies on lands aboriginal people no longer controlled’.58 The colonizing process of fashioning particular areas as wildernesses as the ‘sportsman’s paradise’ was common throughout the Empire, and the commodification of hunting as a product itself was promoted as ‘a particular kind of virilizing experience’.59 Maintaining the product, however, relied on the expertise of local – and often indigenous – men.

Imperial commodity demand: Fashion and the bird trade The trophies produced during hunting tourism were immensely fashionable among imperial middle- and upper-classes by the end of the nineteenth century. Hart and Donald, as well as other New Zealanders who hunted in Africa, took their trophies home to New Zealand and displayed them. Their activities form part of a continuum of animal specimens and trophies that were a thriving trade throughout the Empire during the 1800s. In New Zealand, museums and amateur collectors employed specialist bird hunters, with thousands of specimens being shot and sold. While ostensibly collected for natural history purposes, it is clear in the case of birds collected in other countries that hunters and their agents were selling surplus skins to milliners as early as the 1840s. Quite quickly, a preference became clear in the trade for arsenic-preserved skins, usually preserved by European hunters, over the skins prepared by indigenous people using bark. Naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace recorded that consequently the price of locally prepared bird of paradise skins in New Guinea plunged from up to £2 each for some species to only sixpence over the course of the 1840s.60 Similarly, New Zealand birdhunter, William Docherty, told naturalist Thomas Potts in the 1870s that he had sold 2,000 kiwi skins to a London agent to be sold onto the garment industry.61

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The trade in plumes and bird skins was vast in scale and reach even without the massive trade in ostrich feathers. Records of auction houses in London and New York show that they cleared millions of natural history specimens, feathers, wings and whole birds each year. A London dealer warned New Zealand ornithologist Walter Buller in 1880 that he would accept no more New Zealand birds, because he still had 385 kakapo (Strigops habroptila) and 90 Little Spotted Kiwis (Apteryx owenii) in stock (both now critically endangered).62 The American orthithological magazine, The Auk, noted in 1888 that ‘[l]ast year, the trade in birds for women’s hats was so enormous that a single London dealer admitted that he had sold 2,000,000 of small birds of every kind and colour’.63 In records of London auctions in 1908, the lists still included 180 lyrebird tails from south-eastern Australia.64 London auction houses were the end of a long chain of suppliers that stretched beyond the Empire through sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, the Mediterranean and the Americas.65 As early as the 1830s, Sydney drapers advertised the arrival of ‘[c]hildren’s beaver hats and bonnets richly trimmed with ostrich feathers’.66 Prior to the domestication of ostriches in the 1860s, locals and settlers hunted wild birds for both plumes and skins. Animal products dominated the trade out of Albany, the English settlement on the Eastern Cape, with ivory and horns, skins and hides and feathers making up 75 per cent of trade by 1831.67 Apart from the use of feathers in military uniforms, changes in women’s fashion promoted the feather trade, which increased in volume and value as the nineteenth century went on. Fashion historian Margarette Braun-Ronsdorf notes that with the shift to slimmer silhouettes in the late nineteenth century, larger hats and accessories such as fur or feather muffs became popular. She writes that from the 1870s onwards, ‘[a]part from … the masses of artificial flowers, hat decorations consisted almost exclusively of ostrich plumes …’.68 Feathers on hats were absolutely everywhere in the newspapers and photographs of British colonies from the 1870s onwards. Even the most cursory glance through the weddings pages of colonial newspapers revealed bridesmaids, mothers of the bride and groom, cousins and sisters adorned with plumes across all classes. In New Zealand, Maggie Quick wore a white ostrich feather boa when she married stationmaster Frank Delany in Paeroa, North Island; Alice Harrison, herself wearing a veil of embroidered tulle, was attended by bridesmaids in the extremely fashionable magpie gown, that is, a combination of whites and blacks in feathers and fabrics. Her cousin, Miss Bell, was more striking perhaps in a ‘canary’ dress with a hat to match trimmed with yellow roses and bird of paradise feathers.69 Ann Wyatt Blatt, who married estate manager James Georgetti wearing a maizecoloured gown with swansdown trimmings, later donned a travelling outfit

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‘with felt hat and huia feather’.70 In Nagpur, India, when Miss Young married the Deputy Commissioner of Nimar, Mr Robertson, her going-away outfit was described in the Pioneer newspaper as ‘a gem, a tailor-made green cloth, trimmed with red and a red hat and piquant green feather standing up in it’.71 Feathers tended to be made up into garments and trims by specialist furriers, milliners and modistes or costumieres (specialist dressmakers). In colonial New Zealand, Auckland furrier Mrs Yardle made up four kiwi skins into a tippet and muff for Director of the Colonial Museum, James Hector, in 1872;72 J. A. Capper advertised as a ‘Taxidermist, Furrier and Plumassier’;73 J. Jacobs advertised as a ‘Feather Furrier and Taxidermist’, claiming that ‘every description of sea and land birds [could be] prepared and made into muffs &c’.74 Mrs Alice Jacobs offered ‘feathers cleaned, curled and dyed’ as part of her services as a taxidermist and furrier.75 Perhaps the best-known of New Zealand’s ‘feather furriers’ was Hector Liardet of Wellington. In his advertisements in 1875, Liardet urged his patrons to consider as presents for friends in England ‘muffs, tippets, cuffs, ladies’ head-dresses &c made from the choicest sea and land birds of New Zealand’. He assured customers that he could fill orders quickly because he had ‘upwards of 1,000 prepared skins on hand’.76 Liardet exhibited at the Philadelphia Exhibition in 1876 through to the Paris Exhibition of 1890. In Paris, Liardet won medals for his collarets and muffs from the skins of New Zealand birds. His muff from the skin of a Royal Penguin (from Macquarie Island) attracted ‘an immense amount of attention’ and his hat made of the plumage of a speckled shag was bought by the Baroness Rothschild.77 Just as London and Paris fashions had appeared in remote colonies such as New Zealand, so too did appeals for women to eschew ‘cruelty in fashion’. From the mid-1880s, ornithologists and naturalists launched campaigns aimed at reducing demand for feathers. Stories appeared in newspapers telling of the slaughter of adult birds in egret colonies, leaving hundreds of chicks to starve or fall from their nests and drown; the blame for the rarity of many species was laid squarely at the feet of women’s vanity. In 1902, the Colonist (New Zealand) reported that: ‘The King and Queen strongly deprecated the killing of birds for hat trimmings when informed that a certain milliner had contracted for 10,000 seagulls’ wings for London and Paris orders’.78 The effects of plume hunting on bird populations are difficult to gauge, especially when other factors such as the wholesale destruction of habitat for agriculture or the introduction of predators and competitors are taken into account. One social effect of plume hunting, however, as with the hunting of ivory and the trade in local weapons as artefacts, was to give the Empire common

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threads. New Zealand hunter Newton McConochie’s reminiscences provide a vignette that links souvenir-buying and the imperial experience of soldiering and hunting. When McConochie was nine years old, he and his brother were looking for ways to hunt pigs without a rifle, a weapon their mother had forbidden them to use. The solutions came from South Africa. In his memoir, he wrote, In 1900 a man came to our place who had just returned from the war in South Africa. He had with him an assegai such as are used by the African Zulu. Seeing this weapon provided the inspiration that was needed. Why not get our old trustworthy friend the blacksmith to make a spearhead that could easily be fitted to a wooden shaft, so readily attainable from the young growth of the forest.79

Their friend the blacksmith did indeed make a spearhead for them; it was three inches long (7.6 cm) with a tapered shaft 45 cm long, with two holes in the shaft and a half-inch lug to nail into the handle. Knowing their mother would not approve, the boys kept its existence a secret: ‘Our weapon was not assembled until the first pig was bailed, and of course it was hidden again before we returned to the house.’80 Ivory buyers commonly traded for ‘native weapons such as battle axes, assegais &c.’ and newspapers reported on the arrival in main centres of new caches of artefacts.81 Through colonial networks, these weapons were widely dispersed as aesthetic objects.82

Conclusion Colonial hunting cultures illustrate the diverse ‘trajectories’ that collided in, and emanated from, colonial spaces. Local ecologies and their management by local people shaped hunting cultures in various ways. Indeed, they were strong determinants of the success of British settlements. Disruption to local game management, as well as the introduction of new animals, technologies and legal frameworks, contributed to the development of distinct hunting cultures in the colonies. There were some common elements, however, especially in settlement colonies. One commonality was the integral roles local people continued to play in changing hunting environments (Chapter 9). Historians are moving beyond characterizing colonial hunting as a ritual of imperial power. The linkages made by many environmental historians between sport-hunting and conservation link colonial hunting cultures with other ideas and movements focused on the natural world. The fundamental importance of local game ecologies to the success or failure of British colonies, the persistence of indigenous agency through hunting

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and the examination of hunting as a consumer process linking to the fashion houses throughout the Empire provide further views on colonial manifestations of the impact of environment on class, race and gender.

Notes 1 John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 2 William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2. 3 This chapter uses the term ‘local’ instead of ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’ to indicate the range of peoples who inhabited the British Empire. 4 Alan Lester, ‘Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire’. History Compass 4, 1 (2006): 124–41 (quote, 135). 5 See, for example, Angela Wanhalla, In/Visible Sight: The Mixed-Descent Families of Southern New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2009); Shannon Ryan, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Newfoundland Seal Fishery’. International Journal of Maritime History 4, 2 (1992): 1–43; Jill Fields, ‘ “Fighting the Corsetless Evil”: Shaping Corsets and Culture, 1900-1930’. Journal of Social History 33, 2 (1999): 355–84. 6 Bruce M. White, ‘A Skilled Game of Exchange: Objibway Fur Trade Protocol’. Minnesota History 50, 6 (Summer 1987): 229–40; Jennifer Newell, Trading Nature: Tahitians, Europeans and Ecological Exchange (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010). 7 David Collins, cited in James Boyce, ‘Return to Eden: Van Diemen’s Land and the Early British Settlement of Australia’. Environment and History 14 (2008): 293. 8 This term was popularized by Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787–1868 (London: Collins Harvill, 1987). 9 Boyce, ‘Return to Eden’, 294. 10 Arthur Smyth described local kangaroos as ‘shy’ less than two weeks after arriving with the First Fleet in January 1788; Governor Arthur Phillip’s plans to release pigs were thwarted in 1790. Both quoted in Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2011), 241. 11 Gammage, Biggest Estate, 248. 12 Boyce, ‘Return to Eden’, 295. 13 See, Gammage, Biggest Estate. 14 Janet Davidson, ‘The Polynesian Foundation’, in The Oxford History of New Zealand, ed. Geoffrey Rice, 2nd edn (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1992), 20.

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15 Several explorers and surveyors are quoted in C. M. H. Clarke and R. M. Dzieciolowski, ‘Feral pigs in the northern South Island, New Zealand: I. Origin, distribution and density’. Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand 21, 3 (1991): 237–47. 16 Boyce, ‘Return to Eden’, 292. 17 Rollo Arnold, The Farthest Promised Land: English Villagers, New Zealand Immigrants of the 1870s (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1981), 29. 18 Donna Landry, The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking and Ecology in English Literature, 1671–1831 (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001), 3. 19 Arnold, Farthest Promised Land, 51, 61, 167, 195, 210. 20 Robert Cameron, ‘A history of the Camerons of Spring Hill, 1840-1900’, unpublished manuscript, reference number 93–6/1 R3B6S4, Wairarapa Archive, Masterton, New Zealand, 4. 21 See, Kate Hunter, Hunting: A New Zealand History (Auckland: Random House, 2009), 47–8. 22 Charles Hursthouse, New Zealand or Zealandia, The Britain of the South (London: Edward Standford, 1857), 83. 23 John Bradshaw, New Zealand as it is (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1883), 334. 24 Red, rusa, sambar, Virginian white-tailed, sika, and fallow deer and wapiti are all established in New Zealand. Axis deer and moose failed. Tahr and chamois are also well established. Pheasants suffered from the same pressures that affected native birds, particularly the introduction of mustelids and the loss of habitat, and by the 1970s acclimatization societies had abandoned hope of establishing selfsustaining populations. 25 The rate of increase of deer in favourable conditions meant it took only fifteen years for a handful of deer liberated into the bush to become a herd of 100, and a further five years for that number to reach 300. See, Hunter, Hunting: A New Zealand History, 51–3. 26 George Colpitts, Game in the Garden: A Human History of Wildlife in Western Canada to 1940 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002), 78–80. 27 See, as two examples, William Beinart, ‘Empire, Hunting and Ecological Change in Africa’. Past and Present 128 (1990): 162–86; and Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006). 28 Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkley : University of California Press, 2003) and Louis S. Warren, The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven: Yale Historical Publications, 1997) both discuss the characterization of some ethnic groups’ hunting practices as ‘wasteful’ and barbaric.

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29 Colpitts, Game in the Garden, 75. 30 Warren, The Hunter’s Game, 25. See also Colpitts, Game in the Garden, 87ff. 31 William Burchell cited in William Kelleher Storey, Guns, Race and Power in Colonial South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 79. 32 Rev. George Langhorne to Colonial Secretary, 30 September 1938, Historical Records of Victoria, vol. 2A, editor-in-chief Michal Cannon (Melbourne: Government Printing Office, 1983), 229. 33 Colpitts, Game in the Garden, 84. 34 Evening Post, 18 June 1904. 35 Evening Post, 15 May 1907. See, also Evaan Aramakutu, ‘Colonists and Colonials: Animals’ protection legislation in New Zealand, 1861-1910’ (unpublished M.A. diss., Massey University, 1997). 36 Lester, ‘Imperial Circuits’, 135. 37 See, for example, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature, ed. Jeffrey Richards (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). 38 The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents (1896–1900), ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites, vol. 6, cited in Beinart and Hughes, Environment and Empire, 45. 39 Beinart and Hughes, Environment and Empire, 53, 65–6; ‘Journal kept during a tour of the interior of South Africa … by Mr Joseph McCabe’, Natal Witness, 27 May 1853, 4, details trading for ivory with local people and their offers to trade oxen for guns, lead and powder; Wanhalla, In/Visible Sight; Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Uwin, 1996); Susan Berry, ‘Recovered Identities: Four Métis Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rupert’s Land’, in Recollecting: Lives of Aboriginal Women of the Canadian Northwest and Borderlands, eds. Sarah Carter and Patricia McCormick (Edmonton: Athabasca Press, 2011), 29–59. 40 Friend of the Sovereignty (Bloemfontein), 21 October 1852, 2. 41 See, for example, Natal Witness, 2 April 1852, 2, 6 April 1855, 3; Livingstone’s comments were published in Natal Witness, 10 May 1861, 5. For the range of groups involved in the ivory trade, see Storey, Guns, Race and Power, 108–11. 42 Wanhalla, ‘Women “Living Across the Line”: Intermarriage on the Canadian Prairies and in Southern New Zealand, 1870-1900’. Ethnohistory 55, 1 (2008): 29–49. 43 Wanhalla, ‘Women “Living Across the Line”’, 32. See also, Sylvia van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670–1870 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983). 44 Ross Galbreath, Walter Buller: The Reluctant Conservationist (Wellington: GP Books, 1989), 143–5. J. D. Enys, ‘An account of the Maori manner of preserving the Skin of the Huia, Heteralocka auctirostris, Buller’. Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand 8 (1875): 205.

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45 Berry, ‘Recovered Identities’, 34–45. 46 Berry, ‘Recovered Identities’, 30. 47 Safari and shikar were local terms that became adopted to describe hunting expeditions. In other parts of Africa such as Zambia, the term ulendo was used. 48 See, for example, correspondence from Harry Tate in the Journal of African Society detailing conversations he had in the early twentieth century with: ‘A Dabida interpreter who had been gun-bearer to the late Mr Harold Hyde-Baker (the chit he held from his former master was endorsed, “This boy does not know fear”)’. Correspondence, Journal of the African Society 28, 111 (April 1929): 324. The problem of capturing local voices and perspectives is discussed in JoAnn McGregor, ‘The Victoria Falls, 1900-1940: Landscape, Tourism and the Geographical Imagination’. Journal of Southern African Studies 29, 3 (September 2003): 717–37. 49 Herbert Hart, unpublished diary, 1 August, 30 June, reference number 08-91, Wairarapa Archive, Masterton, New Zealand. 50 Letter from Reverend Moffatt, Natal Witness, 6 April 1855, 3; Indaba (Cape Town), 1 April 1863, 15. 51 Stuart Marks, Large Mammals and a Brave People (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1976), 169. 52 Marks, Large Mammals, 127. 53 Hart, 23 August, 1 September, 5 September 1926. A. I. Richards, Land, Labour & Diet in Northern Rhodesia: An Economic Study of the Bemba Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961 [1939]), 344–7; Richards, ‘Anthropological problems in North-eastern Rhodesia’. Africa: Journal of the Institute of African Languages and Cultures 5, 2 (1932): 122. 54 See, for example, Marks, Large Mammals, who cites the Mpika District Notebook from 1907: ‘convictions for breaches of the game regulations were frequent, especially in the matter of game pits’, 15. 55 Hart, 11 August 1926. 56 Richards, Land, Labour & Diet, 345. 57 Hart, 11 August. 58 Loo, ‘Of Moose and Men: Hunting for Masculinities in British Columbia, 1880-1939’. The Western Historical Quarterly 32, 3 (2001): 317. 59 Loo, ‘Of Moose and Men’, 319. 60 Pamela Swadling, Plumes from Paradise: Trade Cycles in Outer Southeast Asia and their Impact on New Guinea and nearby Islands until 1920 (Boroko, PNG: Papua New Guinea National Museum, 1996), 83. 61 Thomas Potts cited in Paul Star, ‘From acclimatisation to preservation: Colonists and the natural world in southern New Zealand, 1860-1894’ (PhD diss., University of Otago, 1997), 142–3. 62 Galbreath, Walter Buller, 143.

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63 The Auk, 1888, cited in Robin W. Doughty, Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1975), 30. 64 Doughty, Feather Fashions, 30. 65 See, for example, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, ‘“Falling into Feathers:” Jews and the Trans-Atlantic Ostrich Feather Trade’. Journal of Modern History 79 (2007): 772–812. 66 Sydney Morning Herald, 27 April 1837, 3. 67 MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, 91. 68 Magarette Braun-Ronsdorf, The Wheel of Fashion: Costume since the French Revolution 1789–1929 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1964), 174. 69 New Zealand Tablet, 5 July 1906, 15; Wanganui Chronicle, 12 October 1899, 2; Fielding Star, 2 July 1902, 2. 70 Wanganui Herald, 27 June 1899, 2. 71 Pioneer (Allahabad, India), 11 July 1893, 14. 72 PC000107 Kiwi skin muff, Marjorie Hector collection, Te Papa Tongarewa/ National Museum of New Zealand. 73 Wanganui Herald, 6 April 1876, 2. 74 Nelson Evening Mail, 4 July 1884, 4. 75 Evening Post, 14 October 1897, 1. 76 Evening Post, 8 March 1875, 3. John Jacobs of Nelson also advertised that he had ‘bird skins &c for export always on hand’, Nelson Evening Mail, 27 February 1888, 2. 77 Evening Post, 5 January 1890, 3. 78 Colonist, 22 February 1902, 3. 79 Newton McConochie, You’ll Learn No Harm from the Hills (Auckland: A. H. and A. W. Reed, 1987 [1965]), 26–7. 80 McConochie, 27. 81 ‘Journal kept. … Joseph McCabe’, Natal Witness, 27 May 1853, 4. 82 Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 89–91, 156–8.

Select bibliography Beinart, William. ‘Empire, Hunting and Ecological Change in Africa’. Past and Present 128 (1990): 162–86. Berry, Susan. ‘Recovered Identities: Four Métis Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rupert’s Land’, in Recollecting: Lives of Aboriginal Women of the Canadian Northwest and Borderlands, eds. Sarah Carter and Patricia McCormick. Edmonton: Athabasca Press, 2011, 29–59.

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Boyce, James. ‘Return to Eden: Van Diemen’s Land and the Early British Settlement of Australia’. Environment and History 14 (2008): 289–307. Colpitts, George. Game in the Garden: A Human History of Wildlife in Western Canada to 1940. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002. Galbreath, Ross. Walter Buller: The Reluctant Conservationist. Wellington: GP Books, 1989. Gammage, Bill. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2011. Jacoby, Karl. Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves and the Hidden History of American Conservation. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2003. Loo, Tina. ‘Of Moose and Men: Hunting for Masculinities in British Columbia, 1880-1939’. The Western Historical Quarterly 32, 3 (2001): 297–319. MacKenzie, John M. The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. Marks, Stuart. Large Mammals and a Brave People. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1976. Newell, Jennifer. Trading Nature: Tahitians, Europeans and Ecological Exchange. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010. Ryan, Shannon. ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Newfoundland Seal Fishery’. International Journal of Maritime History 4, 2 (1992): 1–43. Star, Paul. ‘From acclimatisation to preservation: Colonists and the natural world in southern New Zealand, 1860-1894’. PhD diss., University of Otago, 1997. Wanhalla, Angela. ‘Women “Living Across the Line”: Intermarriage on the Canadian Prairies and in Southern New Zealand, 1870-1900’. Ethnohistory 55, 1 (2008): 29–49.

9

Game of Empires: Hunting in Treaty-Port China, 1870–19401 Robert Peckham

In the account of his hunting trips through the hills of Northern China, John Wong-Quincey observed how ‘the average Britisher when he moves into the outposts of empire usually saddles himself with a private arsenal in the hope of something to shoot at’.2 Across the British Empire, even at its ‘edges’ in the semicolonial settings of treaty-port China, hunting was a popular activity.3 More than an occasional pastime or amusement, it was an important social ritual bound up with ideals of community, masculinity, class and race.4 Hunting, as a form of sport, ‘served overwhelmingly to express and enhance the solidarity of colonial society’.5 It demonstrated an exercise in ‘skill and courage’, rather than ‘the silly vanity of copious butchery’.6 Indeed, hunting inculcated those heroic frontier values of resilience and ingenuity, which were seen as most desirable in the male colonial subject.7 In particular, hunting developed the expertise, instincts and hardiness of the soldier. In this chapter, I explore hunting as a social practice, as well as a discursive phenomenon. My aim is to trace Western hunting activities in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while focusing on the modalities of colonial hunting and the meanings variously ascribed to it.8 The emphasis is on the experiences and perspectives of missionaries, traders, colonial officials and travellers from approximately 1870 to the late 1930s, decades that saw the proliferation of guidebooks and sportsmen’s handbooks, as well as a growing metropolitan interest in travel to China. While this period witnessed profound changes in Sino-British relations, with the fall of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) and the establishment of the Republic of China (1912–49), the emphasis in this chapter is on the ways in which hunting, as an activity and a particular way of seeing the Chinese environment, reaffirmed continuities in the face of

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sometimes violent change. Even as relations between Chinese and expatriates were being redefined, hunting served to underscore racial and cultural differences. Hunting narratives demonstrate not only how expatriate residents in China perceived Chinese objects and spaces, but also, reciprocally, how the Chinese world they depicted enabled Westerners to see themselves.9 Ultimately, hunting encouraged the commoditization of China’s animals and landscapes, as hunters created demand for game, engaged in sightseeing and produced natural history specimens and accounts of the nature they encountered.10 It also promoted interactions between Europeans and Chinese: while local Chinese were employed to assist on hunts, Europeans were not infrequently perceived as ‘poachers’ or transgressors. Although hunting (and sport in general) is barely visible as a phenomenon in official colonial papers, allusions to hunting pervade colonial newspapers, memoirs and guidebooks to an extent, as Anthony Kirk-Greene has noted, that it might be claimed the Empire was run by an ‘athletocracy’.11 Hunting not only encompassed the ‘chase’ in the field, but also hinged critically on the production of texts. Recording – in writing, with photography, or through trophies and wildlife dioramas – was considered a critical dimension of hunting. Thus, Henling Thomas Wade concluded his 1895 guide to hunting in the Yangtze Valley with a note on the value of keeping a good hunting diary: ‘Not a little of the interest attaching to sports generally may be attributed to the methodical keeping of authentic records.’12 To this extent, as practice and discourse, hunting provides a way of re-examining the interconnections between ethnographic evidence, material artefacts and political economies of knowledge. Notwithstanding the fact that it is well over two decades since John MacKenzie asserted that ‘[t]he significance of hunting in the imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has never been fully recognised’, there remains a dearth of scholarly work devoted to the imperial chase as it features in narratives of exploration, missionary activity and military campaigns.13 Despite the substantial and growing scholarship on environmental history and empire, hunting continues to be treated as a peripheral theme, an informal cultural phenomenon incidental to the grand narrative of empire’s rise and fall. At the same time, albeit with a few exceptions,14 what little attention has been paid to the imperial cult of hunting has tended to focus on selected regions of Africa and the subcontinent, with some work devoted to the white settler colonies of Australasia and North America (discussed in Chapter 8). ‘Asia’ in this context is generally synonymous with India and mention is rarely made of hunting in

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other settings of formal and informal empire in East Asia.15 As the Scottish artist, naturalist and hunter Harold Frank Wallace noted in 1913, ‘India and Cashmere present an imposing bibliography for the edification of the travelling sportsman. China alone is left out in the cold.’16

Expatriate hunting and ‘ornamentalism’ in China Aside from the Crown Colony of Hong Kong and the port of Weihaiwei (Weihai), the British presence in China was confined to trading settlements. The British occupied Hong Kong in 1841, following the First Opium War (1839–42). Under the terms of the Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing), the island was formally ceded to Britain by the Qing dynasty. Five ‘treaty ports’ were also established at Shanghai, Shamian Island in Canton (Guangzhou), Ningpo (Ningbo), Foochow (Fuzhou) and Amoy (Xiamen). There, the British (with other nationalities) acquired trading ‘concessions’ or ‘settlements’ in the port cities, giving them degrees of independence. A second group of British Treaty Ports was established after the Arrow War/Second Opium War (1856–60), serving as ‘a vehicle for Western interests in trade, diplomacy and evangelism’.17 As a further capitulation, the Chinese lifted the travel restrictions for foreigners who were able to move more freely throughout the country.18 By 1894, foreign missionaries – predominantly from Britain, Canada and the United States – oversaw some 500 mission stations across China (see also Chapter 7).19 As a colony ruled through a governor appointed by the British monarch with nominated executive and legislative councils, Hong Kong was clearly very different politically and administratively from the British concessions, settlements and jurisdictions granted by the Qing elsewhere in China. However, in the decades after their establishment, a culture of travel developed between Hong Kong, the Treaty Ports and other non-treaty destinations in China and beyond (see Chapter 7), which became popular ‘tourist’ spots on the ‘beaten track’:20 sites such as the Three Gorges or Chefoo (Yantai) in Shandong, on the coast by Shanghai, which was a fashionable expatriate summer retreat known as the ‘Scarborough of China’.21 Hunting provided an important rationale for ‘holidaying’ – trips which often took the form of excursions in yachts or on local houseboats ‘up country’, along the waterways of the Yangtze, to shoot wildfowl, boar or deer.22 The most popular shooting grounds for foreign sportsmen were those districts ‘within the compass of the treaty ports’.23

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While metropolitan ideals of hunting were reaffirmed in these enclaves, they were also critically transformed and often undermined in a setting where assumptions about the meaning and scope of imperial rule and the ‘natural’ order upon which it was predicated were challenged. In these semi-colonies, the emphasis was more on ‘epistemological engagement rather than systemic control’.24 Hunting in what the missionary and Sinologist Ernest J. Eitel called ‘the confines of this strange empire of China’ underscored the limits of British hegemony and its claims to world dominion.25 In China, other traditions of imperial hunting co-existed with local custom and magico-religious beliefs. From ancient times, extensive tracts of wild land had been set aside expressly for imperial hunting. Under the Qing dynasty a ‘Bureau of Imperial Gardens and Hunting Lands’ was established to manage numerous imperial reserves, including the ‘Imperial Hunting Enclosures’.26 In these royal ‘hunting’ grounds, sport was combined with diplomacy and military training.27 As Mark Elliott has noted, hunting ‘was a hallmark of the Manchu Way’, and by the close of the eighteenth century it ‘had become part of the complex of sacred Qing institutions’.28 As such, hunting functioned as an ‘invented tradition’ that reaffirmed Manchu ethnic consciousness, formalizing and ritualizing Qing power through reference to an age-old tribal past.29 British hunters thus ran up against Chinese hunting traditions and were conscious, to varying degrees, both of an imperial Manchu history and of Han Chinese customs. As the American diplomat Thomas R. Jernigan conceded in Shooting in China, his purpose in producing a hunting guide was to help smooth ‘the way of the shooter who may come to this empire to enjoy his sport’.30 Hunters were travellers and tourists visiting China from abroad, or they were residents of the Treaty Ports dispersed along the waterways and coast from Canton on the South China Sea to Tianjin in the north. In this sense, hunting in China was fundamentally different from hunting in India and Africa, where indigenous populations were denied access to game, through colonial legislation and the establishment of formal reserves and national parks. There, indigenous hunters were invariably framed as ‘poachers’, while Europeans acquired special rights and privileges to hunt.31 Conversely, while racial inequalities were certainly apparent in East Asia – with hunting manuals contrasting superior Western hunting attitudes and techniques with those of the Chinese – the British were the ‘poachers’ operating within the boundaries of a foreign empire. Indigenous views of wildlife and resource management were modified after the Revolution of 1911, which overthrew the imperial dynasty and established the Republic of China (Chapter 3).32

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Journeying through China at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was very different from exploration in Africa (Chapter 8). In China, sportsmen could travel on roads, consult Chinese maps, sojourn in temples or inns on their way, and dine lavishly on local foods.33 Steamers transported sportsmen up-river to rendezvous with their yachts. Hunting parties could sally forth into the surrounding countryside, accompanied for their convenience by an entourage of ‘coolies, cook, dogs and stores’.34 As one commentator observed in his account of hunting in Amoy, ‘few sportsmen care to forsake their comfortable shooting boats to share a native hovel with native creepers, on the bare chance of indifferent sport’.35 Sportsmen in China demonstrated ‘regrettable apathy’, which was ‘born of the luxury inseparable from a shooting trip’.36 While travellers and sportsmen in China tended to stress hardship, endurance and self-reliance as a means of accentuating the resourcefulness and athleticism of the imperial sportsman, which enabled him to overcome seemingly insuperable obstacles, these values and virtues were mapped onto China from pre-existing and already fully fledged narratives of imperial exploration and conquest. Although different from Africa and India, the cult of hunting in China was articulated within a pan-imperial ethos (Chapter 8). Perspectives were shaped by the conventions of an exotic, ‘big game’ literature that had evolved, particularly from the mid-century. For Sir Robert Hart, a British consular official in China who served as Inspector-General of China’s Imperial Maritime Custom Service from 1863 to 1911, Major Water Campbell’s The Old Forest Ranger (1842) – offering ‘exciting stories about tiger hunts & bison shooting’ in India – provided a specific context for his own hunting expeditions in China.37 Many of those in the military-bureaucratic class had, in fact, honed their hunting skills elsewhere in the Empire, perhaps most notoriously Sir Frederick Lugard, who took up the Governorship of Hong Kong in 1907, after a career which had begun, by his own admission, as a professional ‘elephant-hunter’ employed by the African Lakes Company.38 Yet, despite drawing on an imperial hunting narrative, ‘China’ had its own distinct history of reception in Britain. As Catherine Pagani has noted, the Sino-British conflicts that culminated in the Opium Wars, highlighted the contradictions in British attitudes to China and Chinese objects, which were viewed ‘as something desirable and worthy of admiration, and as symbolic representations of power and dominance through their association with a people defeated’.39 The differences between Chinese, African and Indian objects and spaces were frequently noted by hunters. ‘If the shooter is fond of hunting big game he can enjoy the sport in China,’ Jernigan declared, ‘but

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not in the sense it can be enjoyed in Africa or India’.40 China was represented as a counterpoint to the experience of hunting within the boundaries of the ‘formal’ Empire. Early twentieth-century Western sportsmen consistently contrasted hunting in China to the ‘great wave of sportsmen which [had] swamped the prolific shooting centres of Africa and India’.41 Thus, Wallace observed how China was ‘seldom visited by sportsmen’; it was a country inhabited by ‘strange people and still stranger animals’, and, in contrast to the voluminous literature on shooting and hunting in Africa and India, there was only a scattering of comparable works devoted to China: ‘Every one knows that lions are from Africa, and tigers from India; but there are many who, were they asked to name half a dozen species of animals found in China, would fail to answer.’42 In contrast to Africa and the Subcontinent, hunting in China existed in a more ambiguous relationship to indigenous culture and state power. Yet, in this setting of informal empire, hunting also played a critical role in defining inter-racial relations, bolstering identities and sacralizing hierarchical relations. As we shall see, the chase was one way of demonstrating British ‘mastery over the Chinese landscape’.43 Moreover, hunting in China, no less than in India, may be viewed within broader historiographical debates about imperialism as ‘ornamentalism’: that is, about the extent to which, during the era of British high imperialism from the 1850s, a metropolitan social hierarchy was reproduced in Britain’s overseas dominions. As David Cannadine has argued, ‘ornamentalism was hierarchy made visible, immanent and actual.’ If Empire was unified through spectacles of ceremony and ritual, which reaffirmed and sacralized hierarchy,44 hunting might be understood as an aspect of this ‘ornamentalism’; as a spectacle of empire, which reiterated hierarchical relations.45 Sport occupied a central role in the lives of British residents in China: from cricket, horse racing and polo playing to swimming, yachting, lawn tennis, hockey, bowling and football.46 There were opportunities for angling, too. During his time as Colonial Secretary in Hong Kong (he was subsequently to become Governor) Sir Francis Henry May – who wrote a history of the Hong Kong Yacht Club – ‘stocked the local reservoirs with fish to keep his hand in with a rod’.47 Hunting, in particular, was a popular pursuit: whether shooting wildfowl in Hong Kong and Canton, hunting foxes and hares in Tianjin,48 or expeditions for bigger game, including bear in Manchuria, deer in Shanxi and tigers in Amoy. Hunting was not simply a means of ‘annihilating’ time,49 but a way of life and a focal point of social interaction. Accounts of the lives of Treaty-Port residents and travellers are pervaded with tales of hunting. Characteristically, the eminent

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British physician and parasitologist Sir Patrick Manson (Figure 9.1), who spent time in Formosa (Taiwan), Amoy and Hong Kong, took part in shooting expeditions into the surrounding countryside where excellent snipe grounds were provided by the numerous paddyfields. Farther afield were the wild highlands where every now and again tigers were bagged. Manson was foremost in these adventures and soon gained the reputation of being the best snipe-shot in China; and when a tiger-shoot was arranged he was keen to join it.50

However, by the late nineteenth century, China was perceived by many British sportsmen as being environmentally impoverished, or at the least, threatened by over-hunting. Sportsmen lamented the fact that the land had been over-exploited and bemoaned the heavy work of trampling through thick

Figure 9.1 Tiger hunt group, Amoy, China in 1874 (Manson is in front row, far left). Source: Wellcome Library, London.

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vegetation. As Lieutenant Cradock noted, ‘good pheasant shooting in China, is now I believe a thing of the past. Places that formerly used to be “wick” with birds, are completely shot out.’51 Chinese country-dwellers were frequently indicted for having stripped the country bare: they were deemed irresponsible guardians, their negligence justifying further foreign intervention. Ironically, too, ‘wandering foreign sportsmen’ had also played a part in this despoliation – with the ‘Continentals’ and ‘Japanese’ censored, in particular, by British and American hunters for their indiscriminate shooting of migratory birds: Happily shooting in China for many years past has been comparatively free from the visits of the wandering foreign sportsmen; but unhappily sport is now seriously threatened by the foe within the gates, for it is impossible to believe that small game can long withstand the organized raids of the countless numbers of those who now go a shooting.52

China was also perceived as an exotic place, ripe for exploration and exploitation. This exoticism was reflected and reaffirmed in the research of naturalists such as Robert Swinhoe, whose work revealed the variety of China’s wildlife, particularly its ornithology.53 Late nineteenth-century narratives of exploration did much to promote views of China as a wild, unmapped land. This was apparent in Henry E. M. James’s account of his travels with Francis Younghusband into Manchuria from India in 1886, when both went game hunting in the wilderness of the Changbai Mountains (1888). There is a survivalist and moral dimension to the description of living in the wilds off tinned food, supplemented with partridges and snipe, shot en route by the ‘explorers’ in their tweed shooting coats. Sporting books revelled in descriptions of the wolves that roamed the banks of the upper Yangtze, the leopard populations in the ranges of the Lushan near Kiukiang (Jiujiang), and tigers that could be stalked in the hills of Fujian.54 In such descriptions, China was re-imagined as a frontier territory, awaiting exploration and conquest. In Western sporting accounts, leisure and work are imbricated, while distinctions between the activities of officials, missionaries, explorers, scientists and hunters blur.55 As Roy Chapman Andrews, director of the American Museum of Natural History, observed in an introduction to Harry Caldwell’s Blue Tiger published in 1924: ‘His skill with a rifle and as a field observer is hardly less remarkable than his ability as a missionary.’56 An amateur naturalist, long-time resident of China and ‘rifle-bearing’ member of the Methodist Church, Caldwell had obliged the villagers of Foochow by shooting ‘man-eating tigers’, proclaiming that ‘his gun had been just as effective in carrying Christianity to the natives as [had] his evangelistic work’.57 Hunting is understood, here, as a cultural

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performance, with the gun a critical tool of conversion, even as shooting wildlife is framed as a practice that produces knowledge about the natural world.

The sporting prospects of Hong Kong A common complaint articulated by travellers to Hong Kong in the nineteenth century was that the Crown Colony did not look like a suitable hunting environment. As one British naval officer noted in the 1880s, as he sailed up the coast of China: ‘On first scanning the high island and hills that surround the beautiful and immense harbour of our “Eastern Gibraltar,” a stranger is apt to exclaim, what a wretched looking country for any shooting!’58 Hunting was inseparable from an environmental ideal – it was as much about place, as the wildlife that inhabited it. At least in Hong Kong, this ideal of the bucolic hunting ground was undermined by the bare, granite slopes, and by the tame but unaccommodating ‘rice fields’ which made shooting ‘deuced hard work in these climates always being up to ones middle in mud and water’.59 Particularly from the 1870s, state-sponsored efforts were made to transform the appearance of the colony, acclimatizing the ‘barren rock’ to British expectations.60 The botanist Charles Ford was appointed Superintendent of the Government Gardens and Tree Planting Department in 1872 and oversaw the afforestation of the colony.61 Particularly from the 1880s, a grand plan of waterworks was begun, which involved the damming of a valley in Tai Tam. And in 1886, a dairy farm was established in Pokfulam, on the western side of Hong Kong Island. The sowing of some 300 acres (approximately 120 hectares) of hillside with Guinea grass and the importation of foreign cattle lent a suitably ‘bucolic’ appearance to the British colony and particularly to a locale that occupied a commanding position at the entrance to Victoria Harbour. As elsewhere across the Empire, the natural environment was conceived in relation to ideals of social order, political control and the acquisition of resources.62 The ‘engineering’ of Hong Kong also took place within a persistent ‘associationism’, wherein Hong Kong was compared and contrasted to other familiar landscapes. Recurrent comparisons were made, for example, between the hills of Hong Kong and the Highland ‘glens’ which were posited as an ideal hunting-scape. A ‘myth’ of the Highlands linked royalty with recreational sport, while the country’s turbulent and often-bloody history was suppressed in ‘an image of tranquil natural order’.63 This Highland hunting myth was epitomized in the animal and Highland paintings of Sir Edwin Landseer, including his work

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commissioned by the royal family, Queen Victoria Meeting the Prince Consort on his Return from Deer Stalking in the Year 1850, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1854.64 In the colony, ‘sport defined elite status’65 and offered an opportunity for lower-ranking but aspiring members of the military-bureaucratic class to cement their social positions and indulge in an activity, which was likely to have been inaccessible to them at home. Although the initial impression of Hong Kong may have been of a place unsuitable for hunting, the colony did in fact provide numerous opportunities for shooting and coursing pursuits. Aside from aesthetic considerations and the health benefits to be had, one argument in favour of afforestation had been that it would reverse the despoilment of wildlife habitats, restoring Hong Kong’s ruined ecology. Concerns about the diminishing wildlife were articulated from the 1860s. A letter published in the Hongkong Daily Press in September 1869, for example, deplored ‘the wholesale and heartless slaughter of the birds’, calling for ‘stringent enactment’ by the government: A ruthless war is waged against all the feathered creation, especially on Sundays, when a host of seedy, hungry-looking gunners, seldom, I am happy to say, Englishmen, may be seen sallying forth with every description of fire arms to shoot indiscriminately any bird that incautiously allows itself to be stalked to within an easy range of a yard or two. … Let the would-be sportsmen go and indulge their love of destruction on the main-land, but let it be an offence, punishable by fine, for any one to shoot a bird on this island.66

Such disapproval directed principally at non-British shooters (and particularly the Portuguese) prompted an Ordinance for the Preservation of Birds in 1870, followed by the Wild Bird and Game Preservation Ordinance of 1885 (amended in 1892), which sought to place restrictions on hunting with the issuing of licenses and stricter controls on shooting ‘deer, hare, rabbit, pheasant, partridge, grouse, heath or moor game, black game, bustard, woodcock, snipe, quail, landrail, wild-duck, and widgeon’.67 Exceptions were made to the Ordinance’s enforcement. For example, Francis Henry May (later Governor), then Captain Superintendent of the Hong Kong Police Force, was granted an exemption to the law with ‘the exclusive right to shoot and take game and wild birds within a limited area for a term of years’.68 Moreover, the effectiveness of the legislation remains doubtful, since in 1886 shooting licenses brought in a paltry $10. Ten years later the revenue had risen to a mere $85, meaning that only 17 licenses (at $5 a license) had been issued in the colony for ‘Permission to Shoot and take Game’.69

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As Lieutenant Cradock remarked: ‘There is more sport to be got within easy reach of Hongkong, than he [a stranger] might, at first, be possibly led to believe.’70 A ‘Game Club’ comprised of ‘gentlemen interested in shooting’ was established in the Colony, although this appears to have been disbanded by 1894.71 Snipe quail, and partridges were the ‘principal spoil’, while curlews, plovers and pigeons gave ‘variety to the bag’. Other birds included teal, wild duck, woodcock, herons, cranes, doves, water rails, egrets, kestrels, hawks and eagles.72 In particular, the ‘New Territories teems with bird-life at different seasons of the year, and offers [sic] excellent opportunities to the man who comes to tramp o’er paddy-fields with his dogs and gun’.73 Snipe season, which opened at the beginning of September, lasted until March or April. In addition to fowling, there was fishing (the Hongkong Angling Club was established in 1924), turtle hunting, as well as hunts for wild pig and deer. Although the South China red fox abounded in the New Territories,74 it was alleged that European foxes had been unsuccessfully introduced for fox hunting.75 In the 1870s, Phineas Ryrie, a sporting enthusiast and the first chairman of the Hong Kong Jockey Club, introduced rabbits from England to Stonecutters’ Island for the purposes of shooting, although the rabbits failed to reproduce.76 The acquisition of the New Territories from the Qing dynasty on a ninety-nine-year lease in 1898 added some 356 square miles (573 kilometres) of land to the colony.77 According to a survey of the acquired territory, wildlife abounded: there were ‘hog-deer’, wild cats and a few remaining wolves ‘surviving among the hills’.78 The Fanling Hunt, which was inaugurated in October 1924, organized steeplechases and ‘drag hunts’.79 By the second decade of the twentieth century, foxes had apparently become rarer, although one commentator in 1927 observed: ‘There are plenty of foxes in the New Territory [sic] but it is devilish hard to catch them’.80 As the Hongkong Telegraph remarked on 21 January 1902: ‘The island of Lantao, from all accounts, is about the only spot round Hongkong, where large game can be met with.’ There were numerous reports of tigers across the colony.81 In 1892, PC Godfrey, scrambling among the brush with his gun while out hunting the ‘Tytam tiger’, accidentally shot himself through the wrist, while a young Chinese girl, tending cattle near Wong-ma-kok, was mauled by a ‘wild beast’, identified as ‘yellow with brown stripes and the size of a cow’.82 The only verified shooting of a wild tiger was in March 1915 by a hunting party led by Assistant Superintendent of Police Donald Burlingham at Fanling-Sheung Shui, in the northern New Territories. Thousands flocked to see the carcass of the

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‘monster tiger’, which was exhibited in the City Hall and subsequently skinned by the Dairy Farm butcher.83 The head of the tiger was later mounted in the Police Museum, the former Wan Chai Gap Police Station on Coombe Road. As Richard Holt has noted: ‘Taxidermy was the true art of empire.’84 Accounts of hunting from the 1880s increasingly emphasized the hunter as sportsman, naturalist and collector whose skills in the preservation of game were paramount. Animals were to be killed in ways that preserved their outward appearance for posterity as natural history specimens and trophies of sportsmanship. Hunting guides contained useful tips on the best ways to skin and preserve specimens.85 Along with the gun, the camera became an indispensable hunting tool: ‘An animal may be photographed with its surroundings, just as it fell; the picture may be made a nucleus of interesting and most instructive memoranda.’86 Hunting can be thought of in this context as a visual practice entailing particular ways of seeing that were linked to the production of knowledge. As James Ryan has observed, the history of photography is deeply embrangled with practices of hunting and taxidermy and with an imperial appropriation of nature.87 Staged, trophy-shots of animals in situ with their heroic white hunters, as well as taxidermized specimens, formed part of an imperial politics of display. They embodied ideals of masculinity at a time when such ideals were being challenged on the home front.88 ‘Stuffed animals,’ Ryan writes, ‘had become the ideal photographic target: a re-creation of nature as apparently authentic, yet utterly docile’.89 In Hong Kong, a museum of zoological specimens was opened in the City Hall, where insects and game – predominantly birds – were displayed for public view. As the author of a short piece in The China Review declared: ‘We wish the Museum success and take this opportunity of urging our readers to contribute such specimens as may fall to their guns or otherwise come into their possession.’90 In 1905, the Rev E. J. Hardy noted: ‘So many beautiful birds labelled to belong to Hong Kong are in the museum and so few outside that it would almost seem as if they had nearly all obtained the immortality of stuffing’.91 Similar collections of habitat dioramas and taxidermized wildlife were begun in Treaty Ports – and notably Shanghai – with natural history museums opened to display the trophy of hunters.92 The museum at Shanghai, established in 1874 as an adjunct of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, was overseen by a curator and taxidermist, and contained specimens of mammals, including panther, porcupine, wild boar, deer, badger and hare.93 At the same time, a Zoological Collection was established in Hong Kong’s Botanical Gardens under

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the direction of Ford, where specimens of birds and various mammals were kept in small numbers for public view.

Shooting in Treaty-Port China Hong Kong was the only formal British colony in China, with the exception of the port city of Weihaiwei, ceded to Britain on a lease in 1898 and returned to China in 1930. Yet despite the different kinds of expatriate community in China, which ranged from the Crown Colony of Hong Kong to concessions, such as those at Hankow and Kiukiang, with British-controlled municipal councils, and much smaller ‘outports’ consisting of a handful to a few hundred expatriate residents,94 there were common features. For one, the European populations of these enclaves were small and transitory. Moreover, they were also closely interconnected. As Robert Bickers notes, ‘[t]hey saw themselves, and were seen by observers, as a coherent group, sharing a coherent local identity.’95 Hunters from Hong Kong frequently travelled to the mainland in search of more diverse game and better sport. Governor Sir William Des Voeux was a keen huntsman, who undertook regular hunting trips to China,96 as did Sir Francis Henry May, who had a ‘strong affection for game-shooting’.97 However, in Canton, like Hong Kong, commentators lamented the diminishing hunting opportunities. As one traveller noted: ‘Enthusiastic sportsmen are apt to complain of Canton as affording them little opportunity of indulging in the pursuit of game.’ Snipe and woodcock could be found, but shooting expeditions involved heavy work ‘trudging through the paddyfields’ and what should have been a pleasurable pastime became a ‘labour’.98 The best opportunities could be had in hunting parties for marsh-fowl, including duck, geese and teal. Although a sizeable city, Shanghai offered better opportunities for hunting (Figure 9.2). The employees of Jardine Matheson were encouraged to join in wildfowl shoots.99 As Isabella Bird remarked of Shanghai: ‘An extraordinary variety of amusements is crowded into every day.’ Prominent among them, were ‘house-boat picnics and pleasure excursions, and house-boat shooting excursions, lasting from three days to a week, for which special advantages exist, as the inland cotton-fields during the winter are alive with pheasants, partridges, quail, woodcock, and hares, while the water-courses abound with wild fowl’.100 The Shanghai Paper Hunt or ‘Hare and Hounds’ had been founded in December 1863, but there was steeplechasing as early as 1855.101

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Figure 9.2 Hunting party, China, c.1910. Source: © 2010 John Sullivan. Courtesy of the Historical Photographs of China, University of Bristol.

Ningpo’s ‘lake district’ was ‘unrivalled’ for wildfowl shooting, while tigers could be hunted in the caves at Amoy, which involved going in with ‘coolies’ carrying ‘flaming torches’. The torches would allegedly go out with the discharge of the rifle.102 Sporting activities in Amoy centred on the public recreational ground, with riding along the sandy coast. Pheasants and partridges could ‘be found in the interior, but beyond the range of a two-days’ trip’. With winter came ‘immense flocks of Wild Fowl, Geese, Duck, Teal &c’.103 One commentator described the variety of wildlife (and hunting opportunities) to be found in Amoy: Amoy is noted for its game. In the district good sport may be enjoyed in hunting wild geese, wild duck, teal, partridge, plover, snipe, pheasant, quail and rabbits. If something more exciting is desired, there are tigers in the mountains, enormous man-eaters, and wild boars. Then there are foxes, weasels, muskrats, and the like. Among birds there are curlews, sparrow-hawks, kites, magpies, ospreys, crows, owls, butcher-birds, thrushes, sparrows, black-birds, tailorbirds, herons, egrets, pelicans, gulls, albatrosses, and a wide variety of smaller water birds.104

This description of bountiful game contradicts the frequent complaints about the diminishing stock of game in the countryside. Depictions of the Chinese environment – its flora and fauna – thus reveal complex attitudes and often conflicting views. The Yangtze River was the favoured destination for hunting vacations. ‘In all the East,’ as John Bland commented, ‘few places that I know afford so great a

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variety of game as the lower Yangtze’.105 As soon as the wheat ripened, pheasants would appear in the countryside and the agents of Jardine up-river would telegraph to Shanghai: Then the taipans would be off up river in an Ewo steamer transferring to native houseboats at the appropriate spot. The total bag, judging from the number sent down to be distributed in Shanghai, must have been very large and approaching that of estates in North Norfolk where several keepers are employed.106

Oppositional knowledge Hunting brought British sportsmen into contact with the Chinese population, often pitting local knowledge about wildlife against Western views and hunting techniques (Figure 9.3). There was minimal interest on the part of expatriate hunters in local hunting practices, although when foreign observers did discuss Chinese hunting traditions, the emphasis tended to be on the inefficiency of their antiquated techniques, such as drag-netting.107 The history of hunting in China was one of terminal decline. In this narrative of cultural atrophy, hunting is understood as an index of cultural vitality. The decline of the ‘sportsman’ is linked to the impoverishment of Chinese science, literature and art. ‘The Chinese sportsman of the present day is, in every essential equipment, as far behind the western sportsman as China is behind western nations in civilization.’108 His ‘primitive’ hunting methods are described as unsportsmanlike, involving the use of traps, snares and poison that imply an inherent deviousness.109 As we have seen, a prevalent belief articulated by British sportsmen was the extent to which the Chinese had despoiled the land; once lush hunting grounds had been turned to desert or become inaccessible to the chase. Many accounts intimated that political instability and belligerence were latent in Chinese society. Foreign sportsmen’s descriptions of nature in China frequently alluded to the disruptive influence of Chinese history on the land; as if the land and its superimposed history might be detached from place, thereby giving Western hunters implicit claims to the land’s custodianship. On the one hand, the ‘hideous carnival of slaughter’ which resulted from the Taiping Rebellion – a civil war fought between 1850 and 1864 in the south of China against the ruling Qing dynasty – had depopulated large tracts of the countryside and turned once cultivated land into wild hunting grounds. On the other hand, however, the repopulation of the land was also restricting the freedom of sportsmen to

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Figure 9.3 Western sportsman with Chinese hunter: ‘Equipped for Pheasant Shooting’. Source: Thomas R. Jernigan, Shooting in China. Shanghai: Methodist Publishing House, 1908.

roam and decimating the habitat of wildlife. As Bland noted, game ‘is rapidly decreasing as the resistless tide of Chinese humanity flows back, first to cultivate and then to overcrowd the places made desolate fifty-five years ago’.110 Here, the Chinese are censored simultaneously for depopulating and repopulating the land, while the commonplace view of an aggregated Chinese ‘humanity’ as a ‘resistless tide’ or overwhelming flood suggests a blind, indiscriminate natural force. If Western hunters associated themselves with a resourceful individualism and deeply bonded community, they invariably identified the Chinese as a rabble where persons and crowds become interchangeable objects. Characteristically, in his introduction to Blue Tiger, Andrews describes his first encounter with Harry

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Caldwell on the Min River in Fujian Province in 1916. Against a background of ‘squalid villages’ and ‘smothering vegetation’, the hunter strides into view through the ‘massed humanity’ on the river bank, ‘bursting with energy’ and ‘strenuously active’ in his white pith helmet.111 In writing about the Chinese landscape and in re-mapping Chinese places in terms of ‘Western’ hunting grounds, sportsmen strove to reclaim the environment for themselves. ‘Hunting’, and the collection of zoological specimens, became crucial tropes for the re-ordering and assimilation of a natural environment that had been shaped by a wholly different history. Western sportsmen and naturalists frequently expressed custodial claims to the land and frustrations at the impediments posed to their work by its ‘native’ inhabitants. This is perhaps epitomized by the US zoological expedition to China in 1916–17 to gather specimens for the American Museum of Natural History. While the country’s inhabitants are seen to present an ‘obstacle’ to ‘scientific research’,112 China is evoked within a history of global migration, suggesting that the foreign naturalists have as much claim to the land as the Chinese who wandered down from Central Asia in the past as ‘primitive tribes’ in pursuit of game. The account of the expedition veers between descriptions of the political ‘turmoil’ of contemporary China, the ‘hopeless confusion’ of the land, and ‘big-game’ hunts, reminiscent of high-imperialist sportsmen’s adventures. Finally, the classifying urge applies not only to the dangerous ‘wildlife’, but also to the inhabitants themselves, with a chapter on ‘The Blue Tiger’ followed by one on ‘The Women of China’. Although trading may have been circumscribed within the settlements of the Treaty Ports, sport was an open field. As Oliver Ready observed: When I say shooting, I do not mean the kind of sport to which one is accustomed at home, where to trespass a few yards on the grounds of another man will probably result in legal proceedings. … No, I mean where one can look on the whole empire of China and say, ‘Here is my ground, here I can take my gun and my dogs and go just wherever, and do whatever, I please, without let or hindrance; shoot what I will, stay as long as I like without asking anyone’s leave, and where keepers and game licences are unknown.’113

The hunter’s gaze is possessive, instinctively framing the landscape in terms of ownership and enclosure. This view of unhindered (and unregulated) access to hunting grounds was reiterated, for example, by William Spencer Percival, who noted approvingly that ‘there are no game-laws and no licenses required, no preserving, the entire country for hundreds upon hundreds of miles of miles is

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open before you’.114 The freedom afforded by this unregulated land is juxtaposed against an increasingly bureaucratized ‘Western’ landscape where liberties are being curtailed. Such comparisons rework and invert prevalent formulations of a closed-door and restrictive China – the ‘Manchu tyranny’ – which in other contexts is pitted against the ‘free-trade’ and open access of the British Empire. Yet, even in this eulogizing of unchecked access, there is a suggestion that the unlimited freedom to hunt comes at a price: China is lawless and lacking in conscience. Indeed, in lying ‘open’ before the expectant hunter, the land itself seems to invite its own violation. Particularly striking in expatriate hunting accounts are the extensive descriptions of the Chinese landscape. Both expatriate hunter and indigenous wildlife exist in relation to an ‘exotic’ landscape, experienced as space and environment, which the hunter strives to make legible. Yet the hunter is himself drawn into the naturalizing process, constructing representations of the nature he ‘reads’. In short, the history of hunting, I argue, is inseparable from the history of landscape. Following W. J. T. Mitchell, I understand landscape, here, to be more than an object that is seen and decoded, but an eco-cultural process through which identities are shaped and contested. As a cultural medium, landscape ‘has a double role with respect to something like ideology: it naturalizes a cultural and social construction, representing an artificial world as if it were simply given and inevitable, and it also makes that representation operational by interpolating its beholder in some more or less determinate relation to its givenness as sight and site.’115 As an activity that entails moving through and ‘into’ the land, hunting offers a particularly useful perspective from which to examine this instrumental dimension of landscape. In the descriptions by Ready and Percival quoted above, the articulation of one position (that of the expatriate hunter who sees China as an opportunity) involves the coincidental dis-articulation of other, Chinese, views. In such hunting texts, the Chinese are often viewed as impediments to the expatriate, ‘freedom-loving’ hunter. Des Voeux, ‘on a short shooting trip up the Yangtse in a houseboat’, noted how ‘the pleasure of the hunt was destroyed by the frequent discovery of natives in the trees immediately in front and within range of the guns.’ The Governor’s apprehensions at shooting one of the Chinese cherry pickers prompted the observation that ‘for some the killing of a Chinaman by accident need not be a subject of much regret’.116 The shooting of crouching ‘wood-and grass-cutters’ who were ‘apt to pop their heads up at a critical moment’, was, George Jamieson, the former British Consul General at Shanghai, declared, an ‘embarrassment’

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for the shooter: ‘In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred this amounts to nothing more than lodging one or two No.6 pellets in the hands or face.’117 In Houseboat Days in China, the author expresses annoyance that the Chinese should seek compensation when foreign sportsmen have shot them. Here, Chinese countrydwellers are imagined as ‘animals’, and described sardonically in terms identical to game: But there is one animal that none of us willingly shoots, yet which, sooner or later, figures in every bag – Homo sinensis, to wit, our Chinese fellow man. … Suddenly rising between you and a flushed quail in the cotton … how often have we seen his sheepish grin as the gun comes away just in time. … Like everything else in China the cost of peppering a native has increased absurdly in recent years, and for those who do not speak the language it has become almost prohibitive in some of the more turbulent districts.118

If the Chinese are frequently viewed as inadequate hunters or incapable custodians of the land, so, too, is Chinese wildlife compared unfavourably to the wildlife elsewhere: ‘Chinese pheasants are terrible runners, and when wounded are up to all sorts of tricks. For instance: “up country” above Shanghai, I have known a winged cock, without the slightest hesitation take to one of the deep and unwadeable creeks and swim across. Totally frustrating any attempt to bag him, unless there should be a retriever on the spot.’119 The Chinese ‘pheasant’ no less than the Chinese ‘peasant’, ‘are up to all sorts of tricks’. There was often tension between hunters and the local population – and sometimes also between the British and other ‘races’ of hunters, such as the Portuguese in Hong Kong, or the Japanese, who were seen as lacking integrity and engaging in improper hunting practices. Tensions with ‘natives’ could easily flare up into violence, as when, on a shooting expedition outside Shanghai in 1898, Henry Wade’s pointer was attacked by a feral dog, resulting in a physical confrontation with sickle-wielding reed-cutters.120 In his essay, ‘What to do in case of trouble with the natives’, Jamieson counselled sportsmen who had the ‘misfortune’ to inadvertently ‘pepper’ villagers with gun-shots to pay them off with coinage. Given the fact that they could be ‘exceedingly disagreeable’, it was imperative for the hunter to ensure his guns were got safely ‘out of the reach of evil-minded natives’.121 In Hong Kong, villagers protested at the presence of hunters trampling the paddy fields and shooting up the land. These game hunts could lead to controversies with the local Chinese population, as when a Mr Hughes of the brokerage firm Hughes and Hough shot what he claimed to be a deer in 1902,

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although a ‘Chinaman’ maintained Hughes had killed one of his sheep and purportedly took court action for redress.122 Chinese New Year was a favoured hunting period – ‘a regular carnival for sportsmen’ – since the fields were free from labourers spending their holidays with family, with business ‘suspended’ and government offices closed. In the absence of the Chinese, the land began to take on the tinctures of rural England.123 In the countryside around Hankow, hunters and picnickers were sometimes ‘indecorously chased back into the town by a mob of frightened or irate villagers’.124 Outside Shanghai, villagers complained that foreigners made indiscriminate use of land outside the boundaries of the settlement with disregard for the local population – ‘Chinese are fined for hunting out of season, Westerners go hunting as they please at any time, the paper chases of Western horsemen destroy the fields without compensation.’125 Trails for the Paper Hunt crossed local farmland and infringed upon ancestral grave mounds. Although the Hunt was held from November through March, when the cotton and bean harvest were over and before the new crops were planted, farmers sometimes hurled rocks at the horsemen and obstructed the trails in protest at the trespassing.126 Some attempts were made to placate the local population, but the Hunt Club tended to dismiss complaints as evidence of an inherent obstreperousness in the local population, sometimes framing local protest as a manifestation of political extremism. Efforts to enlist ‘Chinese gentlemen riders’ in 1930, however, were an acknowledgement that for the Hunt to continue, cooperation with the Chinese was necessary.127

Conclusion: Bagging nature From the 1880s, in particular, an emphasis on the figure of the sportsmannaturalist and collector became more pronounced,128 as summed up in the image of Harry Caldwell, missionary and tiger-hunter, sauntering forth with ‘a butterfly net and a rifle’.129 As elsewhere, in Chinese East Asia, preservation and conservationist ideas went hand-in-hand with hunting.130 The focus on collecting and preserving distinguished the sportsmen from the native hunter, who was deemed to evince indifference – even disrespect – for nature. Western commentators held that Chinese hunters caused more destruction than did Western sportsmen.131 Arthur de Carle Sowerby, the son of Baptist missionaries in Shanxi, and the great-grandson of the botanist James Sowerby, epitomized the new species of sportsman-hunter-naturalist. Sowerby made numerous hunting

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and collecting trips across China, including taking part in the Duke of Bedford and Clark expeditions, where he discovered a new species of ‘jerboa’. As he noted in the preface to Fur and Feather in North China, the purpose of the trip was the ‘rousing of public interest in the subject, with a view of the ultimate protection and preservation of many species, which under existing conditions, are doomed to extinction’.132 Similarly, Wallace also participated in a trip into China for the British Museum – hunting and collecting with George Fenwick-Owen, in order ‘to secure specimens of the takin (Budoreas befordi), a rare animal about which little is on record, a collection of small mammals for the British museum, and any other specimens of big game which we might encounter’.133 While there had been an emphasis on botanical prospecting and collecting in the early decades of the century, after the mid-century there was a shift of emphasis to zoology.134 Hunters in Treaty-Port China collected zoological specimens whenever opportunities arose. For example, the Shanghai Museum was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of ‘trophies’ donated by hunters.135 Colonial contact promoted a new understanding of native flora and fauna ‘as demythologized commodities, which could be harvested or even systematically exterminated with impunity in the name of God, science, sport, profit, or progress’.136 The tension between hunting as sport and as a pursuit linked to conservation and natural history was brought to the fore in Shanghai, when new cold-storage transportation methods encouraged the London-headquartered International Export Company (IEC) to export Chinese game to Britain. The conflict between the IEC and British sportsmen, who supported wildfowl preservation, underscored imperialist contradictions.137 As one British resident observed in his memoirs: The rosy picture I have painted of shooting in China applied only until 1921. In the last 2 years of my service the head of game in all accessible regions was vastly reduced by hordes of Chinese sweeping the country, armed with loaned guns and free ammunition provided by a foreign company. In this way the company filled the holds of its ships with refrigerator equipment containing several thousand head of game, mainly pheasants, as well as their normal quota of animal carcasses and eggs. I remember an outcry in the home press about the quality of the carcasses and eggs, but nothing about the cargoes of frozen game these holds contained.138

In this passage, an apocalyptic vision of belligerent ‘hordes of Chinese’ sweeping through the country harked back to historic fears of mass uprising and the ‘yellow peril’139 – a vision of the threatened Western Treaty-Port enclave in

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a hostile and teeming hinterland. Yet, here, the predatory ‘hordes’ have been armed by a Western company and are wreaking destruction at its instigation to supply overseas markets. In other words, Chinese hunters are decimating game for a Western export market, even as British sportsmen are deprived of their recreation. Ironically, the globalizing systems produced by Empire have come to fatally undermine the very ‘ornamentalism’ upon which imperial networks were grounded and drew their force.

Notes 1 I would like to thank James Beattie, John Carroll and Christopher Munn for their assistance in the preparation of this chapter. Thanks also to Robert Bickers for providing me with the photograph reproduced in Figure 9.2. I am grateful to Maria Sin for her help with Chinese sources. 2 John Wong-Quincey, Chinese Hunter, foreword by Lin Yutang (New York: John Day Company, 1939), 57. Wong-Quincey’s father, William W. Quincey, had been the first Chinese inspector in the Hong Kong police force; his name derived from the place of his father’s birth, Quisan (Kunshan) in Jiangsu. 3 On informal empire and semi-colonialism, see J. Osterhammel, ‘Semi-Colonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth-Century China: Towards a Framework of Analysis’, in Empire and After, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen (London: Unwin and Allen, 1986), 290–314. 4 See, generally, John M. Mackenzie, ‘The Imperial Pioneer and Hunter and the British Masculine Stereotype in Late Victorian and Edwardian Times’, in Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, eds. James A. Mangan and James Walvin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 176–98. 5 Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 208. Following MacKenzie, ‘hunting’ is taken here to ‘encompass the pursuit, driving, ambushing and trapping of wild animals of all species with the intension of killing them for meat, other animal products, or purely for sport.’ MacKenzie further notes the overlaps and differences between hunting as sport and ritual; see The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997 [1988]), 2–3. 6 Roland Ward, The Sportsman’s Handbook to Practical Collecting, Preserving, and Artistic Setting-Up of Trophies and Specimens to which is Added a Synoptical Guide to the Hunting Grounds of the World (London: Simkin, Marshall, & Co., 1880), 2. 7 MacKenzie, ‘The Imperial Pioneer and Hunter’; James A. Mangan, ‘Prologue: Britain’s Chief Spiritual Export: Imperial Sport as Moral Metaphor, Political

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9

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11

12 13

14

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Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire Symbol and Cultural Bond’, in The Cultural Bond: Sport, Empire, Society, ed. Mangan (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 1–10. On connecting social practices with discourse in history, see the essays collected in Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language and Practices (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). On China as Europe’s ‘other’, see Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 25. At the same time, views of Chinese ‘nature’ were reabsorbed back into China. On the dialectical relationship between Western and Chinese understandings of China, see Larrisa N. Heinrich, The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body between China and the West (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Anthony H. M. Kirk-Greene, ‘Badge of Office? Sport and His Excellency in the British Empire’. International Journal of the History of Sport 6, 2 (1989): 218–41 (quote, 220); and ‘Imperial Administration and the Athletic Imperative: The Case of the District Officer in Africa’, in Sport in Africa: Essays in Social History, eds. William J. Baker and Mangan (New York: Africana Publishing, 1987), 81–113; on athleticism in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, see Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); on ‘manliness’, see Mangan and Walvin, Manliness and Morality. Henling Thomas Wade (ed.), With Boat and Gun in the Yangtze Valley. 2nd edn (Shanghai: Shanghai Mercury, 1910 [1895]), 244. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature, 7; on the plea for more systematic research on hunting, see Thomas L. Altherr and John F. Reiger, ‘Academic Historians and Hunting: A Call for More and Better Scholarship’. Environmental History Review 19, 3 (1995): 39–56. See, for example, Eric T. Jennings, Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2011), 84–91; Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Greg Gillespie, Hunting for Empire: Narratives of Sport in Rupert’s Land, 1840–70 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007). Although, see Ning Jennifer Chang, ‘Zai hua yingren jian de wenhua chongtu: shanghai “yundong jia” duikang “niaolei tuhai,” 1890–1920’ [Cultural Conflicts in the British Community in China: Shanghai ‘Sportsmen’ Versus the ‘Bird Slaughterers,’ 1890-1920]. Zhongyang yanjiuyuan xiandaishi yanjiusuo jikan [Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica] 34 (2000): 89–144; for an account of ‘the spread and advance of modern sport in Asia’, broadly

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17 18 19 20

21

22

23 24 25 26 27

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defined, see Mangan and Fan Hong (eds), Sport in Asian Society: Past and Present (New York: Frank Cass, 2003). Harold Frank Wallace, The Big Game of Central and Western China: Being an Account of a Journey from Shanghai to London Overland across the Gobi Desert (London: John Murray, 1913), viii. Frances Wood, No Dogs and Not Many Chinese: Treaty Port Life in China, 1843–1943 (London: John Murray, 1998), 1. The terms and conditions were laid down in the Treaty of Tianjin (1858), which was ratified at the end of the war in the Convention of Peking (1860). John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 222. Isabella L. (Bishop) Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond; an Account of Journeys in China, Chiefly in the Province of Sze Chuan and Among the Man-tze of the Somo Territory. vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1899), x. The naturalist Robert Swinhoe, who went to Chefoo to convalesce, noted: ‘To foreign residents in China Chefoo is more than a port of trade; it is the summer resort of the ladies and their sick lords, and has been hailed as the “Scarborough of China” ’; see Reports by Consul Swinhoe of his Special Mission up the River Yang-tsze-kiang, etc. (London: Harrison and Sons, 1870), 423; schools of the China Inland Mission were also situated in Chefoo, which became a centre for expatriate schooling. Anon, ‘Deer-Stalking in China and Sporting Notes’. The China Review, or Notes & Queries on the Far East 5, 4 (1877) and 5, 5 (1877): 217–24, 286–95 (quote, 217). Thomas R. Jernigan, Shooting in China (Shanghai: Methodist Publishing House, 1908), 64. Elizabeth Hope Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 9. Ernest J. Eitel, Feng Shui, or, the Rudiments of Natural Science in China (London: Trübner & Co., 1873), 1. Chris Coggins, The Tiger and the Pangolin: Nature, Culture, and Conservation in China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 11. On imperial hunting parks, see George Lanning, Wild Life in China, or, Chats on Chinese Birds and Beasts (Shanghai: National Review, 1911), 188–90; Mark C. Elliott and Chia Ning, ‘The Qing Hunt at Mulan’, in New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Chengde, eds. James Millward, Ruth Dunnell, Mark Elliott and Philippe Fôret (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 66–83. Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 183, 186.

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29 See, Elliott who cites Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of ‘invented tradition’ in relation to ‘a process of formalization and ritualization, characterized by reference to the past, if only by imposing repetition’; Elliott, The Manchu Way, 187. 30 Jernigan, Shooting in China, 1. 31 See, MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature; and Edward I. Steinhart, Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya (Oxford: James Currey, 2006). 32 Coggins, The Tiger and the Pangolin, 8. 33 Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China, 124. 34 Anon, ‘Deer-Stalking in China and Sporting Notes’, 217. 35 R. H. Bruce, ‘Sport in Amoy’. The China Review, or Notes & Queries on the Far East 22, 5 (1897): 718–9 (quote, 718). 36 Wade, With Boat and Gun in the Yangtze Valley, iv. 37 Robert Hart, Entering China’s Service: Robert Hart’s Journals, 1854–1863, ed. K. Bruner, J. K. Fairbank and R. J. Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 223. 38 Frederick John Lugard, The Rise of our East African Empire; Early Efforts in Nyasaland and Uganda. vol.2 (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1893), 12. 39 Catherine Pagani, ‘Objects and the Press: Images of China in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press, ed. Julie F. Codell (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 147–66 (quote, 148). 40 Jernigan, Shooting in China, 123. 41 Jernigan, Shooting in China, 63. 42 Harold Frank Wallace, The Big Game of Central and Western China: Being an Account of a Journey from Shanghai to London Overland across the Gobi Desert (London: John Murray, 1913), vii–viii. 43 Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism, 1900–49 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 85. 44 David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 122. 45 See, also, Cannadine, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition”, 1920-1977’, in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 42–101; for an anthropological analysis of hunting as ritual, see James Howe, ‘Fox Hunting as Ritual’. American Ethnologist 8, 2 (1981): 278–300. 46 J. W. Bains, ‘Sport’, in Twentieth-Century Impressions of Hong-Kong, Shanghai, and Other Treaty Ports of China. Their History, People, Commerce, Industries, and Resources, eds. Arnold Wright and H. A. Cartwright (London: Lloyd’s Greater Britain Publishing Company, 1908), 250–61 (quote, 250).

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47 Geoffrey Robley Sayer, Hong Kong, 1862–1919 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1975), 116; although new legislation introduced in Hong Kong in 1911 put a curb on fishing, requiring anglers to obtain a license from the Water Authority. 48 Nicholas Belfield Dennys, The Treaty Ports of China and Japan: A Complete Guide to the Open Ports of those Countries together with Peking, Yedo, Hong Kong and Macao (London and Hong Kong, 1867), 141, 474. 49 A. R. Margary, The Journey of Augustus Raymond Margary, from Shanghae to Bahamo, and Back to Manwyne (London: Macmillan and Co., 1876), 316. 50 Philip Manson-Bahr and Alfred William Alcock, The Life and Work of Sir Patrick Manson (London: Cassell, 1927), 10; the skills of the sportsman-hunter were linked to those of the physician, as Manson-Bahr and Alcock remarked: ‘In dealing with epidemics – as with snipe-shooting – Manson showed abilities not always associated with the studious reflective habit’ (34). 51 Christopher Cradock, Sporting Notes in the Far East (London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden & Welch, 1889), 47. 52 Jernigan, Shooting in China, 63–4. 53 Philip B. Hall, ‘Robert Swinhoe (1836-1877), FRS, FZS, FRGS: A Victorian Naturalist in Treaty Port China’. The Geographical Journal 153, 1 (1987): 37–47. 54 H. E. M. James, The Long White Mountain, or a Journey in Manchuria, with some Account of the History, People, Administration and Religion of that Country (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1888). 55 On the overlaps between scientific knowledge, exploration, and empire, see Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); on ‘the manner in which hunters, campaigners, and administrators fused’, see MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature, 127, and also MacKenzie, ‘Chivalry, social Darwinism, and Ritualised killing: the hunting ethos in Central Africa up to 1914’, in Conservation in Africa: Peoples, Policies and Practice, ed. David Anderson and Richard H. Grove (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 45. 56 Harry R. Caldwell, Blue Tiger (New York: The Abingdon Press, 1924), 8. 57 Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews, Camps and Trails in China (New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1919), 44; Harry Caldwell was the co-author with J. C. Caldwell of South China Birds (Shanghai: Hester May Vanderburgh, 1931). 58 Cradock, Sporting Notes in the Far East, 179. 59 Quoted in Patricia Lim, Forgotten Souls: A Social History of the Hong Kong Cemetery (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), 126. 60 Thomas R. Dunlap, ‘Remaking the Land: The Acclimatization Movement and Anglo Ideas of Nature’. Journal of World History 8, 2 (1997): 303–19. 61 On the ‘greening’ of Hong Kong and the politics of afforestation from the 1870s, see Robert Peckham, ‘Hygienic Nature: Afforestation and the Greening of Colonial Hong Kong’. Modern Asian Studies (in press).

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62 Gillespie, Hunting for Empire, 82. 63 Trevor R. Pringle, ‘The Privation of History: Landseer, Victoria, and the Highland Myth’, in The Iconography of Landscape, eds. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 142–61 (quote, 143). 64 Richard Ormond, Monarch of the Glen: Landseer in the Highlands (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2006); on Landseer, see MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature, 31–5. 65 John M. Carroll, Edge of Empires: Chinese Elites and British Colonials (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 98. 66 ‘Protection of Birds’, Hongkong Daily Press, 21 September 1869, 2. 67 ‘No. 1 of 1870’, Hongkong Government Gazette, 2 April 1870, 150; ‘Government Notification No. 210’, Hongkong Government Gazette, 23 May 1885, 459. 68 ExCo Minutes 1894, Great Britain, Colonial Office, Original Correspondence: Hong Kong, Series 131 CO131/20, 287 and 295. 69 Hongkong Blue Book for the Year 1887 (Hong Kong: Noronha, 1888), A4, C2; Hongkong Blue Book for the Year 1896 (Hong Kong: Noronha, 1897), A4, C2. 70 Cradock, Sporting Notes in the Far East, 179. 71 ExCo Minutes 1894, CO 131/20, 287 and 295. 72 Bains, ‘Sport’, 261. 73 Bains, ‘Sport’, 258. 74 G. N. Orme, ‘Report on the New Territories, 1899-1919’, Hong Kong Sessional Papers 1912, no. 11, 43–63 (quote, 52). 75 Solomon Bard, Voices from the Past: Hong Kong, 1842–1918 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2002), 317. 76 Colin N. Crisswell, The Taipans: Hong Kong’s Merchant Princes (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1981), 109. 77 Orme, ‘Report on the New Territories’, 43. 78 Orme, ‘Report on the New Territories’, 52. 79 See ‘Fanling Hunt: First Annual Meeting of Subscribers’, Hong Kong Jockey Club, 3 September 1926, in Anon, The Fanling Hunt. Vol. 1 (Hong Kong: n. p., 1925-30). This is an unpaginated volume of newspaper clippings, minutes of meetings and other documents related to the Fanling Hunt, deposited in the University of Hong Kong’s Main Library (Special Collections). 80 See the minutes, third season, second annual meeting of the ‘Fanling Hounds’, in Anon, The Fanling Hunt. 81 Orme, ‘Report on the New Territories’, 52. 82 ‘The Colonial Surgeon’s Report for 1892’, Hong Kong Sessional Papers 1893, no. 22, 313–54 (quotes, 345, 346). 83 ‘European Constable’s Fight with Tiger’, Hongkong Telegraph, 8 March 1915, 5; and ‘Hongkong Tiger’, Hongkong Telegraph, 9 March 1915, 4. 84 Holt, Sport and the British, 208.

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85 Wade, With Boat and Gun in the Yangtze Valley, 133–6. 86 Ward, The Sportsman’s Handbook to Practical Collecting, 11; as Susan Sontag has noted, ‘the camera is a sublimation of the gun’; On Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 14–15. 87 James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and ‘Hunting with the Camera: Photography, Wildlife and Colonialism in Africa’, in Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations, eds. Christopher Philo and Chris Wibert (London: Routledge, 2000), 203–21 (quote, 205). 88 Ryan, Picturing Empire, 100. 89 Ryan, ‘Hunting with the Camera’, 214. 90 Anon, ‘Museum at the Hongkong City Hall’. The China Review, or Notes & Queries on the Far East 5, 1 (1877): 72. 91 E. J. Hardy, John Chinaman at Home: Sketches of Men, Manners and Things in China (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905). 92 Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China, 82. Although MacKenzie has examined the relation between natural history museums and empire, little has been written on museums in Hong Kong and semi-colonial China, see Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); on the museum in Shanghai, see Wade, With Boat and Gun in the Yangtze Valley, v; on the ‘unprecedented explosion in the creation and expansion of natural history museums all over the world’ in the nineteenth century, see Susan Sheets-Pyenson, Cathedrals of Science: The Development of Colonial Natural History Museums During the Late Nineteenth Century (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University, 1988). 93 J. D. Clark, Sketches In and Around Shanghai etc (Shanghai: Shanghai Mercury and Celestial Empire, 1894), 125. 94 Bickers, Britain in China, 69. 95 Bickers, Britain in China, 68. 96 George William Des Voeux, My Colonial Service in British Guiana, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Fiji, Australia, Newfoundland, and Hong Kong, with Interludes. Vol.1 (London: Murray, 1903), 236. 97 Sayer, Hong Kong, 116. 98 Dennys, The Treaty Ports of China and Japan, 140–1. 99 Chang, ‘Zai hua yingren jian de wenhua chongtu’. 100 Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, 21. 101 Charles Noel Davis, A History of The Shanghai Paper Hunt Chase, 1863–1930 (Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1930). 102 Arthur H. Heath, Sketches of Vanishing China (London: T. Butterworth, 1927), 159; see the exploits of the ‘tiger hunters’ Harding and Leyburn reported in the North China Herald, 20 January 1888, 25 and North China Herald, 6 July 1889, 12.

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103 Bruce, ‘Sport in Amoy’, 716. 104 Philip Wilson Pitcher, In and About Amoy: Some Historical and Other Facts Connected with One of the First Open Ports in China. 2nd edn (Shanghai: Methodist Publishing House, 1912), 156. 105 J. O. P. Bland, Houseboat Days in China (London: William Heinemann, 1919), 49; Bland joined the Chinese Maritime Customs in 1883, later becoming Secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Council; see Bickers, Britain in China, 31–2. 106 Maurice O. Springfield, Hunting Opium and Other Scents (Norfolk: Norfolk & Suffolk Publicity Services, 1967), 79. 107 Wade, With Boat and Gun in the Yangtze Valley, 135–41. 108 Jernigan, Shooting in China, 209. 109 Jernigan, Shooting in China, 211–2. 110 Bland, Houseboat Days in China, 41; see, also, William Spencer Percival, The Land of the Dragon: My Boating and Shooting Excursions to the Gorges to the Upper Yangtze (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1889), 34–5. 111 Caldwell, Blue Tiger, 9. 112 Andrews and Andrews, Camps and Trails in China, 2. 113 Oliver George Ready, Life and Sport in China (London: Chapman & Hall, 1903), 46. 114 Percival, The Land of the Dragon, 66. In contrast to China, the activities of British hunters in Japan were more curtailed. The British formed a Hunt Club in Yokohama, importing hounds from Shanghai. Although shooting was formally prohibited, they nonetheless persisted in the sport. In 1860, one British hunter was apprehended for shooting a goose and deported; see Sir Hugh Cortazzi, Collected Writings of Sir Hugh Cortazzi (Tokyo: Edition Synapse; Richmond: Japan Library, 2000), 204. 115 W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Introduction’, in Landscape and Power, ed. Mitchell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 1–4 (quote, 1–2). 116 Des Voeux, My Colonial Service, 236. 117 Wade, With Boat and Gun in the Yangtze Valley, 214–6. 118 Bland, Houseboat Days in China, 61–2; see, in this context, Cradock’s views of the ‘superfluity’ of anti-social Japanese hunters and their ‘wild half-bred pointers’, Sporting Notes in the Far East, 1–2. 119 Cradock, Sporting Notes in the Far East, 49. 120 Wade, With Boat and Gun in the Yangtze Valley, 249–50. 121 Wade, With Boat and Gun in the Yangtze Valley, 214–5. 122 Hongkong Telegraph, 21 January 1902, 2. 123 Anon, ‘Deer-Stalking in China and Sporting Notes’, 286. 124 William T. Rowe, Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796–1895 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 272. 125 Quoted in Ssu-yü Teng and John K. Fairbank, China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1839–1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 114–5.

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126 Harriet Sergeant, Shanghai: Collision Point of Cultures, 1910–1939 (New York: Crown Publishers, 1990), 111–2. 127 Bickers, Britain in China, 133. 128 Ward, The Sportsman’s Handbook to Practical Collecting, vii. 129 Andrews and Andrews, Camps and Trails in China, 44. 130 MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature, 200–24. 131 Wade, With Boat and Gun in the Yangtze Valley, iii–v; by the late imperial period, it has been argued, unsustainable agricultural practices were leading to pressures on productivity and to environmental degradation, see Robert B. Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 132 Arthur de Carle Sowerby, Fur and Feather in North China (Tientsin Press: Tientsin, 1914); see also, Robert Sterling Clark and Arthur de Carle Sowerby, Through Shên-Kan: The Account of the Clark Expedition in North China, 1908–9 (London: J. Fisher Unwin, 1912). 133 Wallace, The Big Game of Central and Western China, vii. 134 Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China, 128. 135 Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China, 125, 130. 136 Coggins, The Tiger and the Pangolin, 8. 137 Chang, ‘Zai hua yingren jian de wenhua chongtu’. 138 Springfield, Hunting Opium and Other Scents, 82–3. 139 Fears of the ‘yellow peril’ were amplified by the violence of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and articulated in popular publications, such as J. Martin Miller’s China: The Yellow Peril at War with the World (1900).

Select bibliography Bickers, Robert. Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism, 1900–49. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Bland, J. O. P. Houseboat Days in China. London: William Heinemann, 1919. Cannadine, David. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Carroll, John M. Edge of Empires: Chinese Elites and British Colonials. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Cradock, Christopher. Sporting Notes in the Far East. London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden & Welch, 1889. Fan, Fa-ti. British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Jernigan, Thomas R. Shooting in China. Shanghai: Methodist Publishing House, 1908. MacKenzie, John M. The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997 [1988]

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Mitchell, W. J. T. ‘Introduction’, in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994, 1–4. Osterhammel, J. ‘Semi-Colonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth-Century China: Towards a Framework of Analysis’, in Empire and After, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen. London: Unwin and Allen, 1986, 290–314. Peckham, Robert. ‘Hygienic Nature: Afforestation and the Greening of Colonial Hong Kong’. Modern Asian Studies, in press. Percival, William Spencer. The Land of the Dragon: My Boating and Shooting Excursions to the Gorges to the Upper Yangtze. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1889. Ready, Oliver George. Life and Sport in China. London: Chapman & Hall, 1903. Sergeant, Harriet. Shanghai: Collision Point of Cultures, 1910–1939. New York: Crown Publishers, 1990. Wade, Henling Thomas (ed.). With Boat and Gun in the Yangtze Valley. Shanghai: Shanghai Mercury, 1910 [1895].

10

Experiments, Environments, and Networks: Commercial Rice Cultivation in South-Eastern Australia, 1900–19451 Emily O’Gorman

Between 1900 and 1945, commercial, irrigated rice growing in south-eastern Australia was established and rapidly expanded. This chapter examines some of the local and international networks that underpinned this process, analysing the ways they facilitated exchanges of material, such as rice seeds, as well as ideas and expertise. It traces these networks through the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area (MIA), located in southern inland New South Wales near the Murrumbidgee River, which became a centre of expanding rice cultivation in this period (Figure 10.1). These networks were embedded in broader sets of politics and agendas as well as ideologies. This chapter draws and builds on recent scholarship in environmental history that examines how particular places, including agricultural landscapes, have been shaped by exchanges of biological material and ideas.2 In addition, and within an overarching focus on networks, it aims to bring together the processes of production and consumption in its framework of analysis by exploring the mutually shaping forces of rice cultivation in this region and its domestic, and then more distant, markets.3 Further, an examination of rice growing in this region reveals a wider culture of agricultural experimentation undertaken by governments and private individuals in Australia that in many ways sustained these networks. As this chapter shows, these two modes of experimentation were interlinked and in many ways dependant on each other. Local and international networks shaped rice growing in this region, and they have therefore been part of ongoing environmental transformations that continue to influence contemporary national politics. In recent years, almost

234 Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire Figure 10.1 A plan of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, officially opened in 1912. Source: State Records NSW: NRS 14086, Lantern slides of NSW and the Franco-British Exhibition, 1905–11. Digital ID: 14086_a005_ a005SZ847000020, Map of southern NSW showing Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area,1908.

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all rice cultivated in Australia has been grown in the southern Murray–Darling Basin in three irrigation areas: the MIA, the Coleambally Irrigation Area and the Murray Valley irrigation districts.4 The main varieties of rice grown in these areas have required flood-irrigation regimes, where paddies are submerged at particular times through controlled irrigation releases.5 In recent years, approximately 70 to 80 per cent of the rice produced in this region has been exported to over sixty countries.6 The relatively large water requirements of rice have led to increasing criticism of the industry by environmentalists, ecologists, economists and other groups within wider national debates about water use for irrigation in the Murray–Darling Basin.7 These debates gathered pace during a recent drought across eastern Australia, which lasted in some places from the year 2000 to 2010.8 In general terms, the most prevalent issue in these discussions has been the conflict between the water needs of established agricultural farms and industries, and the ramifying ecological consequences of these water extractions. There are a number of wetlands along the Murrumbidgee, such as the Lower Murrumbidgee floodplain, that are important sites for bird breeding and biological diversity more broadly. These have received reduced amounts of water due to upstream irrigation extractions, including for past and recent rice growing.9 This chapter, then, also provides an historical perspective on some of the mixed legacies of rice, through the lenses of networks and experimentation. Further, it shows some of the ways in which local environments shaped international networks and rice growing in this region, as well as being deeply shaped by them. In many ways, the histories of rice and the MIA became tied together in this period, and in order to understand networks of rice experiments and cultivation some explanation about the MIA is first necessary. This chapter therefore begins with a brief overview of the establishment of the MIA.

The Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area The MIA began operation in 1912, within a context of increasing popular support for irrigation across eastern Australia dating from the mid-nineteenth century. Support for irrigation was strongly aligned with long-held ideologies within Australian and British governments of the social benefits of closer settlement schemes and yeomanry; namely, that famers working small blocks within a larger bounded settlement would create good, industrious citizens.10 To further these goals, the New South Wales government and those of other

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colonies passed legislation in the 1860s and 1870s that aimed to subdivide large pastoral properties, which together covered sizeable tracts of eastern Australia, and thereby convert them into smaller blocks worked by a new class of yeoman farmers. Many pastoralists found ways to sidestep the intended outcomes of this legislation. However, by the turn of the twentieth century pastoralism in many parts of inland Australia had suffered significantly, particularly through the effects of what is now known as the Federation Drought, which lasted from c. 1895 to 1902.11 This drought occurred against a history of successive episodes of droughts and floods, experienced since pastoral expansion into the area in the 1820s, which in turn were a source of ongoing debates over river regulation as a way to overcome variable water supplies. Following this drought, pastoralists along the Murrumbidgee and Murray Rivers lobbied the new federal government, created in 1901 with Australia’s federation, and state governments for the establishment of a series of large dams, irrigation networks and navigation locks to guard against future droughts, and the governments responded. From the early twentieth century, irrigation in this region (and other parts of Australia) expanded rapidly and gained further popular and government support.12 The MIA and Burrinjuck Dam (built between 1907 and 1928 to feed its irrigation networks) were planned and built by the state government within this context. The irrigation scheme fitted government agendas of increasing settlement in the inland and upheld yeoman ideals. It also aligned with government goals of making areas previously subject to drought productive of foods and goods that could meet demand from expanding domestic and international markets. However, as historian C. J. Lloyd noted, building the MIA was ‘essentially an act of faith’ by the state government as it rested on a range of ‘assumptions’ about the viability of particular products to grow under irrigation in this environment.13 The establishment of the MIA created further upheaval for local Aboriginal groups, predominantly Wiradjuri people. Following the often violent frontier conflicts with mainly British colonists, which reached their height in the late 1830s, and the introduction of diseases such as smallpox that severely reduced Wiradjuri numbers, many Wiradjuri had taken up employment on the pastoral properties that dominated the region from the 1840s, mostly as a means to stay on country. In the first two decades following the establishment of the MIA, more Wiradjuri moved into missions or places outside these intensively cultivated regions.14 The state government planned the MIA as a government-administered irrigation area that would produce food from small, intensively cultivated farms. In the scheme, there were 2-acre (8,093 square metre) blocks to supplement

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the income of those engaged in supporting industries, 10-acre (4-hectare) blocks devoted to horticultural pursuits such as citrus and 50-acre (20-hectare) blocks earmarked for dairying and raising pigs and fat lambs.15 The origins of those who were recruited and selected to take up farms reflected the Australian government’s support for a British and European yeomanry. It resonated with the Australian Immigration Restriction Act 1901 (widely referred to as the ‘White Australia Policy’) that partly had its roots in racist attitudes towards Chinese immigrants, which gained traction among British colonists from the mid-nineteenth century amid fears of competition from Chinese immigrants on the goldfields and in pastoral labour forces (see also Chapter 7).16 Farmers were recruited by the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission to the scheme from around Australia, the United States and Europe, including a large number of Welsh immigrants and also a large group of miners from Broken Hill in New South Wales.17 Many of these settlers had little or no farming experience, and others had very little experience of regional conditions. Advice on farming was supplied by the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission, which oversaw the running of the MIA in its early years, and also by a number of irrigators from Victoria and America who the Commission recruited to the scheme to both farm there and instruct others.18 As farmers began cultivation in the MIA, it soon became clear that many of the crops that the government had planned for settlers to cultivate were unsuitable for intensive farming. Government officials gave advice about what to grow based on the recommendations from the previous landowner, grazier Samuel McCaughey. McCaughey’s involvement is significant, as his assurance of the potential for the area to produce food underpinned much of the rationale for the scheme, particularly lucerne (or alfalfa) for dairying.19 However, no research had been undertaken by the government as to what would grow in the particular soil of the region under intensive irrigation or into the effects of irrigation on underground water tables.20 In places, soil salinity became a problem, and was so severe in some areas that farmers abandoned their blocks.21 In others, the soil was only two to three feet deep, and underlain by impervious clay which did not absorb water, leading to over-watering and thus low yields.22 The problems that beset the MIA culminated in a Royal Commission (1916), which confirmed farmers’ claims that what could be farmed on their plots had been misrepresented. The Royal Commission recommended the compensation of 133 farmers, some with financial grants and additional land, others by exchanging their farms for more suitable ones. The Royal Commission further recommended the formation of larger farms of 150–200 acres (60–80 hectares)

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in extent.23 At the same time as the Commission publicized its findings, other commissions in other states, such as in Victoria, also questioned the feasibility of closer settlement programmes. The yeoman ideal as a life-style choice was thoroughly shaken.24 Although verging on complete collapse within its first five years, the scheme was an intertwined social and environmental experiment that had deep political and cultural roots such that its supporters would not allow it to fail. The New South Wales government had invested significant amounts of taxpayer money in the MIA and many politicians had backed the scheme. Farmers looked to alternative crops and products, such as tobacco and ostrich farming for feathers, but for reasons of both growing conditions and markets most of these were abandoned. Many in the MIA focused their efforts on growing fruit trees, grape vines and vegetables for canning. When these crops also failed, farmers took casual jobs, for example, in the MIA’s factories and carting materials. Finding new crops and establishing mixed farming became imperative to both farmers and the state government.25

Rice experiments: Takasuka and experiment farms Rice was one of the crops trailed to fill the vacuum of suitable products to grow and was experimented with from 1915 at Yanco Experiment Farm, located in the MIA.26 The Experiment Farm was established by the New South Wales State Government’s Department of Agriculture in 1909 to test the suitability of agricultural products for the MIA.27 The varieties for these trials came from rice cultivated by Japanese immigrant Isaburo (Jō) Takasuka (1865–1940) on the Murray River near the town of Swan Hill in Victoria. These trials point towards two kinds of agricultural experimentation, which were interlinked: experiments by private individuals and those by government employees at experiment farms, which were established around Australia from the late nineteenth century. In Australia, experiment farms were established within colonial government agendas of increasing land settlement and the production of food and goods for colonists.28 These kind of farms were used by colonial regimes as well as other governments throughout the world that sought agricultural ‘improvement’ (see Chapter 3). In Australia, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, individuals also undertook agricultural experiments, sometimes working within wider state policies to increase food production for a range of personal and economic reasons. Links

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between individual and government experiments were not uncommon, as governments either partially sponsored individuals’ experiments or drew on their results. Indeed, the state government established the MIA where it was in order to utilize McCaughey’s experimental irrigation canals, the results of his own agricultural trials, and to make use of the potential dam sites he had identified.29 This section examines these different kinds of experimentation, and their links, through the rice trials undertaken by Takasuka and at the Yanco Experiment Farm by government ‘Experimentalists’ (their official title) in the early twentieth century.30 This examination also points towards the introduction of Asian, and a range of other, plant species and modes of farming and gardening in both Australia and New Zealand (see Chapter 7). In Takasuka’s case at least, this was not a direct ‘transfer’ of skills from one place to another, but a dynamic process. For instance, Takasuka seems to have drawn on American as well as Japanese farming techniques and attempted to adapt these to local growing conditions. Further, this examination draws attention to the agency of individuals who were discriminated against during this period of legislative racism (see also Chapter 7). To understand Takasuka’s experiments, some background is necessary.31 Further, his family’s story shows the ways that networks operated within broader cultural contexts, including Australia’s racist immigration legislation and policies in this period. Isaburo Takasuka, his wife Ichiko and their two children immigrated to Australia in 1905, when the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 was in force. This Act racially discriminated against Japanese people entering the country, and the Department of External Affairs granted the family only a short-term residency, initially for twelve months (one normally not renewed beyond three years), to operate an import-and-export business.32 Isaburo Takasuka was born in Matsuyama, on the island of Shikoku, southern Japan. The son of a chef, he was schooled in Japan, but studied at De Pauw University and then Westminster College, both in the United States, graduating with a BA in 1896. Takasuka returned to Japan where, in 1898, he ran for election in the House of Representatives. In the same year, he married Ichiko, the daughter of a District Court judge.33 The precise reasons for their migration to Australia are unclear, but may have stemmed from the stalling of Takasuka’s political career, as his constituency was reduced in size in 1900 when the Japanese government redrew electoral boundaries. Further, the costs of two political campaigns seem to have reduced his inherited wealth, perhaps providing another reason for migration (although the family retained some property in Japan).34

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In accordance with the government’s terms of the family’s residency in Australia, Takasuka established an import-and-export business in Melbourne and also taught Japanese language classes at Stott & Hoare’s Business College.35 The Department of External Affairs granted the family exemption from the Immigration Restriction Act for a further twelve months, but on the condition that they did not apply again.36 With the family facing possible deportation, Takasuka made a case to the Victorian Premier and the Minister for Crown Lands for leasing a floodplain on which to trial rice cultivation.37 Takasuka argued that rice could make marshy land agriculturally productive, a possibility that resonated with state government agendas of increasing food production and expanding land settlement.38 Takasuka was granted permission by the state government to use 200 acres (80 hectares) at Tyndtynder West, located on the Murray River, for rice experiments, with the understanding that if he continued these trials and spent 10 shillings per acre for five years, he could obtain a perpetual lease.39 The family’s entry permit became tied to this lease, and their continued residency in Australia therefore hinged on the rice experiments. Indeed, the Department of External Affairs regularly requested reports from the Department of Agriculture and the local police about Takasuka’s progress with the experiments. The Department of External Affairs often made these requests in conjunction with Takasuka’s annual application to renew the family’s certificate of exemption, without which they would be forced to leave. Takasuka also wrote letters to the Department of Agriculture and to the Department of External Affairs himself, detailing his experiments and emphasizing his aim of establishing rice as a commercial crop for Victoria. Today, the surviving correspondence and official documentation relating directly to the Takasukas’ exemption from the Immigration Restriction Act forms a file of approximately 300 pages, held in the National Archives of Australia.40 Takasuka’s previous experience with farming is difficult to ascertain. When he applied to the Swan Hill Local Land Board for an allotment, he claimed to have ‘grown rice in Texas’ for four years, during which time he had rented ‘170 acres at times & 300 acres at other times’.41 He stated that he gave up rice growing because the price of rice was low in the United States.42 To further demonstrate his experience in rice cultivation, Takasuka stated that his ‘[f]ather has 10000 acres in Japan. He has people growing rice on parts of it’.43 Historian David Sissons, who in the 1970s and 1980s, undertook extensive research into the experiences of the Takasuka family as part of a wider project on Japanese–Australian political and social relations, suggested that Takasuka may have exaggerated his

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farming experience.44 While this is probable given the circumstances, there is a possibility that Takasuka had the experience he claimed.45 Whether or not this was the case, the local conditions of the Murray River presented him with significant challenges in establishing an experimental crop. Takasuka imported rice from Japan for the trials and irrigated the fields from the seasonal rises in river flow from snow melt and rainfall. However, the challenges of controlling floodwater, together with experiences of drought in 1907 and large floods in 1909, made establishing a rice crop difficult, particularly as rice can be sensitive to both under- and over-watering.46 Takasuka rented land, unaffected by flooding, from other farmers in the district for further trials, so as to avoid the devastating floods that had ruined his earlier crops.47 Further, in 1909, he requested that the Department of External Affairs allow him to invite two Japanese experts in rice growing to help him establish the experimental crops. The Japanese Consulate-General made this request on Takasuka’s behalf, writing that ‘owing principally to unfavourable weather conditions, he has had to encounter many difficulties in the prosecution of his enterprise, the work in connection with which has become so hard that he finds himself in great need of assistance’.48 This request, however, was declined by the Department of External Affairs.49 In 1911, Takasuka planted twenty-five Japanese varieties and, according to a newspaper report, ‘proved that three of these, including Kahei, and Shinriki [in Japan grown as an upland variety of] rice, can be grown when the land is irrigated’.50 The newspaper article also described Takasuka’s methods of growing and harvesting, highlighting his use of machinery, including a wheat harvester (technology that was employed by rice farmers in America). Takasuka’s success in rice experiments seems to have sparked genuine interest among journalists and farmers in Victoria and New South Wales. Racial prejudice towards Japanese immigrants was, however, also evident in some of these newspaper accounts. For example, one report of Takasuka’s 1915 crop stated that: ‘[m]any of the European neighbours of the Japanese experimenter have expressed their intentions of entering upon the cultivation of rice, astonished at results which he has succeeded in obtaining’.51 Another reported on this crop under the heading: ‘Rice Growing in Victoria – A Jap Granted a Lease’.52 By 1915, Takasuka claimed to have trialled fifty-six different varieties of rice, most, if not all, being Japanese varieties.53 He acclimatized promising varieties to local conditions using trials and, in the words of a New South Wales State Government agricultural report, developed ‘a strain which he called “Takasuka”, and from which he harvested 1 ton of grain per acre’ in 1915.54 Takasuka sold these seeds to suppliers for general sale in Melbourne, and to the

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New South Wales Department of Agriculture.55 The previous year, the Victorian Department of Agriculture had written to Takasuka with a request to buy rice seed, as they had received a ‘number of enquires’, and following his successful crop, Takasuka contacted the Department to see if they still had an interest in purchasing this seed.56 However, it is unclear whether they purchased any (and given later correspondence this seems unlikely). Indeed, the ‘enquiries’ referred to above may have been from the New South Wales Department of Agriculture, which appears to have been anticipating the production of suitable seed by Takasuka. A report by a newspaper published in the MIA in 1914 stated: ‘our own Department of Agriculture is making an effort at the present time to obtain a supply of acclimatised rice seed [from Takasuka] which, if obtained, will be tested at the Yanco Experiment Farm’.57 The ‘Takasuka’ seed that the Department purchased in 1915 became the basis for rice trials under irrigation at Yanco Experiment Farm. This variety was also trialled at the Grafton Experiment Farm, northern New South Wales, where rainfed rice from ‘the Central Provinces of India’ had also been experimented with since 1911, but with little success.58 Indeed, from the mid-nineteenth century, individuals and governments had experimented with rice growing across Australia, particularly in the northern monsoonal regions. Some historians have speculated that in the 1850s and 1860s, Chinese migrants introduced rice to south-eastern Australia, northern Queensland, the Northern Territory and north Western Australia to grow as part of market gardens and then sold the grain at nearby goldfields. In the second half of the nineteenth century, rice trials were attempted by governments in the Northern Territory, along coastal Queensland, and coastal New South Wales with the aim of finding ways to grow rice on a large scale and with higher yields for widespread cultivation. These trials were largely unsuccessful (although a short-lived rice industry developed in Queensland), usually because of damage or low yields from variations in rainfall and river flow – a factor that both supporters of irrigation and researchers at government experiment farms sought to overcome for agriculture more broadly.59 Yanco and other experiment farms that were established around Australia from the late nineteenth century drew attention to the professionalization and rise of agricultural science. Agricultural science quickly gained support from governments in Australia and was part of a broader move by governments at the time towards developing and privileging institutional knowledge to achieve greater efficiency in production. Agricultural scientists used government experiment farms as testing grounds for different crops and livestock, and were often established by governments in places that they perceived to hold promise

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as farming areas or that proved difficult to farm. They were places where agricultural scientists developed new crop varieties for local conditions and disseminated advice to farmers. Agricultural scientists also trialled new chemical and mechanical technologies at the farms, and they passed on information about promising products to farmers. This process was underlain by ideologies that sought to overcome the perceived limitations of these environments through agricultural ‘expertise’ (rather than, for example, farmers’ knowledge).60 Initial trials of ‘Takasuka’ at Yanco Experiment Farm were, on the whole, not successful, as the crop suffered from ‘hot and very windy weather’ which reduced the yield.61 Nevertheless, trials of this variety continued in the following three years as the market price for rice was high. However, dry conditions, a locust plague and then low germination rates (attributed to the low-quality seeds produced by the plants due to the hardships of the previous two trials) overcame each of these experiments in turn.62 In contrast to the enduring interest shown by the New South Wales Department of Agriculture in Takasuka’s experiments and varieties, in 1919 the Victorian Department of Agriculture withdrew its support for his experiments. In a letter to the Department of External Affairs, the Director of Agriculture stated, ‘the work being done by Mr Takasuka is not sufficiently important to justify any further recommendation being made for his exemption’ from the Immigration Restriction Act.63 The Department of External Affairs made further enquiries with the local police, who wrote supportively of the Takasuka family’s role in the community. Ultimately, this local support, together with the longevity of the family’s residence in Australia, became the basis for further annual exemptions.64 In the early 1920s, Takasuka made several requests to the Department for it to waive the need for the family to apply for annual exemptions, which the Department eventually did in 1924.65 Takasuka continued his rice experiments until 1927, when, because of financial difficulties, the family moved onto another farm and cultivated other crops at Nyah, Victoria.66

Californian exchanges In 1919, the New South Wales government experimentalists undertook trials of ‘three varieties from California’ as well as ‘Takasuka’ at Yanco Experiment Farm. The precise origins of these Californian seeds are unclear.67 One possibility is that they came from American engineer Elwood Mead, who had immigrated to Victoria in 1907 to oversee irrigation in that state. Mead had also been

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invited by the New South Wales State Government to help plan the MIA in 1911 and to undertake an investigation of the Area in 1923. In Victoria, Mead had raised the possibility of cultivating rice using varieties and techniques developed in California; that he may have introduced varieties for trial in New South Wales is, however, only speculation.68 This trial of Californian varieties and Mead’s employment in Victoria reflect a relationship between American agriculture, particularly Californian, and that in Australia at the time. Parts of California and eastern Australia were widely thought to share common cultural and environmental conditions for agriculture, and both the US and Australian governments held similar goals of increased land settlement and food production. Australians sought to learn from American experiences, and many irrigation works, crops and supporting institutions like government experiment farms and agricultural colleges reflected those of California.69 This relationship over irrigated agriculture was relatively recent. During the mid-to-late nineteenth century, British India had been Australia’s primary international source of water management and engineering expertise.70 Colonial river engineers with experience in British India were invited by Australian colonial governments to consult on river engineering and were also employed in government water management departments. For example, Hugh McKinney had a decade of experience as a British river engineer in India before his migration to Australia in 1880, and subsequent employment in New South Wales government water management departments.71 Victorian politician Alfred Deakin, Australia’s ‘Father of Irrigation’, was enamoured of the status of the British engineer in India as ‘a ruler of men’.72 However, it was American irrigation developments and management techniques that inspired his shaping of Victoria’s 1886 Irrigation Act. In that same year, the Act facilitated the establishment of the Mildura Irrigation Colony on the Murray River by Canadian-born entrepreneurs, the Chaffey brothers, who had established successful irrigation settlements in America, including California.73 While Deakin admired the status of British engineers in India, by the 1880s they had become identified as figures of colonial autocracy and local repression. Historian Ian Tyrrell has noted that emulating irrigation in India would have likely undermined the public support that government irrigation in Australia required to ‘justify the expenditure of large sums of money’.74 Further, agricultural departments in both Australia and California looked for models of irrigation better suited to climates characterized by variability and long periods of aridity, rather than the British models that were developed for more humid climates.75 Government representatives increasingly fostered connections between eastern Australia and California. In addition

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to holding that the areas had similarities in climate, political structures and colonial histories of land use, these places were perceived by government agricultural agencies to be facing similar problems in developing irrigation, such as the exacerbation of soil salinity, and were thus able to learn from each others’ experiences and expertise.76 This relationship strengthened during the First World War and the Second World War as political connections between the two countries solidified as both undertook similar programmes of post-war reconstruction that centred on dams and agriculture.77 During the First World War, activities in the MIA slowed, but once it ended, the Area expanded as the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission allocated 800 new farms to returned servicemen.78 However, in the early 1920s, forfeitures were common as inexperienced farmers, following advice on cultivation given by government engineers and researchers, again faced crop failures from seepage and salinization. These difficulties were often compounded by farmers’ lack of capital.79 In this context of expansion and then forfeitures in the MIA, agricultural research by the state government regained momentum. In 1920, John Brady, an employee of the New South Wales Department of Agriculture, travelled to California on a research trip to investigate techniques for citrus growing and canning for the MIA. Based on his observation of similarities in the clay soils between the rice-growing areas in California and Australia, he recommended that Californian varieties be trialled at Yanco Experiment Farm. Subsequently, government researchers undertook initial trials of three varieties of rice that had been developed in California from Italian varieties (originally from China) and Japanese varieties. The varieties, Colusa (Italy), Wataribune (Japanese) and Caloro (early Wartaribune), became the subject of more trials at Yanco Experiment Farm between 1922 and 1924.80 Caloro was particularly successful in terms of yield and grain quality, and strains of this variety made up 70 per cent of rice crops in the MIA into the 1960s.81 While these trials were undertaken partly because of the connections between state government agricultural research in Australia and California, the rice varieties themselves were the product of much longer histories of exchanges of biological material and plant breeding, through which people had aimed to select traits to suit regional environmental conditions. Seeds collected from these trials of Californian varieties became the basis for the first attempt at a commercial rice crop in the MIA in 1924–5. A total of 157 acres (63 hectares) were sown and yielded 222 tons of paddy (hulled) rice.82 This crop was considered so successful by the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission that it encouraged farmers to grow rice by making water cheaply

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available.83 Over the next decade, rice growing expanded dramatically. By 1933–4, farmers were cultivating rice across about 20,379 acres (8,247 hectares), with a yield of approximately 40,995 tons of paddy rice.84 In addition to good yields and a generally high market price (although it fluctuated from year to year), farmers and the state government also perceived additional benefits in growing rice rather than other products in the MIA: for example, farmers grew it on clay soils that were previously seen as unproductive and it lent itself to mixed-farming.85 In many ways rice went some way towards justifying the MIA and Burrinjuck Dam by finally providing a feasible agricultural product for parts of the MIA. The clay soils underlying parts of the MIA were in many ways ideal for rice growing. The clay held water, pumped on to fields to flood the semi-aquatic plant. Rice needed to be flooded at particular times in its growth cycle to ensure high yields and to control weeds. The relatively high water requirements of the crop led to tight controls being placed on the area under cultivation. In addition to needing to apply for permission to grow rice, farmers had their farms assessed, as they still do, for suitability and agreed to adhere to guidelines for cultivation. The water requirements of rice also led to an early, but informal, agreement between New South Wales and Victoria that rice would only be grown commercially by New South Wales within the shared upper- and mid-Murray River system so that large water extractions would not adversely affect downstream farmers and centres.86 The contemporary geography of rice farming in some respects reflects this agreement as there are only a small number of rice farms in north-eastern Victoria. Rice growers formed a co-operative in 1925, through which they established mills. The associated services around rice growing, including the establishment of mills and rail freight, were used as arguments by the Department of Agriculture in favour of rice growing, as they would create jobs and improve the regional economy.87 Farmers used mechanized methods to cultivate rice, copied from California, as Takasuka had also done. This mechanization made commercial rice farming possible in the MIA, which did not have access to a cheap labour force.88

Creating a market Rice grown in the MIA went towards supplying the small domestic market, previously met by imports from Burma, India, Japan and Java (approximately

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20,000–25,000 tons of rice annually).89 By the mid-1700s rice had become a common part of the English diet and was used, for example, in puddings and for rice milk.90 It seems likely that English convicts and migrants brought this dietary tradition with them to Australia. Indeed, supporting this idea, from at least the 1860s, recipes that included rice – for instance pudding and Indian curry with rice – were published in Australian newspapers.91 Further, rice was a central part of many Asian diets and cultures, and particular groups – especially Chinese and Japanese migrants – likely also were major consumers for the domestic rice market. The possibilities for export were also realized early. In 1926, a Department of Agriculture report stated: ‘ There is nothing to fear from overproduction, as once the local demands are met there is a ready market in the East, as well as in England and Germany.’92 The report pointed to the example of America, which both supplied domestic demand and exported to Europe and Japan. However, by the late 1920s, the growth in the quantities of rice produced in the MIA began to create a marketing problem for the industry. By 1929, rice production in the MIA had surpassed total existing domestic demand.93 In the same year, the MIA industry lobbied the Commonwealth government to increase tariffs on foreign rice so as to shore up the domestic market. At a hearing by the Tariff Board about the proposed duty, the Director of Agriculture, A. H. E. McDonald, linked the creation of a bigger market for Australian rice to the importance of current and projected increases in rice production in the MIA. He was reported by the Sydney Morning Herald as stating that, ‘a considerable part of the land on the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area was found to be practically useless for other forms of agriculture, and the utilisation of this land constituted a serious problem’.94 Further, he argued that ‘if export trade could be ultimately developed’ with an increased area given over to rice production, then ‘the industry would absorb much of the water conserved in Burrinjuck and Hume dams, and would provide a means for the utilisation of water which is not now conserved’.95 A newspaper article published in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1932 shows how rice grown in the MIA was marketed by the Rice Marketing Board (established in 1928) against imported rice. Reporting on a public speech by M. J. Gleeson, a member of the Board, to the New Health Society, this article stated: ‘Prior to 1928 the rice consumed in Australia was grown in the East, harvested by natives, and marketed under the most unhygienic conditions. The rice for local requirements to-day, however is handled by machinery right from the field to the consumer.’96 Here, the spokesman seems to have used ideas about the

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vulnerability of white bodies to tropical diseases as well as ‘modern’ technology in the marketing of Australian rice for ‘Western’ domestic consumers.97 As production superseded domestic demand, the MIA rice industry also looked for export markets.98 The export markets for rice in the MIA included places within the British Empire, and these were likely sought out by representatives of the rice industry in order to take advantage of the system of imperial free trade and then imperial preference established with the Empire Marketing Board in 1926.99 In 1931, Australian rice growers exported relatively small quantities of rice to the Pacific Islands (1,996 tons cleaned/275 tons uncleaned), New Zealand (1,506 tons cleaned/8 tons uncleaned) and the United Kingdom (153 tons cleaned).100 In 1931, the rice industry also sent a ‘trial order’ of grain to Canada, with the view that an export market could be gained there ‘for the disposal of surplus rice’.101 However, exports to Canada seem to have been fairly sporadic, perhaps due to changing Canadian political relations with Britain and its Dominions, competition from other imports in Canada, and the growth in markets for Australian rice, particularly in the United Kingdom.102 Indeed, by 1933–4 the amount of rice exported to the United Kingdom had grown to 7,238 tons cleaned, and 12 tons uncleaned (matching increases in rice production in the MIA), while exports to the Pacific Islands dropped significantly.103

The Second World War While yields steadily increased, the area under rice cultivation along the Murrumbidgee did not significantly alter from the mid-1930s to 1941. In 1942, however, rice cultivation expanded by more than 10,000 acres (4,046 hectares) in the MIA to supply food aid to parts of Asia, where Japanese invasion and occupation had broken down established rice farming and trade. Food and resources were re-directed by the Japanese forces, which also took over local, subsistence rice fields for other purposes.104 The results were widespread food shortages and starvation in places like the Philippines.105 In the MIA, the state government temporarily increased the number of permits for farms to grow rice and the limit on the acreage already under rice cultivation on each farm. The state government also expanded rice cultivation into the Murray Valley irrigation districts.106 The labour required for farming this rice for food aid was supplemented by the Women’s Land Army and by the mostly Italian internees of the Prisoner of War camp that was established

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at Riverina Welfare Farm (formerly Yanco Experiment Farm).107 This rice was purchased by the federal government and then exported. Irrigation water became prioritized towards the cultivation of food for wartime policies. One account by the New South Wales Department of Agriculture in the 1950s stated that ‘the area planted to rice in New South Wales [during the war] … was increased to the limit of water available’.108 The phrase ‘the limit of water available’ probably refers to water shortages during a severe drought across eastern Australia in 1944–5.109 During this period, the area under rice cultivation shrank from more than 40,000 acres (16,187 hectares) in the 1943–4 season to about 24,500 acres (9,914 hectares) in the 1944–5 season.110 During the Second World War, the Australian Federal Government diverted rice, previously bound for domestic markets, to Asia. The same account from the New South Wales Department of Agriculture stated that: ‘At times Australians … have had to submit to rice shortage because of the need to maintain these exports – made to countries whose populations are less well provided than Australia with the wherewithals of existence.’111 These humanitarian sentiments were not unique to rice, nor to Australia. In both world wars food shortages, such as those resulting from interruptions to trade networks and reduced agricultural workforce, were nearly worldwide, and there was a concurrent surge in humanitarian approaches to food in this period that took on global dimensions. This is perhaps best epitomized by the establishment of the Food and Agriculture Organization within the United Nations soon after the end of the Second World War, which sought to redistribute food supplies around the world to prevent severe shortages in some regions.112 Following the end of the Second World War, Australia’s food aid to parts of Asia continued and, together with national food security, became a rationale for increasing food production. A state government report reflected the prevailing sentiment that: ‘food must be produced in larger quantities so that, as well as providing for its own population, the Commonwealth [Government of Australia] will have enough to step up many exports [for aid]’.113 Within this context of post-war food aid, the land under rice cultivation in the MIA and Murray Valley irrigation districts steadily increased, in part sustained through soldier settlement. In 1953, the state government estimated that one fifth of all irrigation water in New South Wales was ‘directed to rice bays’.114 The continuation of rice growing in the irrigation districts is significant as the districts had been established under the explicit proviso that there would be no intensive irrigation. However, the temporary wartime measure of cultivating rice had set

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a precedent.115 In 1960, the state government opened Coleambally Irrigation Area, with the intent that it would be primarily a rice-growing area. By 1964 there was a total of 59,278 acres (23,988 hectares) under rice cultivation in New South Wales, totalling 1,029 rice farms: 574 in the MIA, 152 in Coleambally and 303 in the Murray Valley irrigation districts. That year paddy rice production totalled 139,767 tons.116 The expansion of the area under irrigation was supported by new dams, a strategy that was part of Australia’s post-war and Cold War national development goals of increasing food supply. Along the Murrumbidgee these included Tantangara Dam, completed in 1960, and Blowering Dam, completed in 1968 on the Tumut River, a headwater tributary of the Murrumbidgee. Both of these dams were part of the massive Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme which began construction in 1949 and included extensive systems of tunnels and dams for both the generation of hydro-electricity and the provision of irrigation along the Murrumbidgee and Murray River systems.117 New dams and agricultural ventures proliferated in Australia in this period, and rice came under commercial cultivation in other places. Two places in particular were sites of substantial rice projects, and both were part of wider ideologies to ‘settle the empty north’ in a period when large sections of Australia’s population were anxious about the continent’s proximity to Asia in the wake of Japan’s show of military strength in the Second World War.118 First, in northern Queensland a commercial crop was harvested in 1969, fed by the new Burdekin Dam. This industry lasted until the early 1990s when sugar cane began to replace rice as a more lucrative crop for the region.119 Second, in the post-war period a private company led by Americans, and with research support from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, undertook a large rice-growing project at Humpty Doo in the Northern Territory. The company abandoned the scheme in 1962 due to a combination of factors that included unreliable rainfall and floods, the difficulty of applying the available mechanized technology in the muddy tropical conditions, and a belief that magpie geese ate a large percentage of each crop.120 The relationship between rice growing along the Murrumbidgee and Murray Rivers and countries receiving food aid changed significantly in the 1960s, when high-yielding and semi-dwarf rice varieties were taken up by farmers in many parts of Asia as part of the Green Revolution.121 The causes and consequences of the Green Revolution are complex and will not be discussed in detail here. Of direct relevance, however, is that while Australian farmers did not take up these varieties, many countries that previously relied on rice from the Murrumbidgee

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and Murray Rivers gradually no longer did so, a transition that occurred through the 1960s and 1970s. The rice industry on the Murrumbidgee and Murray Rivers gradually diverted more and more rice to paying markets. The moral imperatives behind increasing agriculture have remained despite the fact that exports now primarily go to paying markets and often to wealthy countries. Even today representatives of Australian agriculture talk about ‘feeding the world’.122 While most rice does go to paying markets, the Australian government has bought rice surpluses at reduced prices for use as aid. From the 1960s, rice production in terms of tonnage has tended to increase. However, the area under cultivation fluctuated, as droughts in the mid-1960s and early 1980s severely reduced water supplies to irrigation areas. Some farmers moved out of rice growing, partly in response to the difficulties of water supply, but also because of the deregulation of water markets, along with changing rice markets and trade as a result of the Green Revolution.123 During this period of expansion, both in the area under irrigation and in the number of large dams, from approximately 1945 to 1975, problems such as soil salinity and the degradation of wetlands emerged in new areas and worsened in others. These problems were recognized by government and farmers alike at the time and sometimes had even been predicted. In particular, soil salinity was a significant issue in irrigation regions throughout the Riverina, and its effects were ameliorated by state governments through land drainage works and the allocation of new farms to farmers. It was not until the 1990s, however, that these problems began to be addressed in any sustained way. They remain pressing concerns for local communities, ecologists and a range of other groups, and in national politics, today.124 Further, the effects of past as well as contemporary land-use practices will continue to play out into the future as there are long lag-times in these ecological and hydrological systems.125 Local and international networks of ideas, expertise and materials underpinned the establishment and expansion of commercial rice cultivation and contributed to these mixed legacies of rice. These networks were embedded in broader sets of ideologies and politics, like racial prejudice in and economic policies of the British Empire, and were supported by cultures of agricultural experimentation that were fostered by government departments and utilized by individuals like Takasuka. Tracing these and other networks, including connections with California and parts of Asia, provides a new historical perspective on rice growing and opens up a consideration of the diverse places and cultures that have shaped this region.

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Notes 1 Parts of this chapter were presented at the Natures, Cultures, Identities, Materialities workshop co-organized by Gay Hawkins, Lesley Head, David Trigger and Sarah Whatmore, and at the Australian Historical Association conference at the University of Wollongong in 2013. The comments of participants and audience members greatly helped me to refine aspects of the argument. Sections of this chapter draw on: E. O’Gorman, ‘Growing Rice on the Murrumbidgee River: Cultures, Politics, and Practices of Food Production and Water Use, 1900 to 2012’. Journal of Australian Studies 37, 1 (2013): 96–115. 2 Among these many works, those that have been especially influential for this chapter are: T. Brooking and E. Pawson, Seeds of Empire: The Environmental Transformation of New Zealand (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011); Jodi Frawley and Heather Goodall, ‘Transforming Saltbush: Science, Mobility, and Metaphor in the Remaking of Intercolonial Worlds’. Conservation and Society 11, 2 (2013): 76–186. 3 Matthew W. Klingle, ‘Spaces of Consumption in Environmental History’. History and Theory, Theme Issue 42 (2003): 94–110. 4 ‘Water and the Murray-Darling Basin - A Statistical Profile, 2000–01 to 2005-06’, Australian Bureau of Statistics, accessed March 2012 (4610.0.55.007), http://www. abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Latestproducts/DC0DC8AAE4ECD727CA2574A5 001F803A?opendocument; ‘Agricultural State Profile, New South Wales, 2003-04 (7123.1.55.001)’, Australian Bureau of Statistics, accessed March 2012, http://www. abs.gov.au/Ausstats/[email protected]/Lookup/975A0F9AADA04961CA2570430078D77B ?opendocument. 5 ‘Growing Rice’, Ricegrowers’ Association of Australia, accessed March 2012, http://www.rga.org.au/about-rice/growing-rice.aspx; Garry Griffith and John Mullen, ‘Pricing-to-market in NSW Rice Export Markets’. Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics 45, 3 (2001): 323–34, 323. 6 ‘Marketing & Export’, Ricegrowers’ Association of Australia, accessed March 2012, http://www.rga.org.au/about-rice/marketing-export.aspx. Where rice is exported varies from year to year, depending on markets and demand. 7 ‘Environment Committee’ and ‘Press Cuttings 1’, Ricegrowers’ Association of Australia, organization archives, Leeton, NSW. These archives document criticisms from a range of individuals and groups, as well as responses to them by the Ricegrowers’ Association of Australia. See also, ‘Waste water – is Aussie rice worth the resources?’, ANU News, http://news.anu.edu.au/?p=547, accessed 15 June 2010. In 2005–6, rice growing accounted for 16 per cent (1,252 GL) of all agricultural water use in the Murray–Darling Basin; the fourth highest amount of water used for a single agricultural product in the area, exceeded only by cotton,

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dairy farming and pasture. ‘Water and the Murray-Darling Basin’, Australian Bureau of Statistics. In 2009–10, 100 percent of irrigated water use for rice was in the Murray–Darling Basin: ‘1301.0 - Year Book Australia, 2009–10’, Australian Bureau of Statistics, accessed March 2012, http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/ [email protected]/Lookup/1301.0Chapter3042009%E2%80%9310. For more on Australia’s climate history, including droughts, see Climate, Science, and Colonization: Histories from Australia and New Zealand, eds. James Beattie, O’Gorman and Matthew Henry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). R. Kingsford and R. Thomas, ‘Destruction of Wetlands and Waterbird Populations by Dams and Irrigation on the Murrumbidgee River in Arid Australia’. Environmental Management 34, 3 (2004): 383–96. J. M. Powell, Watering the Garden State: Water, Land and Community in Victoria, 1834–1988 (Sydney : Allen & Unwin, 1989), 40–1. Richard Waterhouse, The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia (Fremantle, WA: Curtin University Press, 2005), 200–1. Waterhouse, The Vision Splendid, 18–33; Michael Pearson and Jane Lennon, Pastoral Australia: Fortunes, Failures & Hard Yakka (Collingwood: CSIRO Publishing, 2010), 78, 84. Don Wright, ‘The River Murray: Microcosm of Australian Federal History’, in Federalism in Canada and Australia: The Early Years, eds. B. Hodgins, D. Wright, and W. H. Heick (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1978), 277–86; C. J. Lloyd, Either Drought or Plenty: Water Development and Management in New South Wales (Parramatta, NSW: Department of Water Resources New South Wales, 1988), esp. 164–88; Powell, Watering the Garden State, 136–44. Lloyd, Either Drought or Plenty, 199. Bill Gammage, ‘The Wiradjuri War, 1838–40’. The Push 16 (1983): 3–17, 14 and 15; Peter Rimas Kabaila , Wiradjuri Places: The Murrumbidgee River Basin with a Section on Ngunawal Country (Jamison Centre: Black Mountain Projects, 1995), especially 117–41. This is a complex history, which is discussed, for example, in Wiradjuri Places. Lloyd, Either Drought or Plenty, 201–12; Trevor Langford-Smith and John Rutherford, Water and Land: Two Case Studies in Irrigation (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1966), 33–43. Waterhouse, The Vision Splendid, 60–6. Lloyd, Either Drought or Plenty, 201–12; Langford-Smith and Rutherford, Water and Land, 33–43. Lloyd, Either Drought or Plenty, 206 and 208; Langford-Smith and Rutherford, Water and Land, 33–43. Lloyd, Either Drought or Plenty, 199 and 209–10; Langford-Smith and Rutherford, Water and Land, 25–9.

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20 Lloyd, Either Drought or Plenty, 198; Langford-Smith and Rutherford, Water and Land, 30–2 and 50–1. 21 Lloyd, Either Drought or Plenty, 199–212; Langford-Smith and Rutherford, Water and Land, 25–9 and 33–43. 22 Lloyd, Either Drought or Plenty, 210. 23 Lloyd, Either Drought or Plenty, 211–12; Langford-Smith and Rutherford, Water and Land, 49–52. 24 Waterhouse, The Vision Splendid, 200–5. 25 Lloyd, Either Drought or Plenty, 205–13; Langford-Smith and Rutherford, Water and Land, 46–9. 26 ‘Rice-Growing in New South Wales’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 27 (November 1916): 799–800. 27 Langford-Smith and Rutherford, Water and Land, 31. 28 Cameron Muir, The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An Environmental History (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2014), chs 2 and 3. 29 Lloyd, Either Drought or Plenty, 198–9 and 209–10; Langford-Smith and Rutherford, Water and Land, 25–32. 30 See, for example, ‘Rice-Growing in New South Wales’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 30 (November 1916): 799–800; and, ‘Rice Trials at Yanco Experiment Farm’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 32 (December 1921): 842. 31 Biographical details of the Takasuka family members that follow draw on: D. C. S. Sissons, ‘A Selector and His Family’. Hemisphere 25, 3 (November/ December 1980), 168–74, 169. 32 ‘Takasuka, J – Exemption [from dictation test] certificate’, A1. 1925/27767. National Archives of Australia; D. C. S. Sissons, ‘An Immigrant Family: The Takasukas’, unpublished manuscript in, Box 1, Folder 7, ‘Papers of D.C.S. Sissons’. MS3092. National Library of Australia. See also, Sissons, ‘A Selector and His Family’, 169. 33 Sissons, ‘A Selector and His Family’, 169. 34 Sissons, ‘A Selector and His Family’, 168–9 and 172; and, D. C. S. Sissons, ‘An Immigrant Family’. 35 Sissons, ‘A Selector and His Family’, 170. See also advertisements for the college and language teachers in: Reporter, 24 August 1906, 5; Reporter, 12 October 1906, 5; Camperdown Chronicle, 5 January 1907, 1; Camperdown Chronicle, 11 May 1907, 1. 36 ‘Takasuka, J – Exemption’. 37 ‘Takasuka, J – Exemption’; Sissons, ‘A Selector and His Family’, 170. 38 ‘Takasuka, J – Exemption’. 39 ‘Takasuka, J – Exemption’; Sissons, ‘A Selector and His Family’, 170; Swan Hill Local Land Board. 18 October 1906. Crown Lands 05075/204. In, Papers of D. C. S. Sissons. MS3092. National Library of Australia.

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40 ‘Takasuka, J – Exemption’. 41 Swan Hill Local Land Board. 42 Swan Hill Local Land Board. Later, in a letter to the Department of External Affairs, Takasuka also claimed to have based his farming methods on those in Texas (but did not mention having experience in farming there). See, Letter from J. Takasuka to Customs Excise Office. 12 March 1921. ‘Takasuka, J – Exemption’. 43 Swan Hill Local Land Board. 44 Sissons, ‘An Immigrant Family: The Takasukas’. 45 Sissons, ‘An Immigrant Family: The Takasukas’. 46 ‘Takasuka, J – Exemption’. 47 ‘Takasuka, J – Exemption’. 48 Letter from the Japanese Consulate-General to the Department of External Affairs. in ‘Takasuka, J – Exemption’. 49 A newspaper report in 1915 contradicts this official report, commenting that: ‘About seven years ago Mr. Takasuka brought out from Japan an expert to assist him for ten months in making initial experiments’, The Farmer and Settler, 26 October 1915, 7. 50 The Age, 12 April 1912, in ‘Takasuka, J – Exemption’. See also, The Mildura Cultivator, 17 April 1912, 4–5. 51 The Mildura Cultivator, 17 April 1912, 4–5. 52 The Farmer and Settler, 26 October 1915, 7. 53 ‘Takasuka, J – Exemption’; ‘Rice Culture in New South Wales’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 31 (April 1920): 232; Sissons, ‘A Selector and His Family’, 171. 54 ‘Rice Culture in New South Wales’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 31 (April 1920): 232. According to one newspaper report, the variety that was acclimatized to ‘Takasuka’ was Kahei: Kerang New Times, 15 June 1915, 4. 55 ‘Rice-Growing in New South Wales’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 27 (November 1916): 799–800; ‘Rice Culture in New South Wales’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 31 (April 1920): 232; Sissons, ‘A Selector and His Family’, 171; Gary Lewis, An Illustrated History of the Riverina Rice Industry (Leeton, NSW: Ricegrowers’ Co-operative Limited, 1994), 23–48. For an advertisement of ‘Takasuka’ seed, see for example: Leader, 27 November 1915, 5. 56 ‘Victorian Department of Agriculture’, in Box 12, ‘Papers of D.C.S. Sissons’. MS3092. National Library of Australia. 57 Irrigation Record, 1 September 1915, 16. 58 ‘Rice Culture in New South Wales’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 31 (April 1920): 232. See also, ‘Rice-Growing in New South Wales’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 27 (November 1916): 799–800; Lewis, An Illustrated History of the Riverina Rice Industry, 23–48. There is some possibility that trials of these Indian varieties may have also been undertaken in 1911 at Yanco

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Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire Experiment Farm and Hakwesbury Agricultural College. See, W. R. Watkins, ‘Rice-growing. Its Possibilities on the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Areas’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 37 (October 1926): 741–8, 741. Falvey, ‘History of Rice in Southeast Asia and Australia’, 216–17; Basinski, ‘A Review of Rice Growing in the Northern Territory and Western Australia’, 1; Robert J. Henry, Nicole Rice, Daniel L. E. Waters, Shabana Kasem et al., ‘Australian Oryza: Utility and Conservation’. Rice 3, 4 (2010): 235–41; J. F. Kellock, ‘The Early Queensland Story’, in Rice & Men: Queensland Rice Industry, 1869–1986, ed. K. Lewis (Ayr, Queensland: Lower Burdekin Rice Producers Co-operative Association, 1988), 12–52, 12–16; Sydney Morning Herald, 27 September 1858, 4; ‘Rice Culture in New South Wales’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 31 (April 1920): 232; W. R. Watkins, ‘Rice-growing. Its Possibilities on the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Areas’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 37 (October 1926): 741–8, 741. Muir, The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress, chs 2 and 3; George Main, Heartland: The Regeneration of Rural Place (Sydney : UNSW Press, 2005), 47–52; Adele Wessell, ‘Dairy Chains: Consumer Foodways and Agricultural Landscapes’. Coolabah 5 (2011): 251–60, 255; Jodi Frawley, ‘Poison Plots and Prickly Pear: Jean White and the Prickly Pear Experimental Station, Dulacca, 1912-1916’, in Outside Country: Histories of Inland Australia, eds. Alan Mayne and Stephen Atkinson (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2011), 43–62. ‘Rice-Growing in New South Wales’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 27 (November 1916): 799–800. W. R. Watkins, ‘Rice-growing. Its Possibilities on the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Areas’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 37 (October 1926): 741–8, 741; ‘Rice Culture in New South Wales’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 31 (April 1920): 232; ‘Rice-Growing in New South Wales’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 27 (November 1916): 799–800; Cowra Free Press, 29 May 1920, 3. Letter from the Director of Agriculture to the Department of External Affairs. 11 July 1919. ‘Takasuka, J – Exemption’; Sissons, ‘A Selector and His Family’, 171. ‘Takasuka, J – Exemption’; Sissons, ‘A Selector and His Family’, 171. ‘Takasuka, J – Exemption’; Sissons, ‘A Selector and His Family’, 171. Sissons, ‘A Selector and His Family’, 172. ‘Rice Culture in New South Wales’, 232. Lewis, An Illustrated History of the Riverina Rice Industry, 34; Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860–1930 (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1999), 159; Langford-Smith and Rutherford, Water and Land, 57. The NSW Department of Agriculture had shown earlier interest in techniques of rice growing and the adaptation of Japanese

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varieties in the USA (mostly in the southern states): E. O’Kelly, ‘Rice-growing in America’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 3 (September 1892): 660–5; ‘Japanese Rice’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 12 (November 1901): 1385–9. Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods, 4–10; Allan Black, ‘The Genesis of Australian Agricultural Colleges in the Nineteenth Century’. Australian Journal of Politics and History 21, 1 (1972): 42–55, 46. See also, Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods, 121. Lloyd, Either Drought or Plenty, 119; Katrina Proust, ‘Learning From The Past For Sustainability: Towards and Integrated Approach’ (PhD diss., Australian National University, September 2004), ‘Appendix E, Hugh McKinney: A Colonial Engineer’, 293–312. A. Deakin, Indian Irrigation, quoted in Heather Goodall, ‘Digging Deeper: Ground Tanks and the Elusive Indian Archipelago’, in Beyond the Black Stump: Histories of Outback Australia, ed. Mayne (Kent Town, South Australia: Wakefield Press, 2008), 129–60, 158. Lloyd, Either Drought or Plenty, 175; Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods, 121–43; Powell, Watering the Garden State, 104–35; Proust, ‘Learning From The Past For Sustainability’, 153–63. McKinney drew on knowledge from India about the connection between irrigation and soil salinization as well as ideas about the opportunities for irrigation in Australia. See, Powell, The Emergence of Bioregionalism in The Murray-Darling Basin (Canberra: Murray-Darling Basin Commission, 1993), 80; Hugh McKinney, ‘Irrigation In Upper India’. Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales 17 (1881): 139–48, especially 146–8. Tyrell, True Gardens of the Gods, 122; Proust, ‘Learning From The Past For Sustainability’, 153–63. Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods, 111–12. Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods, 4–5. Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods, 172–3; Powell, The Emergence of Bioregionalism in The Murray-Darling Basin, 48–50. Lloyd, Either Drought or Plenty, 215; Langford-Smith and Rutherford, Water and Land, 54–72. Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods, 160; Lloyd, Either Drought or Plenty, 215–18; Langford-Smith and Rutherford, Water and Land, 56–72. It is unclear whether John Brady brought these varieties back from California, ordered them, or someone else from the Department of Agriculture ordered them. A. N. Shepherd, ‘Rice-growing on the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Areas’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 34 (August 1923): 583–7; A. N. Shepherd, ‘Yanco Irrigation Area’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 25 (August 1924):

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Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire 560–4; A. N. Shepherd, ‘Rice Growing’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 35 (December 1924): 855–8, 858; Watkins, ‘Rice-growing. Its Possibilities on the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Areas’, 742–4; W. Poggendorff, ‘Varieties of Rice’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 39 (July 1928): 505–8. Trials of these Californian varieties of rice were also undertaken in 1923 and 1924, and 1924 and 1925 at the Coonamble Experiment Farm, north of Dubbo, NSW. L. J. Green, ‘Field Experiments With Rice’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 35 (August 1924): 555–60; Green, ‘Field Experiments With Rice’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 36 (August 1925): 581–7. Rice: The World’s Main Food Crop, Royal Easter show pamphlet (1965), 7. Rice Growing in New South Wales (Sydney : New South Wales Government Printer, c. 1948), 2. W. R. Watkins, an Agricultural Instructor, gave a different figure of the area planted to rice in 1924–5 in the MIA, stating that ‘143 acres were cropped’. Watkins, ‘Rice-growing. Its Possibilities on the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Areas’, 742. Lloyd, Either Drought or Plenty, 217. Estimates of the area and amount of rice produced in 1933 and 1934 vary among sources and depend on whether the measures are for cleaned rice, delivered paddy, or total paddy harvested. Figures given here are for total paddy harvested and area is that given in Rice Growing in New South Wales (Sydney : New South Wales Government Printer, c. 1948), 2. See also, ‘Rice Statistics. 1929–37’. ‘Agriculture – Division of Marketing and Economics. Correspondence, 1926–73’. 200. 10/25451. 384A. Watkins, ‘Rice-growing. Its Possibilities on the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Areas’, 748; ‘Rice Statistics. 1929–37’; ‘Integration of Animal and Crop Production’. 200. 10/35499. 68/1132. State Records NSW. See, ‘Crops Rice, Miscellaneous’ (1969–75), VPRS 3477/P0001/95, Public Records Office Victoria; ‘Crops Rice, Miscellaneous’ (1947–69), VPRS 3477/P0001/95, PROV; ‘Crops Rice, Miscellaneous’, VPRS 3477/P0001/95, (1927–47). These archives contain Victorian State government responses to enquiries about rice growing in Victoria. Many of these letters and memos explain that rice is not grown because of concerns about water and the agreement with NSW. Watkins, ‘Rice-growing. Its Possibilities on the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Areas’, 747. A rice research station was established in 1928. ‘Investigations at Yanco Rice Research Station’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 44 (August 1933): 602. Watkins, ‘Rice-growing. Its Possibilities on the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Areas’, 741. Without motorized machinery a large amount of labour was needed to grow rice. For instance, the role of north African slaves in establishing rice cultivation in southern America is examined by Judith Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1–2. Carney

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has argued that these slaves were central not only to the establishment of rice growing as a labour force, but also because they brought with them the knowledge and skills of cultivating the crop. Rice in Australia, 2; Rice: The World’s Main Food Crop, 7; Watkins, ‘Rice-growing. Its Possibilities on the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Areas’, 747. Carole Shammas, ‘Food Expenditures and Economic Well-Being in Early Modern England’. Journal of Economic History 43, 1 (March 1983): 89–100, 98 and 99. See, for example, South Australian Chronicle and Weekly Mail, 2 January 1869, 4; South Australian Chronicle and Weekly Mail, 30 May 1868, 12; The Daily News (Perth), 25 September 1915, 10. Watkins, ‘Rice-growing. Its Possibilities on the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Areas’, 747. See also, ‘Export possibilities of rice gown in area. 1925-26’. NRS14511. 17/643. 25/4138. SRNSW. Western Argus (Kalgoorlie, WA), 28 May 1929, 8; The Brisbane Courier, 24 May 1929, 12. Rice Production. General File (Parts A and B). 1935–60 – NRS202. 7/12133. SF28 (P.I. 41/3047). SRNSW. See also, The Land, 27 February 1931, 3. Sydney Morning Herald, 13 September 1929, 12. Sydney Morning Herald, 13 September 1929, 12. Sydney Morning Herald, 13 July 1932, 9. Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Carlton South, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2002), especially 97–122. See also, Watkins, ‘Rice-growing. Its Possibilities on the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Areas’, 741. This corrects an earlier statement that the market for rice produced in Australia was domestic until the Second World War. O’Gorman, ‘Growing Rice on the Murrumbidgee River: Cultures, Politics, and Practices of Food Production and Water Use, 1900 to 2012’. Journal of Australian Studies 37, 1 (2013): 96–115, 104. The need for British preference was expressed, for instance, in: The Land, 11 March 1938, 3. Although the Empire Marketing Board was abolished in 1933, it was replaced by a system of imperial preference that similarly promoted the trade, and production, of foods and goods within the Empire. John O’Brien, ‘Empire v. National Interests in Australian-British Relations During the 1930s’. Australian Historical Studies 22, 89 (1987): 569–86. ‘Rice Production.’ General File (Parts A and B). 1935–60 – NRS202. 7/12133. SF28 (P.I. 41/3047). SRNSW. Sydney Morning Herald, April 1931, 7. See, Stephen Constantine, ‘Anglo-Canadian relations, the Empire Marketing Board and Canadian national autonomy between the wars’. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 21, 2 (1993): 357–84. ‘Rice Production’.

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104 ‘Rice Statistics. 1938–57’; James C. Scott, ‘An Approach to the Problems of Food Supply in Southeast Asia During World War Two’, in Agriculture and Food Supply in the Second World War, eds. Bernd Martin and Alan S. Milward (St. Katharinen, Germany ; Scripta Mercaturae Verlag, 1985), 269–82, 275–81. 105 Paul H. Kratoska, ‘Commercial Rice Cultivation and the Regional Economy of Southern Asia’, in Food and Globalization: Consumption, Markets and Politics in the Modern World, eds. Alexander Nützenadel and Frank Trentmann (Oxford: Berg, 2008), 75–90, 78. 106 Rice: The World’s Main Food Crop, 8; Marnie Haig-Muir, ‘The Wakool Wartime Rice-growing Project and Its Impact on Regional Development’. Australian Economic History Review 39, 2 (1996): 56–76, 66–9. 107 Lewis, An Illustrated History of the Riverina Rice Industry, 109–10; Haig-Muir, ‘The Wakool Wartime Rice-growing Project’, 69–70. 108 ‘Rice Growing in Papua and New Guinea’. Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 64 (June 1953): 294–7, 294. 109 ‘The Effect of the 1944–45 Drought on Production.’ 200. 10/25484. 63/311. State Records NSW. 110 ‘Rice Statistics. 1938–57’. 111 ‘Rice Growing in Papua and New Guinea’, 294. 112 J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World (New York: Norton, 2000), 219–21; Alexander Nützenadel and Frank Trentmann, ‘Introduction’, in Food and Globalization: Consumption, Markets and Politics in the Modern World, eds. Alexander Nützenadel and Frank Trentmann (Oxford: Berg, 2008), 1–18, 11–12; Ruth Jachertz, ‘Coping With Hunger? Visions of a Global Food System’. Journal of Global History 6 (2011): 99–119, 101–12. 113 ‘Rice Growing in Papua and New Guinea’, 294. 114 ‘Rice Growing in Papua and New Guinea’, 294. 115 Haig-Muir, ‘The Wakool Wartime Rice-growing Project’, 64–6. 116 Rice: The World’s Main Food Crop, 9. 117 O’Gorman, Flood Country, 137. 118 Libby Robin, How a Continent Created a Nation (Sydney : UNSW Press, 2007), 125–6 and 138–43. 119 K. Lewis, ‘Introduction: Part I’, in Rice & Men: Queensland Rice Industry, 1869–1986, ed. K. Lewis (Ayr, Queensland: Lower Burdekin Rice Producers Co-operative Association, 1988), 1. 120 Basinski, ‘A Review of Rice Growing in the Northern Territory and Western Australia’, 1–3; Falvey, ‘History of Rice in Southeast Asia and Australia’, 217–18. 121 McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 219–26; Kratoska, ‘Commercial Rice Cultivation and the Regional Economy of Southern Asia’, 86–7.

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122 Muir, ‘Feeding the World’. Griffith Review 27 (2010): 59–73. 123 Lewis, An Illustrated History of the Riverina Rice Industry, 168–211; Falvey, ‘History of Rice in Southeast Asia and Australia’, 220. 124 Haig-Muir, ‘The Wakool Wartime Rice-growing Project’, 72–3; Main, Heartland, 184–9. 125 Daniel Connell, Water Politics in the Murray-Darling Basin (Canberra: Federation Press, 2007), 17.

Select bibliography Anderson, Warwick. The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia. Carlton South, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2002. Beattie, James, Emily O’Gorman, and Matthew Henry (eds), Climate, Science, and Colonization: Histories from Australia and New Zealand. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Brooking, T. and E. Pawson. Seeds of Empire: The Environmental Transformation of New Zealand. London: I. B. Tauris, 2011. Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Frawley, Jodi and Heather Goodall. ‘Transforming Saltbush: Science, Mobility, and Metaphor in the Remaking of Intercolonial Worlds’. Conservation and Society 11, 2 (2013): 76–186. Gammage, Bill. ‘The Wiradjuri War, 1838–40’. The Push 16 (1983): 3–17. Goodall, Heather. ‘Digging Deeper: Ground Tanks and the Elusive Indian Archipelago’, in Beyond the Black Stump: Histories of Outback Australia, ed. Alan Mayne. Kent Town, South Australia: Wakefield Press, 2008, 129–60. Haig-Muir, Marnie. ‘The Wakool Wartime Rice-growing Project and Its Impact on Regional Development’. Australian Economic History Review 39, 2 (1996): 56–76. Klingle, Matthew W. ‘Spaces of Consumption in Environmental History’. History and Theory, Theme Issue 42 (2003): 94–110. Langford-Smith, Trevor and John Rutherford. Water and Land: Two Case Studies in Irrigation. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1966. Lloyd, C. J. Either Drought or Plenty: Water Development and Management in New South Wales. Parramatta, NSW: Department of Water Resources New South Wales, 1988. Main, George. Heartland: The Regeneration of Rural Place. Sydney : UNSW Press, 2005. McNeill, J. R. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World. New York: Norton, 2000. Muir, Cameron. The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An Environmental History. London: Routledge 2014.

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Nützenadel, Alexander, and Frank Trentmann (eds), Food and Globalization: Consumption, Markets and Politics in the Modern World. Oxford: Berg, 2008. Powell, J. M. Watering the Garden State: Water, Land and Community in Victoria, 1834–1988. Sydney : Allen & Unwin, 1989. —The Emergence of Bioregionalism in The Murray-Darling Basin. Canberra: MurrayDarling Basin Commission, 1993. Robin, Libby. How a Continent Created a Nation. Sydney : UNSW Press, 2007. Scott, James C. ‘An Approach to the Problems of Food Supply in Southeast Asia During World War Two’, in Agriculture and Food Supply in the Second World War, eds. Bernd Martin and Alan S. Milward. St. Katharinen, Germany : Scripta Mercaturae Verlag, 1985, 269–82. Sissons, D. C. S. ‘A Selector and His Family’. Hemisphere 25, 3 (November/December 1980): 168–74. Tyrrell, Ian. True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860–1930. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1999. Waterhouse, Richard. The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia. Fremantle, WA: Curtin University Press, 2005.

11

Animals and Urban Environments: Managing Domestic Animals in Nineteenth-Century Winnipeg Sean Kheraj

On 18 April 1879, Andrew Boyd’s cow died. Mr Boyd was a licensed dairyman who kept several cows in Winnipeg, supplying the young city with fresh milk for many of its more than 4,000 residents. While grazing in the city one morning, one of Mr Boyd’s cows wandered onto the municipal nuisance grounds to take a meal. Feasting on garbage, as it turned out, proved to be fatal. The unfortunate beast died, leaving the dairyman with one fewer cow for his business. Estimating the value of his cow at about $60, Andrew Boyd petitioned Winnipeg’s city council for compensation. He argued that he was entitled to some form of reimbursement for his loss because the city dump, was ‘not fenced, and there [was] no protection against cows eating garbage deposited in the said nuisance ground’. The city council, according to Boyd, had produced a hazard for which it was responsible to offer some form of protection for his urban cattle. Boyd’s recommendation was to fence the garbage, not the cows.1 The death of Andrew Boyd’s cow points to one of the primary challenges municipal governments in Canada faced in the nineteenth century – the management and regulation of domestic animals within emerging urban environments. Winnipeg and other cities were not exclusively human spaces; they were multi-species habitats, inhabited by human beings and domestic animals alike. As Andrea Gaynor has found in the case of Australian suburbs, ‘it is hard to imagine that they were once home to an assortment of agricultural practices – a dairy here, a market garden there, a piggery down by the river’. Domestic livestock animals played a particularly important role in urban development as sources of food and labour. Cows, horses, pigs and other domestic animals

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were once everyday sights on the streets of Canadian cities where they lived and worked alongside their human owners. As this chapter shows, Winnipeg’s city council and municipal staff attempted to use by-law regulations to bring order to this ecosystem in which humans exploited domestic animals for work, food and companionship. According to William J. Novak, such by-law regulations were intended to facilitate the ‘central attributes of nineteenth-century conceptions of good governance and well-ordered society’, which included the ability to ‘regulate trade and secure an urban food supply, to promote internal improvements and manage public properties, and to guarantee the safety and security of the populace’. As such, these regulations helped to establish Winnipeg as an environment intended to sustain both human and domestic animal populations in what can be described as an asymmetrical symbiotic relationship. That is to say, both humans and domestic animals thrived in the city, but humans derived greater benefit and advantage from this relationship. In the nineteenth century, Winnipeggers lived among many different species of animals and they were dependent upon the bodies and energy of those animals for the maintenance of a habitable urban environment.2 British, European, American and Canadian immigrants often envisioned the colonization and resettlement of the Canadian West as a civilizing mission. As George Colpitts illustrates in his analysis of the changing relationship between humans and wildlife in Western Canada, many immigrants arrived expecting to encounter wild animals in an untamed and uncivilized environment. For example, L. M. Fortier, Chief Clerk of the Immigration Department for the Canadian federal government, recounted a story of a government travelling agent in the early twentieth century who had to dissuade a new European immigrant ‘from investing some of his small capital in firearms and knives to kill buffalo, wolves and other wild animals which his fellow passengers had persuaded him were to be encountered in the streets of Winnipeg’. Instead, the streets of Winnipeg at the turn of the century were filled with cattle, horses, pigs, sheep and chickens, animals which themselves were immigrants in the North American environment.3 Urban livestock animals were critical components of the expansion of the British Empire and the Dominion of Canada. ‘Empire’, according to James Beattie, ‘gave rise to environmental change never before experienced in human history’. In the case of nineteenth-century Canadian expansion into the Northwest, the introduction of novel species of domestic animals, including cattle, horses and pigs, was one of the most ecologically transformative

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moments in the region’s history. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, previously unknown species of animals spread throughout the prairies, replacing the disappearing herds of North American plains bison. As Alfred Crosby reveals in his groundbreaking research on Europe’s imperial demographic takeover of what he calls ‘Neo-Europes’, domestic livestock animals, along with novel diseases and Eurasian food plants, played a pivotal role in the biological expansion of Europe from 900 to 1900. Domestic livestock animals in North America were, as Virginia DeJohn Anderson argues, ‘creatures of empire’, novel species that accompanied and assisted European colonists with territorial expansion and the displacement of Aboriginal people.4 However important these animals were to the expansion of the agricultural frontier in North America, they also played a critical role in the development of towns and cities. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Canadian West, urbanization and railway construction drove colonization and massive agricultural expansion. The emergence and development of Winnipeg as a regional metropolitan centre occurred almost concurrently with the widespread introduction of domestic livestock animals to the Canadian Prairies. To fully understand the role of domestic animals as novel species and creatures of empire then, historians must also consider those that roamed the streets of emerging urban environments.5 Insights from urban environmental history can be usefully applied to studies of the ecological consequences of British imperialism. Urban historians, including Martin Melosi, Christine Meisner Rosen, Joel Tarr, Harold Platt and others have all attempted to examine human–nature relations within cities and the environmental consequences and effects of city building. Most recently, Melosi has called upon urban environmental historians to move away from what he calls a ‘nature/built environment nexus’, a conceptual framework where cities are divided into two environments, ‘a natural world that tends to exclude humans, and an artificial world – a built environment – that is solely the product of human action’. Melosi contends that historians continue to treat built environments as artificial and outside of nature rather than part of a single ecosystem composed of human and non-human organisms. Urban environments, of course, are embedded within the material world, and they are subject to the same environmental influences and principles as anywhere else. To understand British imperialism as a global extension of eco-cultural networks, cities must be incorporated into this analysis. As such, the role of introduced domestic animals in the British Empire must be explored not only for its effects

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on agriculture on the rural frontier, but also for its place within emerging towns and cities.6 The study of animals helps to move urban environmental history beyond this dichotomy of nature/built environment by treating cities as ecosystems that accommodate numerous species rather than as exclusively human habitat. Urban environmental history scholarship, however, has been slow to integrate studies of animals into the history of cities, instead focusing almost exclusively on the impact of humans on the natural environment. For instance, Bernd Herrmann contends that ‘in terms of environmental history, cities are specific environments of a specific species, comparable to large-scale beaver lodges or termite mounds’. The relationships between multiple species, however, influence the formation of even beaver lodges and termite mounds, as they do cities more broadly. Peter Atkins attributes the absence of animals from urban history to an anthropocentric view of cities in the twentieth century in which ‘the category “urban” acquired a transcendentally humanist quality in which animals played only bit parts, to satisfy our hunger for companionship or for meat’. To correct this view, Jennifer Wolch, Kathleen West and Thomas E. Gaines have called for a ‘transspecies urban theory’ that foregrounds a spectrum of human–animal relations in cities. New historical research by Jennifer Mason, Joel Tarr, Clay McShane, Catherine McNeur, Etienne Benson, Dawn Day Biehler and others has begun to breakdown this anthropocentric view, shedding new light on historical processes of urbanization that encompass human and non-human animal actors. This study of Winnipeg adds to this research, demonstrating the ways in which humans and domestic animals both shaped and constructed urban environments on the frontier of Canadian imperial expansion into the prairies.7

Early Winnipeg’s domestic animal population The city of Winnipeg, situated at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers in southern Manitoba, was incorporated in November 1873. The city itself was centred on a small cluster of businesses and homes at the intersection of two former wagon trails, Main and Portage roads, and encompassed parts of the former Red River colony and the Hudson’s Bay Company property at Upper Fort Garry. Following Manitoba’s troubled 1870 entry into the Canadian confederation, the village of Winnipeg grew slowly in the early years of that

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decade as migrants from Central Canada, the United States, and abroad began to resettle in the southern part of the province. By 1874, the population of Winnipeg had swelled to roughly 3,700 people in a relatively concentrated central core of settlement. The economy of Manitoba during this period transitioned from a focus on the export of furs to the development of agriculture, and Winnipeg emerged as a regional metropolitan centre and agricultural market. It was, according to Alan Artibise, ‘the first truly urban community in the British Northwest’.8 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Winnipeg was an overwhelmingly multi-species environment, composed of human and domestic animal populations. Census data provide the very rough contours of the populations of certain domestic animal species in Canadian cities. Although census records are very limited, ultimately representing only a snapshot of urban animals in nineteenth-century Winnipeg, they nevertheless offer useful insights. The census, of course, is an imperfect record inevitably shaped by the processes of enumeration.9 Because many of these animals were destined for the dinner plates of their human owners, any demographic record of urban animals can only possibly offer a static representation of what was a dynamic and fluctuating population. Furthermore, the timing of the census count could not capture the seasonal variability of the urban animal population. Despite these limitations, census records provide a picture of what was an intermixed urban environment, one in which humans and domestic animals clearly shared space. Domestic animals were an inescapable fact of urban life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.10 Beginning in 1861, Canadian census enumerators collected demographic data about domestic animals in cities, towns and villages. The Bureau of Agriculture and Statistics first established the practice of counting livestock along with people on both farms and individual family dwellings within major cities in Canada West (part of the Canadian colony that would later become the province of Ontario), including Hamilton, Kingston, London, Ottawa and Toronto, for the 1860–1 census.11 After Confederation, the Dominion Bureau of Statistics continued the practice of gathering data regarding the keeping of animals in cities, tracking the populations of a variety of species of animals, including horses, oxen, dairy cows, ‘other horned cattle’, sheep, swine and even hives of bees. The 1891 census added fowl to the count, including turkeys, geese, ducks, chickens and ‘other fowl’. In 1911, during Canada’s fifth census, enumerators continued to gather data on urban animal populations as they were specifically instructed

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that ‘[w]here grain, fruit and root crops are grown, and domestic animals are kept, and fruit trees, vines, small fruits, etc., are planted, in Cities, Towns and Villages, the statistics of them (including values) should be taken as carefully as the statistics of crops and animals on farms’.12 Although these census records excluded animals from industrial operations and other businesses, including street railway stables, dairies and piggeries, they nonetheless offer a glimpse into the history of domestic animals in Canadian cities. Census records between 1891 and 1911 reveal the extent to which domestic animals were ubiquitous in the urban environment of Winnipeg. Canadian census enumerators consistently recorded the populations of five species of domestic animals said to be living on individual lots in Winnipeg. These included horses, cows, sheep, pigs and chickens. The demographic histories of these species of domestic animals provide insight into the changing environment of Winnipeg in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the city experienced rapid industrialization and urban growth. In 1891, these five species of domestic animals constituted 41 per cent of all species enumerated in the census, including humans (Figure 11.1). The domestic animal population of Winnipeg changed alongside transformations of the urban environment and the human population of the city. Winnipeg experienced extraordinary human population growth during the period from 1871 to 1911 (Figure 11.2). This was especially evident in the population boom between 1901 and 1911 when the city’s resident population jumped from 42,340 to 136,035. In contrast to the growth of the human population of the city, domestic animals became a smaller proportion of the species enumerated in the census relative to human population growth in the years

17672 41% 25639 59%

Non-human Human

Figure 11.1 Human and non-human populations of Winnipeg, 1891. Source: Census of Canada, 1890-91 Vol. 4 (Ottawa: 1897).

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after 1901. For example, of the four predominant large domestic ungulate species documented in the census, the cow and horse populations saw growth between 1891 and 1901, but witnessed significant decline thereafter (Figure 11.3). Similarly, the chicken population – although more numerous 160000 Humans 140000 120000 100000 80000 60000 40000 20000 0 1871

1881

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Figure 11.2 Human population of Winnipeg, 1871–1911. Source: Alan Artibise, Winnipeg: A Social History of Urban Growth, 1874-1914 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975), 130–31.

3000

Number of animals

2500 2000

Horses Milch cows

1500

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500 0

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Figure 11.3 Large domestic ungulate population of Winnipeg, 1891–1911. Sources: Census of Canada, 1890-91 Vol. 4 (Ottawa: 1897); Fourth Census of Canada, 1901: Natural Products Vol. 2 (Ottawa: 1904); Census of Canada, 1911: Agriculture Vol. 4 (Ottawa: 1914).

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Chickens

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14000 12000 10000 8000 6000 4000 2000 0

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Figure 11.4 Chicken population of Winnipeg, 1891–1911. Sources: Census of Canada, 1890–91 Vol. 4 (Ottawa: 1897); Fourth Census of Canada, 1901: Natural Products Vol. 2 (Ottawa: 1904); Census of Canada, 1911: Agriculture Vol. 4 (Ottawa: 1914).

than any other domestic animals enumerated in the census – declined between 1901 and 1911 (Figure 11.4). Prior to 1901, the census data for the City of Winnipeg shows an increase in the urban domestic animal population followed by a sharp decline. The transformation of the city from a habitat with a mix of humans and domestic animals to one in which domestic animal populations were proportionally smaller can be explained by a number of different factors, including the replacement of horse-drawn trams with electric-powered street railway technology, the effects of crowding, and the difficulty of keeping large domestic animals in confined spaces. Other factors included the decline of available pasture through urban sprawl, the development of large-scale animal slaughtering facilities (allowing urban residents to purchase cut meats rather than raise their own animals) and changing municipal by-law regulations related to the keeping of animals in the city.

Nineteenth-century animal by-laws Domestic animals were so ubiquitous within the emerging urban environment of Winnipeg that they immediately fell under the authority of the municipal government, following the incorporation of the city in 1873. The Manitoba

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legislature granted the city a wide range of powers within the city charter to regulate the domestic urban animal population. The charter included powers to protect the interests of both animals and humans. For example, the city council had the authority to pass by-laws ‘for preventing cruelty to animals’, and ‘for restraining or regulating the running at large of any animals’. In addition to setting the rules for live animals, the city was also responsible for managing their slaughter, the sale and distribution of meats, the processing of animal fats and other by-products, as well as the disposal of animal bodies and waste.13 The city council immediately exercised its authority over domestic animals in some of Winnipeg’s first municipal by-laws. These included a wide array of by-law regulations relating to nuisances, streets, public markets, dog taxes, pounds, livery stables and public health. It is evident from the earliest by-laws concerning domestic animals in Winnipeg that the city council sought to bring order to the multi-species urban environment through a series of regulations that managed the exploitation of domestic animals for human benefit. These animal by-laws shared a number of common characteristics. First, they sought to manage property relations between city residents. As Mark Fiege has demonstrated in the case of airborne weeds in the American West, there has historically been an ‘incompatibility of human boundaries and forms of mobile nature – water, soil and organisms – that those boundaries could not contain’. Because they are living, moving organisms and property, domestic animals complicated property relations even further. As a form of mobile property, domestic animals transgressed static property boundaries and threatened to damage buildings, fencing and other forms of stationary property. Similarly, physical structures could cause harm to the roaming domestic livestock property of city residents. City by-laws attempted to balance these competing – and potentially incompatible – property interests, with the desire to facilitate unimpeded movement, transportation and shipping throughout the urban environment.14 Second, Winnipeg’s early animal by-laws demonstrated concern over matters related to public health, and were influenced by prevailing notions of disease dissemination associated with the miasma theory. In the nineteenth century, Canadian, US and British city dwellers shared a common belief that illness was caused by inhaling bad-smelling air, known as miasma. According to Adam Rome, nineteenth-century US public health officials and urban reformers believed that ‘the decay of organic matter caused air-borne sickness’. Peter Thorsheim has shown, through his analysis of the changing definitions of air pollution, that public health regulations in nineteenth-century Britain first

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focused on ‘an invisible gas thought to be given off by decaying plant and animal matter’. Because of this prevailing thinking about disease, city regulations in Winnipeg targeted decaying organic matter and even living organisms as sources of pollution. This had direct implications for the regulation of domestic urban animals. In his history of public health regulation in early Winnipeg, Artibise argues that ‘of all the city’s various departments that of health suffered most from neglect in the years preceding 1900’. Yet his analysis does not acknowledge the earliest efforts to construct a regulatory framework for public health during a period Martin Melosi characterizes as the ‘age of miasmas’, which focused in large part on the management of urban livestock animals. While a major typhoid outbreak in 1903 and 1904 led to the establishment of a more elaborate and formal public health system with greater powers and resources, this was built atop a regulatory structure designed, in part, to manage domestic animals and their relationship with the urban environment as potential sources of miasma. Urban animal management in nineteenth-century Winnipeg focused on the interactions among humans, animals and the built environment in order to mitigate and abate perceived adverse health effects.15 The third characteristic of Winnipeg’s by-laws governing the keeping of animals in the city was that, in addition to seeking to protect human health, they also sought to protect animal health. Such modest animal protection provisions in these by-laws had multiple influences, including new thinking about human– animal relations encompassing anti-cruelty arguments in the late nineteenth century in Britain, the United States and Canada (see also Chapter 8). In 1894, social welfare reformers in Winnipeg followed trends in other parts of Canada and the rest of the British Empire by forming the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Women, Children and Animals. These organizations, according to Georgia Sitara, shared two interconnected goals, ‘kindness to animals and civilizing human behaviour’. By the end of the nineteenth century, Winnipeg’s animal by-laws began to reflect some of these anti-cruelty interests, but they always embodied some protections for animals as forms of property. Because horses, cattle, pigs, chickens and other domestic animals were valuable sources of capital as food and labour, the city council’s by-laws demonstrated concern for the well-being of animals even prior to the formal organization of anti-cruelty societies in the city.16 Finally, these early by-laws were, for the most part, non-exclusionary. That is to say, prior to 1900, Winnipeg’s city council set restrictions on animal husbandry within the urban environment, but the city’s by-law regulations did not entirely exclude domestic animals. Bettina Bradbury’s pioneering research

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on urban animals in Montreal from 1861 to 1891 reveals the centrality of smallscale livestock husbandry to the economy of families in the city during this period. In spite of municipal efforts to control and constrain the keeping of pigs in Montreal, city authorities did not entirely exclude livestock husbandry in the nineteenth century. The same was true in the case of Winnipeg. In fact, nineteenth-century urban animal regulations created legitimate space within the law for animals to live and work in the city.17

Scavenging and public health Urban domestic animal management in nineteenth-century Winnipeg sought to mitigate adverse health effects on both humans and animals resulting from interactions among animals, humans and the built environment. This approach to municipal regulation of urban animals is evident in the city’s first scavenging by-law, passed in March 1874. This regulation was the city’s eighth by-law, passed even before the by-law that determined the guidelines for the proceedings of council. The scavenging by-law offered a simple licensing system for the removal of solid waste, night soil, manure, and the disposal and burial of animal bodies. The city contracted this work to individuals who purchased annual scavenging licenses, which set guidelines for hauling fees and rates. It also established a municipal nuisance ground for the disposal of urban waste products, including the large quantities of manure and numbers of animal bodies found in city streets. The council hired James Collins and Charles Granger as the first licensed scavengers for the removal and disposal of animal and other waste products in order to better manage the health of the urban environment, fearing that decaying animal bodies and waste would emit harmful miasmas. A year later, the city council passed a more detailed scavenging by-law, which set out specific duties and obligations for scavengers. Under the 1875 by-law, the city required scavengers to retrieve and remove at the request of the Chief of Police any ‘nuisance, offal, garbage, night soil, manure, or other offensive matter on City or in or upon any premises, house, lot, or enclosure within the City of Winnipeg’. Because much of this waste came from urban animals, scavengers were permitted to charge specific rates for the removal of manure and animal bodies. For instance, dead horses and cattle were collected at $2 apiece, while smaller animals, such as sheep and pigs, went for half the cost at $1. The work of city scavengers addressed some of the earliest public-health concerns associated with domestic animals as environmental hazards in Winnipeg. Eventually, by

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1899, the regulation of scavengers fell under the auspices of the city health officer.18 The earliest scavenging by-laws were just one component of the city’s approach to regulating the potential public health and environmental hazards associated with domestic animals. The first public health by-law for the city of Winnipeg was overwhelmingly focused on the management of domestic animals. Passed by the council in May 1874, this by-law included thirty separate clauses, fifteen of which pertained specifically to the control of livestock animals and animal by-products. The first section of the by-law offered a simple and limited set of rules to guard the urban food supply by prohibiting the sale or import of any ‘tainted, damaged or unwholesome fish, meat, fruit, vegetables, or article of food of any kind whatsoever’. Most of the regulations in the public health by-law were intended to supervise the relationship between animals and the surrounding urban environment to mitigate the impact of animals as a pollutant. For instance, water carters were forbidden from drawing water from ‘any water hole, or opening in the ice, used as a watering place by cattle, horses, or other animals, and which by reason of such use, or from any other cause, has become foul or impure’. All city residents were prohibited from depositing ‘any dead carcass, manure, filth, dust, or any offensive matter or substance whatever’ on any city lot within the municipal boundaries of Winnipeg. Should an animal die within the city, its owner was required to have it ‘buried at least four feet below the surface or drawn or removed beyond the limits of the City’. Again, to prevent contamination and to control animal bodies as a source of urban pollution, the public health by-law specifically banned the disposal of animal carcasses in any place it may come into contact with flowing or standing water, including any ‘ditch, coolie, sewer, or drain, in the City or in the River opposite the City’. The Chief of Police was ultimately responsible for ordering the disposal of all unclaimed animal carcasses and therefore had the power to direct licensed scavengers to carry out this duty.19 Guided by the prevailing miasmic theory of disease dissemination, the city council sought to limit the contamination of Winnipeg’s air by foul smells through the regulation of the conditions of animal-keeping on private property. Animals were not outlawed by such regulations. In fact, the early public health regulations in Winnipeg merely established rudimentary controls over what was considered a very necessary urban animal populace. The public health by-law stipulated that ‘any person who shall keep swine, dogs, foxes, or such other Animals on their premises, shall maintain the houses, buildings or pens in which the same shall be kept in such a clean state that the neighbors or passengers

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may not be incommoded by the smell therefrom’. Similarly, any businesses that kept animals or handled animal by-products and allowed ‘such establishments or premises to become nauseous, foul, or offensive, [were] liable to the penalties provided’. This was especially true of slaughterhouses, which, while not initially excluded from the city boundaries, were in fact crucial municipal facilities for the supply of meats. City council established powers for the Chief of Police to inspect all slaughterhouses for cleanliness and to ensure that operators properly disposed of all blood and offal.20 The by-law also granted the city the power to appoint a medical health officer to inspect and enforce these early public health regulations. While the enforcement of this first public health by-law may not have been entirely comprehensive, it was not as slipshod as Artibise suggests. Contrary to Artibise’s claim that Dr George H. Kerr was appointed as the first municipal health officer for Winnipeg in 1881, a report by Stewart Mulvey from 1 February 1875 indicates that he was appointed as the first health officer in 1874. Mulvey claimed to have conducted ‘upwards of one hundred and fifty official inspections on premises throughout the city’ and that he issued ‘one hundred and eighty official notifications in writing’. Mulvey’s extensive inspections occurred within the context of a summer outbreak of an epidemic he only described as a ‘malignant fever’. His report pointed to several deficiencies in the city’s public health by-law, including the provision that permitted residents to dump manure, animal carcasses and other offensive matter just outside the municipal boundaries. This, he claimed, ‘will prove offensive to the persons in the vicinity as well as dangerous to the public health’. While the city council generally ignored Mulvey’s recommendations, his report does show that the first public health by-law was not simply a dead letter.21 The city’s second health officer, George Kerr, similarly struggled to convince the council to grant him wider powers to control human behaviour over the disposal of animal bodies. He regularly drew attention to the fact that residents were simply hauling dead horses and cattle to the prairie just outside the city limits and depositing them on a growing open pile. In December 1881, he claimed to have counted ‘some thirty or forty [carcasses] in number strewed over the prairie close to the hospital’. By 1883, the pile had accumulated roughly 189 dead animals that Kerr eventually had burned. Kerr found that city residents who did use the municipal nuisance ground for the disposal of animal carcasses rarely buried the animals. He recommended that the licensed scavengers be paid additional fees to bury these animals, or the city should hire a specific employee to perform this labour.22

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In 1882, the city continued to face challenges associated with the disposal of dead animal carcasses, urban livestock husbandry and fears regarding fouled, bad smelling air. Dr Kerr reported that ‘the nuisance grounds is altogether to[o] small for the amount of dead animals, night soil, manure, and other filth which is carted from the city’. Additionally, he was concerned about ‘the filthy condition of the several cattle yards throughout the city’ that alarmed nearby city residents, who complained that ‘the stench arising from the yards is not very pleasant’. In 1882, the city added some additional provisions to its public health regulations to address some of Kerr’s concerns. By-law amendments added regulations for cattle yards or any fenced area where ‘three or more cattle, hogs, sheep or calves, are kept for sale or slaughter’, to ensure that they ‘be kept and maintained in as clean and orderly a manner as is possible, and shall be provided with proper sheds for sheltering and wells for watering stock’. The council also required all cattle yards to be located no closer than twelve blocks away from Main Street.23 In 1899, the city council made a substantial alteration to the public health by-law, limiting the number of domestic livestock animals that could be legally kept in the city. As the city’s human population grew to nearly 40,000, the city council began to set limits on the number of livestock animals able to be kept on a private lot in Winnipeg. Amendments to the public health by-law in 1899 restricted to just five animals the number of cattle able to be kept in a stable or other building that was within fewer than 200 feet of a residence occupied by someone other than the owner of the cattle. As with other public health by-laws, the purpose of this amendment was to prevent inconvenience and nuisances to neighbours. As such, if one wanted to keep more than five cows, the owner was required to supply the Market, License and Health Committee with ‘the consent in writing of all persons so resident within two hundred feet of such stable or other building’. Although this new provision to the public health by-law excluded cattle brought into the city for sale and it still permitted residents to keep other animals on private lots, it very likely circumscribed the ability of urban dwellers to keep cattle in Winnipeg.24

Public markets To complement its broader nineteenth-century public health initiatives, the Winnipeg city council attempted to control the sale and distribution of animals as part of the urban food supply through a public market system. This was an

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effort to further protect human and, to a lesser extent, domestic animal health. According to Helen Tangires, ‘in addition to building wharves, docks, bridges, and roads, local government was expected to provide facilities for buying and selling food’. In nineteenth-century North America, this was such a common practice that most cities established public markets within the first weeks of incorporation. For example, W. Thomas Matthews’s research on Upper Canadian towns found that ‘practical matters to law enforcement, internal improvements, public health and sanitation, revenue raising, and the regulation of the public market were uppermost in the minds of Upper Canadians when they advocated the reorganization of municipal institutions’. Public markets were a major component of nineteenth-century urban infrastructure and the primary site for the sale and distribution of live and dead animals in the city.25 As a relatively young western city, Winnipeg followed the practices of older Canadian and US municipalities by establishing a public market in 1874, shortly after incorporation. The first market committee selected a site for the market on 25 February 1874 and drafted a public market by-law that the city council passed in April the following year. After numerous construction delays and some political controversy, the first public market in Winnipeg opened in May 1877. ‘In earnest, and at an early hour there was quite a rush of customers’, according to one newspaper report about the opening of Winnipeg’s Central Public Market. The city council later replaced this original building due to construction flaws and inadequate space in 1890 (Figure 11.5).26

Figure 11.5 The Central Public Market building in the early 1900s. Source: City of Winnipeg Archives. Photograph Collection. Box P7 file 78.

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The public market by-law regulations established significant municipal control over the slaughter, sale and distribution of live and dead animal bodies in the city. It restricted the sale of all ‘fresh, salt, and dried provisions, and fish, including Butchers Meat, Pork, salt and dried meat, Turkeys, Geese, Ducks, poultry, Game, Butter, eggs, Fruit, vegetables, and all Kinds of livestock’ to licensed public market sellers. This ostensibly allowed the city to regulate not just the prices of food in Winnipeg, but also the quality. The by-law required the market superintendent ‘to cause all dirt and filth in or about the said Markets to be removed with all possible celerity, [and] to inspect all articles brought to the Markets’. All butchers in the city had to be licensed and operate only within the Central Public Market where they were to keep their stalls ‘in a clean and proper state’. Lastly, the city council exercised complete control over the sale of live animals, stipulating that ‘no horned cattle, calves, swine, sheep, horses, mares, gelding, or mules or anyone of them, brought into the City for sale, shall be sold in any of the Public streets or other places in the said City, before they have been to the Cattle Market and the Market fees have been paid thereon’. Obviously the public market regulations allowed the city to generate revenue through fees and licenses, but it also served some nominal public-health purposes.27 In 1885, Winnipeg changed its regulations for the slaughter and sale of animals in the public market, shifting towards the use of slaughterhouses. Amendments to the public market by-law in February 1885 prohibited the slaughtering of live animals ‘within the limits of any public markets’, and restricted this to licensed slaughterhouses monitored by the city health inspector.28 These amendments also liberalized previous public market regulations by permitting butchers to open shops outside of the Central Public Market building. The city added provisions for the prevention of cruelty to live animals sold at the public market: No person shall slaughter, sell, offer, or expose for sale or barter or trade, the meat of any calf less than four weeks old. Nor shall any person burn, sear, or cut the inner parts of or confine the mouth of any calf by rope, twine or any kind of muzzle; and no person shall in any manner tie or confine by rope, twine or otherwise the feet of any calf, sheep, lamb, swine or poultry, which may be brought to or exposed in the city for sale.29

In 1899, the city took further measures to ensure that licensed butchers kept their stalls and shops in a clean and healthy condition, and required them not to ‘slaughter, bleed or gut any animal or fish or pluck or remove the feathers from any fowl, poultry or wild game of any description’. Furthermore, the new amendments called upon the sellers to ensure that live animals were ‘fastened in

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the stalls or to the place or places assigned for such purposes as to secure them from doing injury to any person or being injured by each other’, and that no one ‘shall in any way ill-treat or be guilty of cruelty towards the same, either by beating them unmercifully or keeping them lying on the ground with their feet tied or otherwise’.30 In the late nineteenth century, changes to the public market by-laws in the city of Winnipeg balanced numerous interests, including municipal fiscal matters, the business interests of food retailers, public health, and animal health concerns. As the population of the city grew, those interests became more difficult to balance. Butchers sought reform of the restrictive licensing regulations that prohibited the sale of meats outside of the public market, while the municipal government attempted to retain both its public health oversight and the revenue license fees supplied. Provisions for the prevention of cruelty to animals in the public market by-laws demonstrated shifting attitudes towards the treatment of domestic animals in the urban environment, while the maintenance of public health provisions showed the continued concerns about animals as a source of organic waste and environmental pollution.

Pounds and trespass In addition to regulating domestic animals for the purposes of safeguarding human and animal health, the city council also monitored and controlled practices of animal husbandry in Winnipeg in the nineteenth century in order to regulate property relations and to bring order to city streets and sidewalks. As they autonomously roamed throughout the urban environment, domestic livestock animals compelled the city council to implement regulations to control livestock husbandry practices through the establishment of a city pound system. As with its public health regulations, Winnipeg’s nineteenth-century pound by-laws did not seek to entirely exclude domestic animals from the city. Instead, they created legitimate space within the city’s regulatory framework to accommodate the occasionally troublesome presence of horses, cattle, pigs, chickens and other animals that lived and worked in Winnipeg. Of course, non-human animals have the capacity to exercise their own degree of autonomy, something that Winnipeg’s city councillors sought to constrain through municipal pound regulations. The council passed the first pound by-law and hired a city pound keeper in June 1874, complementing the early scavenging and public health by-laws that also regulated domestic animals in the city.

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The Daily Free Press celebrated the passage of the new by-law, noting that ‘we now have a poundkeeper [sic], let some of the unemployed employ themselves in impounding the myriads of pigs and things which infest the streets’. Horses, cows, pigs and dogs regularly transgressed the increasingly ordered boundaries of the urban environment, damaging physical property, impeding transportation and occasionally threatening the human residents of the city. As such, the city council placed new restrictions on the practice of free-range animal husbandry in Winnipeg. The pound by-law forbade city residents to allow any ‘horse or bull, or swine of any sex or kind to run at large at any time within the limits of this city’. Significantly, cows and chickens were excluded from this first by-law regulation.31 While the original 1874 pound by-law forbade many domestic animals from running at large within the city, it also recognized that these animals would invariably break the rules and that the city would need to mediate such complicated property conflicts as those between animal owners and stationary property owners. The city pound keeper was required to follow a relatively strict set of guidelines for how to properly capture and care for animals within the pound. The by-law required him ‘to furnish the animal with good and sufficient food, water, and shelter’. Later by-law amendments even required the pound keeper to milk all dairy cows that he held. While such requirements met the needs of the animals, they were ultimately intended to protect the property interests of the human owners. The pound keeper posted regular notices of all of the captured animals on the gates of the city pound, the police station, local post offices and eventually in the pages of the Manitoba Gazette. The by-law also established the earliest rules for negotiating property damage and trespass disputes over the actions of offending animals. These disputes hinged on whether or not the property owner could prove that he had erected properly constructed fencing to guard his land against roaming animals. Furthermore, the regulation allowed residents to capture stray animals and deposit them in the city pound.32 Despite the modest efforts to establish a modicum of control over Winnipeg’s urban animals in the city’s early years, the pound keeper was ultimately limited in his ability to exercise an omnipresent authority over a population of animals which inhabited Winnipeg in such large numbers. Stewart Mulvey, the first city health inspector, considered free roaming animals a public health concern, particularly the pigs that regularly scavenged for food in the streets. He urged the council ‘to restrain pigs from running at large’, because he found that ‘when water is pumped out of cellars or after a shower of rain these troublesome animals

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root, roll, and bury themselves in the drains, thus producing the worst kind of stagnant waters to the danger of the health of the citizens’. Just a few months after the appointment of the pound keeper, the problem of free roaming animals persisted. According to an October 1874 Free Press report, ‘pigs continue to roam the streets and explore gutters, utterly regardless of the poundkeeper [sic]’. Even in the winter of the following year, newspapers reported that ‘some pigs continue to trot about the city with frozen feet and bristles, a la porcupine, from the coolness of the weather’. In 1877, city resident James Spence complained that ‘[t]here are large droves of cattle running around loose at night doing considerable damage to my property and fence’. Similarly, Richard Foseley reported that his brick yard on Portage Road was ‘nightly annoyed by cattle running over my Bricks and yard making the yard unfit to work on the next morning’. Richard Code, a Point Douglas property owner, faced the ever-present reality of free-roaming urban animals on a regular basis as horses and cattle fed on his garden in 1879. He used the provisions of the city’s pound by-law to seek retribution and compensation from the owners of ‘certain horses and cattle which had done damage’ to his property. Mr Code captured eight delinquent cows on one such occasion, delivered them to the city pound and forwarded a petition to the council for reimbursement for his losses.33 To address some of these complaints, the city council amended the pound by-law in October 1880 to include cattle. The city no longer permitted owners of any ‘ox, cow or other cattle’ to allow their livestock to ‘run at large between the hours of nine o’clock at night and five o’clock in the morning’. The city pound keeper’s monthly reports provide some insight into the extent to which these amendments were enforced (Figure 11.6). Between May and December 1881, the city pound typically held cattle, horses and pigs, but never more than twentyfour animals in a given month. Cattle seemed to be most commonly held in the summer when owners were most likely to herd their animals on unoccupied lots in the city. However, the pound keeper typically captured pigs throughout the year, and in December 1881 these were the only type of animal held in the city pound.34 In 1881, the city added new provisions to its pound regulations, including the integration of previously separate dog licensing and tagging regulations that required all dog owners to purchase tags each year and register their animals with the city police. Because owners could disavow themselves of responsibility for the actions of stray dogs, anyone who allowed ‘any dog or bitch to remain about his house or premises shall be deemed the owner thereof for all the purposes of this by-law’. Stray dogs were a persistent problem on the streets of Winnipeg

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Number of animals

20

Horses Cattle

15

Swine 10 5 0

May 1–May 31 1881

June 1–June 30 1881

Aug 1–Aug 31 1881

Sept 1–Sept 30 1881

Oct 1–Nov 30 1881

Dec 1–Dec 31 1881

Figure 11.6 Winnipeg city pound records, May to December 1881. Source: City of Winnipeg Archives, City Council Correspondence, City Pound Keeper Reports, 31 May 1881 to 9 January 1882.

in the 1870s and 1880s. For example, a storeowner named A. J. Symonds wrote to the city council in February 1877 to raise awareness of ‘the danger of being beset by savage dogs infesting the public streets of the city’. He was especially disturbed by the number of times he was ‘attacked by dogs on Main Street’, where on one such occasion he was chased down the street to his store by two particularly vicious dogs that he kept at bay by beating them with a walking stick. In 1885, the city expanded its pound infrastructure to include three different city pounds to address increasing concerns regarding such stray animals. Alderman Henry S. Crotty complained to the city council earlier that year that up to 150 dogs were known to be roaming the streets and that ‘it was really getting to be dangerous for women and children to go out, and horses were frequently running away’. Mayor Charles Edward Hamilton even echoed the same concerns and ‘mentioned having had to do battle with dogs himself ’.35 The first new pound, located on a large tract of land on the west side of the city, could accommodate a diverse range of animals, including ‘dogs, horses, mules, cattle, swine, bulls, oxen, rams, goats, or other animals together with geese and poultry’. The second pound, located on the south end of the city, included accommodations for all the same animals, except dogs. And the third pound, located on the east side, similarly held all such animals, excluding dogs. In addition to adding new pounds, the council also prohibited the free running of all animals, including cattle and poultry, within a defined boundary in the centre of the city, known as the pound limits. Residents, however, could continue to allow their animals to graze outside of those limits on unoccupied lots. To prevent the problem of runaway horses and other draught animals, the 1885 pound by-law required all such animals to be ‘thoroughly secured from getting

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loose by strong bridles, halters, reins, ropes or other sufficient means held by the driver or person in charge’. Finally, the new amendments banned all dogs from running at large in the city, especially those deemed to be ‘of a vicious or ferocious disposition or accustomed to snap at or bite mankind or if such dog has previously attacked or bitten any person travelling in or along the public street’. The city also specifically prohibited dogs from threatening horses because they could trigger a runaway or possibly a stampede.36 Winnipeg’s nineteenth-century pound by-laws placed increasingly strict limits on where domestic animals could freely move as both human and nonhuman population growth caused crowding and greater potential for conflict. Nevertheless, those limits still permitted Winnipeg residents to keep such animals and to herd them within the city. By 1893, the city council had established five separate pounds to accommodate the growth of the urban environment. All domestic animals, except for bulls, goats and swine, were permitted to graze freely outside of the pound limits. Even in subsequent amendments in 1899, the City of Winnipeg continued to permit residents to herd some domestic livestock animals within the municipal boundaries, recognizing still that such animals were crucial to the economy of the city, as important sources of labour and food.37

Conclusion When Andrew Boyd petitioned the Winnipeg city council for compensation for the death of his cow, he knew that he was within his rights to do so. His cow was not out of place in the city. Even by 1900, one could find cattle grazing on unoccupied lots outside of the pound limits. William H. Carre, a local historian and photographer, captured one such creature on the margin of the frame of a photograph of Carlton Street that he included in his souvenir history of Winnipeg (Figure 11.7). Domestic animals were part of the everyday streetscapes of Winnipeg.38 In nineteenth-century Winnipeg, humans and domestic animals lived in an asymmetrical symbiotic relationship in which humans derived greater benefit and advantage from the exploitation of cattle, horses, pigs, chickens and other livestock. One of the principal tasks of the municipal government of Winnipeg was to attempt to manage and control this complicated, multi-species environment in which humans and domestic animals lived and worked alongside one another. To do so, the city council created a regulatory infrastructure through by-laws

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Figure 11.7 Carlton Street, 1900. Source: William H. Carre, Art Work on Winnipeg, Part 4 (Winnipeg: Wm. H. Carre Company, 1900), n.p.

that would facilitate the exploitation of domestic animals for human needs while safeguarding human health. At the same time, city regulators recognized that these animals performed vital services necessary for the growth and development of Winnipeg. As such, their regulations sought to create legal space within the urban environment for animals to live with some protections against ill-health and inhumane treatment. The role of domestic animals in the growth and development of Western Canadian cities is an important component of the broader history of Canadian colonization of the Northwest and the biological expansion of the British Empire more generally. Domestic animals were novel species that eventually came to displace indigenous species of North American animals and facilitate Canadian colonial control and authority over land and resources. The pattern of colonization across the prairies was led and shaped by the emergence of new towns and cities. Thus, the case of nineteenth-century Winnipeg reveals that introduced domestic animals were ‘creatures of empire’ on both the agricultural frontier and within the urban environment.

Notes 1 City of Winnipeg Archives (hereafter CWA). City Council Correspondence. Andrew Boyd to City Council, 21 April 1879; population figures drawn from City Assessment Office figures cited in Alan F. J. Artibise, Winnipeg: A Social History of Urban Growth, 1874–1914 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975), 130–1.

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2 Andrea Gaynor, Harvest of the Suburbs: An Environmental History of Growing Food in Australian Cities (Crawley : University of Western Australia Press, 2006), 1; William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 191. 3 George Colpitts, Game in the Garden: A Human History of Wildlife in Western Canada to 1940 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002), 9. This anecdote was documented in James S. Woodsworth, Strangers Within Our Gates: Or, Coming Canadians (Toronto: Missionary Society of the Methodist Church, 1909), 37–8. 4 James Beattie, ‘Recent Themes in the Environmental History of the British Empire’. History Compass 10, 2 (2012): 130; Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3–4. 5 For more on the role of cities and railways in Canadian colonial expansion on the prairies, see Artibise, ‘The Urban West: The Evolution of Prairie Towns and Cities to 1930’. Prairie Forum 4, 2 (1979): 237–62. 6 Martin V. Melosi, ‘The Place of the City in Environmental History’. Environmental History Review 17, 1 (1993): 1–23; Christine Meisn Rosen and Joel A. Tarr, ‘The Importance of an Urban Perspective in Environmental History’. Journal of Urban History 20, 3 (1994): 299–310; Harold L. Platt, ‘The Emergence of Urban Environmental History’. Urban History 26, 1 (1999): 89–95; Melosi, ‘Humans, Cities, and Nature: How Do Cities Fit in the Material World?’. Journal of Urban History 36, 1 (2010): 4. 7 Bernd Herrmann, ‘City and Nature and Nature in the City’, in Historians and Nature: Comparative Approaches to Environmental History, eds. Ursula Lehmkuhl and Herrmann Wellenreuther (New York: Berg, 2007), 226; Peter Aitkins, ‘Introduction’, in Animal Cities: Beastly Urban Histories, ed. Atkins (Surrey : Ashgate, 2012), 2–3; Jennifer Wolch, Kathleen West, and Thomas E. Gaines, ‘Transspecies Urban Theory’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13 (1995): 736; For more research on the history of urban animals, see Jennifer Mason, Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850–1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Gaynor, Harvest of the Suburbs; Clay McShane and Joel Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Ann Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Catherine McNeur, ‘The “Swinish Multitude”: Controversies Over Hogs in Antebellum New York City’. Journal of Urban History 37, 5 (2011): 639–60; Jessica Wang, ‘Dogs and the Making of the American State: Voluntary Association, State Power, and the Politics of Animals Control in New York City, 1850-1920’. Journal of American History 98, 4 (2012): 998–1024; Etienne Benson, ‘The Urbanization of the Eastern

286

8 9

10

11

12 13 14 15

16 17 18

19 20 21 22

Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire Gray Squirrel in the United States’. Journal of American History 100, 3 (2013): 691–710; Dawn Day Biehler, Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013). Artibise, Winnipeg, 7–10. For more on processes of census enumeration in nineteenth-century Canada, see David A. Worton, The Dominion Bureau of Statistics: A History of Canada’s Central Statistical Office and its Antecedents, 1841–1972 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998); Bruce Curtis, The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840–1875 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). For more on the variability of census records of urban animals, see Bettina Bradbury, ‘Pigs, Cows, and Boarders: Non-Wage Forms of Survival among Montreal Families, 1861-91’. Labour/Le Travail 14 (1984): 9–46. Bureau of Agriculture and Statistics, Census of the Canadas, 1860–61: Agricultural Produce, Mills, Manufactories, Houses, Schools, Public Buildings, Places of Worship, &c (Mountain Hill, Quebec: Steam Press Printing Est., 1864), 90–5. Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Census of Canada, 1911: Agriculture, Vol. 4 (Ottawa: Government Printer, 1914), 419. An Act to Incorporate the City of Winnipeg, 8 November 1873, 25–32. Mark Fiege, ‘The Weedy West: Mobile Nature, Boundaries, and Common Space in the Montana Landscape’. Western Historical Quarterly 36 (2005): 24. Adam Rome, ‘Coming to Terms with Pollution: The Language of Environmental Reform, 1865-1915’. Environmental History 1, 3 (1996): 8; Peter Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 2; Artibise, Winnipeg, 225; Melosi, The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 12. Georgia Sitara, ‘Humanitarianism in the Age of Capital and Empire: Canada, 1870-1890’ (PhD diss., University of Victoria, 2010), 22. Bradbury, ‘Pigs, Cows, and Boarders’, 9–46. CWA. By-Law 8, ‘A by-law appointing two City Scavengers’, 23 March 1874; By-Law 33, ‘A by-law respecting scavengers’, 2 March 1875; By-law 1601, ‘A by-law respecting the Appointment of an Inspector of Licenses, and the Issue of Licenses in certain cases’, 8 May 1899. CWA. By-Law 12, ‘A by-law relating to the Public Health’, 4 May 1874. CWA. By-Law 12, ‘A by-law relating to the Public Health’, 4 May 1874. Artibise, Winnipeg, 225; CWA. City Council correspondence, Stewart Mulvey, 1 February 1875. CWA. City Council correspondence, G. H. Kerr to Mayor and Council of the City of Winnipeg, 1 December 1881.

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23 CWA. City Council correspondence, G. H. Kerr to Mayor and Council of the City of Winnipeg, 1 December 1881; G. H. Kerr to Mayor and Council of the City of Winnipeg, 30 June 1882; G. H. Kerr to Mayor and Council of the City of Winnipeg, 1 February 1882; G. H. Kerr to Mayor and Council of the City of Winnipeg, 29 April 1882; G. H. Kerr to Mayor and Council of the City of Winnipeg, 2 June 1882; By-Law 179, ‘A by-law respecting Public Health’, 3 July 1882. 24 CWA. By-law 1620, ‘A by-law relating to the Public Health’, 8 May 1899. 25 Helen Tangires, Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 3; W. Thomas Matthews, ‘Local Governments and the Regulation of the Public Market in Upper Canada, 1800–1860: The Moral Economy of the Poor’. Ontario History 79, 4 (1987): 300. 26 CWA. Market Committee Reports, 25 February 1874; By-law 48, ‘A by-law establishing public markets’, 9 April 1875; Daily Free Press, 4 August 1877, 3. 27 CWA. By-law 48, ‘A by-law establishing public markets’, 9 April 1875. 28 CWA. By-law 321, ‘A by-law to establish Public Markets’, 23 February 1885. 29 CWA. By-law 321, ‘A by-law to establish Public Markets’, 23 February 1885. 30 CWA. By-law 1616, ‘A by-law respecting Public Markets and Weigh Houses’, 8 May 1899. 31 CWA. By-Law 13, ‘A by-law respecting Pounds and appointing Poundkeepers’, 1 June 1874; Daily Free Press, 7 July 1874, 3. 32 CWA. By-law 13, 1 June 1874. 33 CWA. City Council correspondence, Stewart Mulvey to City Council, 10 August 1874; Daily Free Press, 21 October 1874, 3; 8 February 1875, 8; CWA. City Council correspondence, James Spence, 9 July 1877; Richard Foseley, 9 July 1877; Richard Code, 22 September 1879; Frank Land, City Pound Keeper, 1 December 1879. 34 CWA. By-law 79, ‘A by-law to amend by-law 13 respecting pounds’, 11 October 1880; City Council Correspondence, City Pound Keeper to Council, 31 May 1881; 4 July 1881; 5 September 1881; 17 October 1881; 5 December 1881; 9 January 1882. 35 CWA. By-law 139, ‘A by-law to establish pounds’, 14 March 1881; City Council Correspondence, A. J. Symonds to City Council, 26 February 1877; Winnipeg Free Press, 24 February 1885, 4. 36 By-law 356, ‘A by-law to establish Public Pounds’, 14 September 1885. 37 CWA. By-law 630, ‘A by-law to provide for Pounds and Poundkeepers’, 17 April 1893; By-law 1603, ‘A by-law for the Appointment of Poundkeepers and to regulate Pounds’, 8 May 1899. 38 William H. Carre, Art Work on Winnipeg, Part 4 (Winnipeg: Wm. H. Carre Company, 1900), n.p.

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Select bibliography Anderson, Virginia DeJohn. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Artibise, Alan F. J. Winnipeg: A Social History of Urban Growth, 1874–1914. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975. Atkins, Peter (ed.). Animal Cities: Beastly Urban Histories. Farnham, Surrey : Ashgate, 2012. Benson, Etienne. ‘The Urbanization of the Eastern Gray Squirrel in the United States’. Journal of American History 100, 3 (2013): 691–710. Biehler, Dawn Day. Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013. Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Gaynor, Andrea. Harvest of the Suburbs: An Environmental History of Growing Food in Australian Cities. Crawley : University of Western Australia Press, 2006. Greene, Ann Norton. Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Herrmann, Bernd. ‘City and Nature and Nature in the City’, in Historians and Nature. Comparative Approaches to Environmental History, ed. U. a. H. W. Lehmkuhl. New York: Berg, 2007, 226–56. Mason, Jennifer. Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850–1900. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. McNeur, Catherine. ‘The “Swinish Multitude”: Controversies Over Hogs in Antebellum New York City’. Journal of Urban History 37, 5 (2011): 639–60. McShane, Clay and Joel Tarr. The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Melosi, Martin V. ‘Humans, Cities, and Nature: How do Cities Fit in the Material World?’ Journal of Urban History 36, 1 (2010): 3–21. Wang, Jessica. ‘Dogs and the Making of the American State: Voluntary Association, State Power, and the Politics of Animals Control in New York City, 1850-1920’. Journal of American History 98, 4 (2012): 998–1024. Wolch, Jennifer, Kathleen West and Thomas E. Gaines. ‘Transspecies Urban Theory’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13 (1995): 735–60.

Index Note: Page numbers in italics denote figures. Abergeldie plantation (Sri Lanka) 143 aboriginal Australians see indigenous Australians academics 29 acclimatization 4, 25–6, 32, 127, 166, 182–4, 241 societies 162, 185, 188 acts see legislation Adams, Arthur S. 151 administration 55 colonial 3, 32 imperial 23, 54 administrators, colonial 32, 142 advertising 12, 16, 28, 68–70, 72, 73, 76, 77, 80, 166, 194 advisers, foreign, in China 44, 48, 52, 56, 60 aesthetics xv, 12, 125, 140–1, 161–2 afforestation see forests Africa xv, 3, 7, 12–13, 15, 34–5, 50, 69, 92–7, 98, 99–111, 180, 190, 193, 203, 205–7 central 98 east 3, 102 north 5, 93, 95–7 southern 5, 31, 93, 98, 99, 181 South Africa 83, 94, 97, 100–1, 103, 105–6, 109, 187, 189, 191, 193, 195 west 98, 110 west central 97–8 African Lakes Company 206 Africans 99–103, 105–6, 109–10 Afrikaans language 105 Afrikaners 103 Nazi sympathizers 106 Afro-tropical (Ethiopian) zone see zoogeographic regions Agassiz, Louis 96 agriculture/agricultural 9, 11–12, 15, 23–6, 28, 44, 46–7, 49, 51, 55, 93, 107, 144, 155, 194, 235, 245, 266

agencies, government 56, 245 associations 53 change 77 colleges 52–3, 244 Komaba Agricultural College 52 Massachusetts State Agricultural College 52 Sapporo Agricultural College, Hokkaido 52 competitions 162 co-operatives 58 development 15, 26, 50, 58 diversification 144 double-cropping 156 expansion 265 experimentation 12, 52–3, 223, 238–9, 251 finance 58 innovation xiv institutions 54, 56, 59 intensive 54, 78 investment 26 Agricultural Credit Administration, Chinese (Nong ben ju) 58 knowledge 48 methods 46 modernization 55 plantation 14, 28, 78, 81, 133, 135, 138, 139, 141, 142–4 policy 47, 49, 57, 59 prices 143 production 155, 158 recovery 48 research 52, 245 National Agricultural Research Bureau, Chinese (zhongyang nongye shiyan suo) 57 science 44, 46, 52, 57, 59–60, 127 Agriculture Improvement Institute, Xikang province 56

290

Index

settlement 12 stations 53 techniques 14, 48–9, 51 technology 46 tropical 78 see also government departments agronomy 44, 46, 48, 57–60, 78 Ah Chee 165, 170 aid food 249–51 humanitarian 35 air diseased 271–2 foul-smelling 276 Albany (Cape Colony) 193 albatrosses 215 Albert, Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) 129, 131 Alexandra, Queen 194 Alexandra (Otago) 159 alfalfa (lucerne) 237 alkali production 134 amaXhosa people 94 amber 161 America central 110, 193 north xv, 3, 12, 22, 46, 54, 77, 110, 181, 193, 203, 265, 277 see also Canada; United States south 23, 110, 125, 128, 138, 193 see also Brazil; Chile; Colombia; Peru Americans African-Americans 187 in Australia 250 in Canada 264 in China 57, 60, 204, 209 white 25 see also United States Amherstia nobilis (Orchid tree) 131, 132 Amoy (Xiamen) 204, 206–7, 208, 215 ancestors, reverence for 167–70 ancestry 158 Anderson, Benedict 81 Anderson, Katherine (historian) 30 Anderson, Virginia DeJohn (historian) 264 Andes 138 Andrews, Roy Chapman 209, 217–18 animal/animals 14, 44, 132 attacks by 212, 282

by-products 181, 271, 275 control 13–14 cruelty towards 272, 279, 284 dead 273–4 domestic 5, 263–8, 269, 270–84 draught 46, 51, 282 exotic 54, 59, 165, 171–2, 182, 183, 207, 210, 264 feral xv game 186, 188, 203, 207, 210–11 humane treatment of 272, 284 anti-cruelty societies 272 human relationship with xv, 13–14, 93, 264, 266, 272, 283 husbandry 53–5, 184, 272–3, 276, 279–80 indigenous 145, 284 introduced 4, 9, 186, 195, 210, 212, 264–6 pack 55 populations 268–9 as prey 97 restraint of 283 roaming 271, 279–82 sales 277–8 stray 280, 281–2 urban xv, 266–7, 269–70, 271–4, 280–1, 284 welfare 14, 279 wild 264 working 58 antelopes 188 horns 161 skins 190 anthropology 23, 127, 191 antiquities, Sri Lankan 127 antlers 188 apples 159 apricot trees 52, 159 Arabs 5, 93, 105 Arch, Joseph 185 archives, National Archives of Australia (Department of External Affairs) 240 Aristotle 93 armies 46 Arnold, Rollo (historian) 184 aromas 81–2, 125, 132 see also fragrance; smells arrowroot 132

Index Arrowtown (Otago) 167 artefacts, indigenous 194–5 Artibise, Alan F. J. (historian) 267, 272, 275 artisans, indigenous 189 artists 128, 204 botanical 129 women 190 Asia 34, 69, 98, 102, 181, 247–51 central 47–50, 218 east 204–5 inner 49 north 96 south-east 50, 161, 164 Assam 70–1, 139–41 assegais 195 Assiniboine River (Manitoba) 266 associationism 210 Atacama Desert 75 Atkins, Peter (historian) 266 Atlantic Ocean 50 Auckland (NZ) 157–8, 163, 165, 194 Acclimatization Society 188 Auckland Star (newspaper) 158 auctions, feather 193 The Auk (periodical) 193 Australasia xv, 46, 49, 54, 172, 203 see also Australia; New Zealand Australia 5, 7, 49–50, 54, 59, 75, 153, 154, 158–65, 182, 187, 263 eastern 5 north-west 242 south-eastern 11–12, 193, 233, 234, 235–51 Austrians, in Sudan 99 authorities, colonial 26 imperial 21, 24–5 axes, battle 195 ‘bachelor frontiers’ 76 Bacon, Francis 22–3 badgers 213 Baildon, Samuel 71 Baltic region 103 bamboo 130–1, 161 Abyssinian 130 banana plantations 163 banding of birds see bird leg ringing banking 11, 58 Banks, Sir Joseph 127

291

‘Banner of Joy’ (Chinese gold miner) 161–2 Bantu language 94 Baoding 52 Baptists 221 Barbados 28 barley 156 Barnett, Jon 35 Batang (Java) 51–2, 54–5 Batang Cultivation Company (Batang kenwu gongsi) 51 Baumgarten, Fritz 105–6 beans 53, 161 cultivation 221 bearers, gun- 190–1, 199n. 48 bears grizzly 189 hunting 207 Beattie, James (historian) 12, 14, 264 Beauclerk, Lady Christabel (fictional bird lover) 104 beavers 188 skins 193 Bedford, Hastings Russell, twelfth Duke of 222 beef farming 54 bees 267 Behringer, Wolfgang (historian) 30 Beijing 52, 54, 151 Beinart, William (historian) 180, 188 (with Lotte Hughes) Environment and Empire (2007) 4 beliefs see geomancy; religion Bell, Miss 193 Bemba people 191 Bengalis, in Sri Lanka 135 Bengal Presidency 138 Benn, Charles 170 Benson, C. W. 115n. 39 Benson, Etienne (historian) 266 Berg, Bengt 104–5, 109 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri 26 berries 161 Bible 9 Bickers, Robert (historian) 214 Biehler, Dawn Day (historian) 266 biodiversity 78 loss of 69 biologists 95

292 biology 57, 71 Bird, Isabella 214 bird/birds 15, 70, 162, 182–3 and agricultural seasons 93 behaviour, study of 92 birdwatching 104 breeding 96–7, 103–5, 235 as carriers of messages 99, 106 citizenship 106 cruelty towards 194 domestic 270 endangered 193 extinct 184, 189 flightless 184, 189, 192–3 game 190, 211 hunting 183, 185 introduced 185 leg ringing 92, 99–101, 103, 106, 114–15n. 38 mistaken for espionage 106 migratory 3, 92–111 see also migration, avian mortality 103, 109–10 movements 13, 15 observatory 99–103 protection of 102, 104 shooting 100, 103, 114–15n. 38, 190, 187, 192–3, 207–9, 211–12, 215, 217 song 105 species 95 as spies 113n. 28 trade 192–5 skin trade 189 wading 105 BirdLife International 110 bird of paradise 192–3 birdsong 93 Bisa people 191 Biscuit (Zambian hunter) 190 bison 189–90, 265 blackbirds 215 Bland, John O. P. 215–17 Houseboat Days in China (1919) 220 blankets 181 Blatt, Ann Wyatt 193–4 Bloemfontein (Orange Free State) 189 Blowering Dam (NSW) 250 Blue Mountains (NSW) 182, 250

Index boars hunting of 204 wild 213, 215 boas, ostrich feather 193 boating 185, 204, 206–7, 214 houseboats 204, 216, 219–20 bodies, animal 273–6 Bok Choy (Chinese cabbage) 161 Bolivians, in Chile 75 Bolsheviks 106 botanical experimentation 128, 144 identification 128 illustration 128–9 nomenclature 127 research 128 botanic gardens xv, 9, 70, 123, 126–32, 138, 144–5 Calcutta 127, 139 colonial 127 Hakgala 132, 137, 138, 139, 144–5 Heneratgoda 132 Hong Kong 213–14 Kew 126–7, 129–30, 137–8 Peliyagoda 127 Peradeniya 9, 70, 123, 126–9, 130–2, 133, 137, 139, 141, 143–5 unkempt 129 botanists 127, 131–2, 138, 145, 210, 221 botany 9, 71, 126, 141, 222 bowling 207 Boxer Uprising (1900) 49, 151 Boyce, James (historian) 182–3 boycotts, of slave-produced sugar 83 Boyd, Andrew 263, 283 Boyd, William 78 Bradbury, Bettina (historian) 272 Brady, John 245 Braun-Ronsdorf, Margarette (historian) 193 Bray, Francesca (historian) 46 Brazil 69, 128, 130–1 breeding animal 54–60 bird 96–7, 103–5, 235 plant 55, 245 bribery 170 bridges 277

Index Brisson, Mathurin Jacques (ornithologist) 95 Bristol 181 Britain 5, 47–8, 68–83, 108, 140, 162, 271–2 see also England; Scotland British Columbia 192 British Empire 3–5, 6, 7–9, 10, 11–16, 59, 68–83, 123–45, 151–5, 157–72, 180–96, 202–23, 233–51, 263–84 Britons in Africa 104 in Canada 264 in China 204, 209, 214, 219, 221 in Japan 230n. 114 in South America 138 in Sri Lanka 133 Broken Hill (NSW) 237 Brownea grandiceps 131 Buck, John Lossing 58–9 Chinese Farm Economy 57 Budapest 99–100 buffaloes 133 hunting 264 building/buildings 271 for animals 274 design 25 materials, vernacular 167 urban 276, 277 Buller, Walter 189, 193 bulls 282–3 ‘Bullun Bullun’ (lyrebird) 187 Burchell, William 187 Burdekin Dam (Qld) 250 bureaucracy 11, 99 in the afterlife 170 bureaucrats 206, 211 burial of animals 274 practices 168 societies 168 Burkina Faso 110 Burlingham, Donald 212 Burma 58, 131, 246 Burrinjuck Dam (NSW) 236, 246–7 businesses, Chinese, in New Zealand 164–5 business networks 153 bustards 211

293

butcher-birds 215 Butcher’s Gully (Otago) 170 butchery 270, 271, 278–9 game 186–7, 213 butter 56, 164, 278 churns 164 butterflies 132 Butzer, Karl 35 by-laws see legislation cabbage, Chinese 161 cables, undersea 11 cacao 69, 132, 144 Calcutta Anglican bishopric of 123 Botanic Garden 127, 139 Caldwell, Harry R. 221 Blue Tiger (1924) 209, 217–18 California 80, 158, 160–1, 243–6, 251 Californian Pump 160 calves 276, 278 Campbell, Walter The Old Forest Ranger (1842) 206 Canada 5, 7, 49, 59, 83, 181, 187–9, 192, 248, 263–7, 268–70, 271–84 central 5 north-west 264, 284 Upper 277 western 186, 264, 284 Canadians in Australia 244 in China 204 canals 49 construction of 14, 48 irrigation 239 canary seed 161 Cannadine, David (historian) 207 Canton city (Guangzhou) 156, 164 Shamian Island 204 Cantonese in Australia 163 in New Zealand 12, 153–6, 158–9, 162–3, 166–72 overseas 153 Canton province (Guangdong) 153, 154, 155–7, 159, 161, 164, 168–9, 171–2, 205, 207, 214 Canton Villages Mission 171 Cape Colony 187, 193

294

Index

Cape Horn 157 Cape of Good Hope 97, 157 Cape Spartel (Morocco) 95 Cape Town 83 capital investment 11–12, 140 movements 25, 133 capitalism 69 Capper, J. A. 194 Capper, John 133–5, 137, 142 Capron, Horace 52 carcasses, animal 273–6 cardamom 144 Carey, Mark (historian) 28 Caribbean 7, 28, 75, 79, 82–3, 110, 133 Carnegie, James, ninth Earl of Southesk 189 Carre, William H. (historian) 283 Carruthers, Jane (historian) 4 cassia 125 cats 186 wild 145, 212 cattle 79, 183, 210, 263–4, 267, 272–3, 275–6, 278–81, 282, 283 hunting 183, 185 ranching 54 yards 276 see also bulls; cows Cave, Henry 140, 142–3 cemeteries 168–9 Cen Chunxuan 50 censuses 267, 268–9, 270 centipedes, dried 161 ceremonies 207 Ceylon see Sri Lanka Chaffey brothers 244 Chahar 54, 56 Chambers, David (historian) 30 Chambezi (Zambian hunter) 191 chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra) 186, 197n. 24 Chan, William 154 Chan Dah Chee (Ah Chee) 164–5 Changbai Mountains (Manchuria) 209 Ch’an Sui Tsing 170 charities 58 see also philanthropy Chefoo (Yantai, Shandong) 204, 225n. 21 chemicals, agricultural 243 Chengdu 51–2

Cheong Shing Tong (burial society) 168 chestnuts, water 161 Chettiar, Karumuttu Thiagarajan 74 Chew Chong 164–5, 171–2 Chicago (IL) 72 World’s Columbian Exposition (1893) 72 chickens 272, 264, 267–9, 270, 279–80, 283 chieftain status, Maori 165 Chile 78 northern 75 China xiv, 3, 5, 7, 12–13, 15, 29, 44, 45, 46–60, 68, 70–2, 127, 139–40, 153, 162, 164–5, 202–23, 208, 215 northern 151, 202 North China Plain 46–7 north-west 47, 59–60 southern 5, 14, 24, 125, 151–2, 154, 155, 168 see also Treaty Ports The China Review (periodical) 213 Chinese in Australia 161, 164, 172, 237, 242, 247 in Cuba 75 in New Zealand 50, 151–9, 160, 161–72 in Peru 75 in South East Asia 50 Chipata (Zambia) 100 chocolate 132 see also cacao Choie Kum Poy 161 Choie Sew Hoy 161, 164, 172 cholera 79, 142 Chongqing (Chungking) 51, 56 Chow, Dr 169 Christian symbols 171 churches, American Protestant 57 cicadas, exuviae of 161 cinchona (Peruvian bark) 69, 78, 132, 137–8, 144 cinema 104–5, 113n. 27 cinnamon 69, 79, 123, 125–6, 145 production 123, 125–7, 134, 144 cities 5, 266 urban growth 268 urbanization 265

Index citrus 237, 245 Clark, Robert Sterling 222 class social 202 working 3, 181, 184 clergymen 29, 133 climate 4, 8–9, 21–36, 133, 156, 159, 183, 244–5 change 24, 26, 35–6, 110 anthropogenetic 23–5, 30 determinism 21–5 effects on humans 22–4, 27, 29, 32–5 knowledge 21–2, 29 indigenous 31 philosophical debates about 24 prediction 30 relationship with culture 24 research 25, 30 temperate 33 tropical 23, 28, 32–4 variability 30 climatology 23 clothing 182 corsetry 181 formal, on plantations 143 fur 181 outfitters, hunting 192 repairs 189 shooting tweeds 209 tropical 32 leech-gaiters 134 pith helmets or topis 32, 134, 218 spine pads 32, 134 wedding 193–4 cloves 132 coaches 134 coarsing 184 cocoa see cacao coconuts 69, 79 Code, Richard 281 coffee 5, 69, 132–7, 144 berries 136 blight 144 cultivation 68, 73, 128, 132–6, 140, 142–5 diseases 137 coffee rust (Hemileia vastatrix) 69 houses 70 production 133–4, 136–7, 139–40

295

Coleambally Irrigation Area (NSW) 235, 250 collecting xv animals 132, 192 botanical 222 indigenous weapons 195 insects 132 natural history 213, 222 plant 132 Collins, David 182 Collins, James 273 Colombia 118n. 78 Colombo (Sri Lanka) 78, 123, 128, 135–7, 142 Cinnamon Gardens 125 Slave Island 126, 127 Union Place 81 colonial policy 50 colonies/colonialism 44 crown 7 Japanese 51 military farming 46, 50 penal 182, 184 see also convicts postcolonialism 108 self-governing 5, 27 settler 59 of white settlement 7, 141, 152, 183, 203, 236 Colonist (newspaper) 194 colonization 25, 44, 52, 59, 264–5 colour, significance of 170 Colpitts, George (historian) 186, 264 Columbus, Christopher 50 commerce Chinese Ministry of Commerce 52, 54 Taranaki Chamber of Commerce 164 commercial networks 163–6 commodities 5, 11–12, 16, 68, 79, 81, 132 commodity chains 188 crops 9, 69, 128 fetishism 69, 82 frontiers 18n. 23, 165, 180 markets 12 prices 136–7 production 4, 9, 11, 78 trade 77, 136, 152

296

Index

communications see telecommunications Communist Party, Chinese 60 communities, imagined 81 competitions, international food 72 conferences Pan-African Ornithological Congress 109 conflict 35 Confucianism 60, 158, 167 conservation 110, 187, 221 of birds 108–9 funding bodies Dutch Postcode Lottery 110 Mava Foundation 110 of game species 186–7, 191, 196, 213, 221–2 Wild Bird and Game Preservation Ordinance, Hong Kong (1885; amended 1892) 211 management 109 conservationists 103, 128 consumers 3, 12, 15, 68, 71, 81–2 demand 11 tastes 140 consumption 11, 14, 16, 79, 81 convicts 182–4, 247 convict settlements 182 cooks 190–1, 206 coolies see labour Coonamble Experiment Farm (NSW) 258n. 80 co-operatives, agricultural 246 Office of Cooperatives, Chinese Nationalist Party 58 Cordiner, Rev. James 125 Coromandel coast (India) 125 corporations 5 correspondence 99, 155, 184–5 scientific 129 corruption 56–7 cosmology see fengshui; religious beliefs, Chinese cotton 46, 48, 132 cultivation 221 coursing 211 cows 54, 263, 267–8, 269, 273, 275–6, 280, 283, 284 Cradock, Lieutenant Christopher 209, 212 crafts, indigenous 189

cranes 99, 105, 212 Cree nation 187 creepers, elephant 130 cricket 207 laws of 143 crocodiles 105 Cromwell (Otago) 167, 171 Chinatown 166 crops 46, 49 cash 156 commodity 9, 69, 128 exotic 156 experimentation 53–4, 70, 238 growing 55–6 root 268 rotation 48 varieties 53, 243 Crosby, Alfred (historian) 265 cross, symbolism of 171 Crotty, Henry S. 282 crows 103, 215 cruelty to animals see animals; birds Cuba 75, 130 Culloden plantation (Sri Lanka) 143 cultivation 55, 78, 133, 138, 139–40, 143, 144, 155–6, 159, 163, 237 culture/cultural attitudes 9 barriers 152 beliefs 182 Cantonese 153 contacts 3 differences 203 economies xvi history xiv indigenous 207 practices, European 143 vitality 216 curators, museum 213 curlews 212, 215 customs Chinese 205 indigenous 32 see also taxation cutlery, bone-handled 181 Dabida people 199n. 48 Daily Free Press (newspaper) 280 dairies 263, 268

Index dairy cows 54, 280 farming 164–5, 210, 237 dairymen 263 dams 210, 236, 239, 245–7, 250–1 see also individual dams Dar-es-Salaam 104 Darjeeling 140–1 Darwin, Charles 129 Daston, Lorraine (historian) 29 Datongbao (publication) 50 Davenant, Charles 23 Davis, Mike (historian) 28–9 Deakin, Alfred 244 de Alwis, Harmanis 128, 131 death cultural perceptions of 155, 167–70 practices 158 rituals 168, 172 debt 75 peonage system 12, 73–5 decaying matter, as source of disease 271–2 deer 186, 197nn. 24–5, 211–13 hog-deer 212 hunting 204, 207, 220 sinews 161 Deerr, Noel 83 Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe (1719) 50 deforestation see forests Delaney, Frank 193 Delonix regia (Royal Poinciana) 131 demography 267 Denmark 99 depopulation 46, 216–17, 236 deserts 5, 50, 105 De Silva, S. B. D. 74 Desmond, Ray 131 dessication 25–6 Des Voeux, Sir (George) William 214, 219 Diamond, Jared 24 diaries 29, 154, 182, 190–1 hunting 203 diaspora, Chinese 152–3 diet 183–4 dietary traditions Asian 247 English 247

297

dingos 182 dioramas, wildlife 203, 213 diplomacy 104, 205, 241 disasters, natural 35 discipline, work 75 disease 4, 14, 32, 46, 79, 272 exotic 236 introduced 265 plant 69, 137–8, 141, 144 transmission of 271 tropical 9, 28, 33–4, 69, 105, 107, 142, 191, 248 diversity, biological 235 divine intervention 29–30 Docherty, William 192 docks 277 dockworkers 80 dogs 182, 183, 186, 206, 230n. 114, 274, 280, 282 dangerous 282–3 hunting 212, 220, 230n. 114 licensing of 281 native 182 wild 220 domestic animals see animals Don, Rev. Alexander 154–5, 161, 166, 169–71 Donald, Vivian 190, 192 donkeys 105 Doombagastalawa plantation (Sri Lanka) 143 doves 212 ‘dragon’s bones’ 161 drainage 274, 280–1 Drayton, Richard (historian) 9 dredges 161, 164 Drenthang (Dengke) 52–3, 59 Animal Husbandry School 54 dressmakers 194 drinks, non-alcoholic 79 drought 23, 31, 35, 110, 156, 235, 241, 249, 251 Federation Drought, Australia (c. 1895–1902) 236 drugs 69, 71, 138 prices 138–9 Dubbo (NSW) 258n. 80 ducks 105, 185–6, 188, 214–15, 267, 278 wild 185, 211–12, 215

298

Index

Dumbera, Vale of (Sri Lanka) 132–3 Dun, Edwin 52 Dunedin (NZ) 157–8, 161–2, 164, 171, 176n. 61, 184 Forbury 160 Horticultural Society 162 Kaikorai Valley 158 Octagon, symbolism of 166 Durban (Natal) 191 Dutch 110 in Java 138 in South America 138 in Sri Lanka 69, 123, 133 Dutch East Indies 125 dysentery 79 eagles 212 East India Companies British 70, 82, 125, 139 Dutch 27 ecologists 235, 251 ecology 8, 9, 11, 14, 109, 172, 180, 182–3 economic autonomy, imperial 71 insecurity 167 policies 27, 58, 251 economics 57 economists 235 economy 11, 24, 26–9, 47, 123, 125–6, 136, 143–4, 154, 156 Edmonton (Alberta) 186 education agricultural 53, 57, 59 botanical 127 linguistic 240 see also agricultural colleges; universities Edward VII, king 129, 131, 194 eel fishing 185 effeminacy, alleged Chinese 71 eggs 222, 278 egrets 194, 212, 215 Egypt 105, 107–8 Eitel, Ernest J. 205 electricity generation 250 elephants 105, 133, 145, 181, 188 hunting 189, 194, 206 elk (wapiti) 186 Elliott, Mark 205

El Niño 28 emancipation, slave 82 emasculation, alleged effect of Chinese tea 71 empire see British Empire Empire Marketing Board see marketing employment, outsourcing of 81 emus 182 hunting 183 enclosure, parliamentary 79 Endfield, Georgina (historian) 8 engineering, river 244 engineers 44, 48, 243–5 England 79, 126, 130, 136, 140, 181, 184–5, 193–4, 212, 247 English, in Australia 247 Englishness 82 of seeds 166 English Without Tears (film, 1944) 104 enlightenment 30 enquiries, official Royal Commission into MIA scheme, NSW (1916) 237–8 enterprise, Chinese 171 entrepreneurs 172, 244 environmentalism 35, 235 environment/environmental xv, xvi, 3–5, 8–9, 70, 82, 109–19, 166, 210, 244 anxiety 68 built 265–6, 272–3 change 4, 9, 11, 13, 28, 35–6, 78, 137, 155, 162, 180, 264 degradation 14, 23, 47, 68–9, 81, 156, 208–9, 211, 216, 251 determinism 35 exchanges 14 experiments 238 exploitation 12–13 hazards 273–4 history xiv–xv, 7–8, 11, 13, 22, 162, 180, 152–3, 203, 265–6 knowledge 9, 14, 152 management 25 modification 153, 151 practices 14 transformation 75–6, 140, 153, 165–6, 233, 265 urban xv, 263–84

Index Enys, John 189 Eora people 182 epidemics 275 plant diseases 69 equipment, agricultural 46, 51 erosion 14, 78–9 espionage 106 estate management 143 Ethiopia 97 ethnic consciousness, Manchu 205 purity 46 Europe xv, 3, 12–13, 22, 76–7, 79, 92–111, 136, 237 Europeans in Africa 103–5, 108–9 in Canada 264 in China 44, 203, 207, 209, 215, 217, 218–19 in Sri Lanka 141 in tropics 26–8, 32–3 Evening Standard (newspaper) 71 exhibitions, international Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition (1893) 72 Paris Exposition Universelle (1890) 194 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition (1876) 194 exhumation of bodies 168 see also repatriation exoticism 81–2 expeditions American zoological, to China (1916–17) 218 Duke of Bedford’s (1906) 222 R. S. Clark’s (1909) 222 experiment farms see farms experiments, agricultural 240–3 expertise indigenous 192 networks 251 experts, foreign, in China 47–8, 52, 56–9 exploration 95, 180, 203, 206 explorers 180, 191, 209 see also expeditions explosives 75 extraterritoriality 5

299

factories, tea 72 Fagan, Brian M. (historian) 22, 24 Fairieland plantation (Sri Lanka) 143 Falz-Fein, F. R. 99, 106 families 158 family networks 164 famines 28–9, 35, 74 China International Famine Relief Commission 58 Fanling Hunt 212 Fanling–Sheung Shui (New Territories, Hong Kong) 212 Fan Shengzhi 48 farmers 46, 48, 53, 57–9, 79, 93, 237–8, 243, 245 smallholders 73 tenant 47 yeomen 235–8 see also peasants farm/farms experiment 53, 44, 46, 52–6, 58–9, 238–44 Coonamble Experiment Farm (NSW) 258n. 80 Grafton Experiment Farm (NSW) 242 Riverina Welfare Farm (formerly Yanco Experiment Farm) 249 land 5, 47, 221 managers 52, 57 size 237–8 state 56–7 subdivision of 236 see also market gardens farming 52, 165, 180 cattle 79 dairy 164, 210, 237 intensive 237 mixed 238, 246 techniques 44, 239 see also gardening fashion 181, 192–5 fats 188 fauna, loss of 79 see also animals feathers 181, 187, 189, 192–5, 238 as ornaments 162 plucking of 278 trade 193–4

300

Index

fences 263, 276, 280–1 fencing 280 fengshui (geomancy) 166–8, 171 Fengtian (Shenyang or Mukden) 53 Fenwick-Owen, George 222 Ferguson, John 143 ferns 131, 182 fertilizer 7, 51, 58, 75, 78, 141, 159, 163, 165, 175n. 41 see also manure fevers 275 fiction 104 Fiege, Mark 271 The Field (periodical) 100 Fiji 163, 165 films 104 comedy 113n. 27 documentary 105 Birds of Passage (1925) 116n. 58 firearms 181–2, 187, 190, 195, 208, 264 fires 97, 140, 182, 91 use of, by indigenous peoples 182 fish 97, 274, 278 fishing xv, 184–5, 188, 207, 212 flavour 82 flooding 14, 23, 29, 35, 97, 156, 236, 241, 250 flora exotic 127 indigenous 145, 183 flowers 131, 162, 170, 182 artificial 193 Chinese 12 flycatcher, spotted (Muscicapa striata) 104 flying foxes 129 flyways 101–2, 110 folklore 30–1 Foochow (Fuzhou) 204, 209 food 189 characteristics of 82 exotic 164 gathering, traditional 79 hunting for 186 importing 241, 246–7 origin of 68 plants 265 preserved 209, 238, 245, 278 prices 24, 278 production 238, 249 regulations 274

shortages 182, 248–9 sources of 9 storage 24 supply 28–9, 46, 58, 186, 274, 276–9 for birds 97 surpluses 251 Food and Agriculture Organization, United Nations 249 football 207 footwear 189 Ford, Charles 210, 214 forest/forests 5, 49, 79, 182 afforestation 26, 211 clearance 133–4, 135, 140, 145, 165 conservation 26 deforestation 14, 23, 25–8, 31, 69, 78–9, 133–4, 135, 140, 145, 165 effect on climate 26 equatorial 97–8 products: edible fungus 164 tropical 5 forestry 53, 110 management 26 National Forestry Research Institute, Chinese (Zhongyang linye shiyansuo) 56 plantations 52, 57 policies 26 workers 134 Formosa (Taiwan) 208 Fort Garry, Upper (Manitoba) 266 Fortier, L. M. 264 Fort Jameson (Chipata, Zambia) 100 Foseley, Richard 281 fowl domestic 267 marsh 214 wild 185, 204, 207, 214–15 shooting of 185, 204 fowling see bird shooting foxes 215, 274 hunting 207 South China red 212 urban xv fragrance 125 France 48, 194 Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor 93 freemasons 168 Free Press (newspaper) 281

Index French in China 48 in Sri Lanka 126 fruit 132, 274, 278 Chinese 127 growing 127, 156 non-edible 70 trees 52, 128, 219, 238, 268 fuel 79 Fujian province 209 funerary architecture 168 practices 170 fungi 131, 137 edible tree (Auricularia polytricha) 164–5 furriers 194 furs 188, 193 stoles 181 tippets 194 trade 189, 192 Fu Songmu 51 Fuzhou Dockyard 48 Gaines, Thomas E. (historian) 266 game animals 182, 183, 184–5, 188, 278 ecologies 12, 182 laws see legislation management 195 rights 191–2 Gansu 47–9 gardeners 161, 185 gardens/gardening animal damage to 281 Buddhist temple 133 domestic xv, 127 ‘Garden of Prosperity’ (Auckland) 170 market see market gardens naturalistic 131 physic 126 royal 128 tea see tea estates techniques 239 Cantonese 158–9, 162–3 Chinese 152 European 133, 162–3 Sinhalese 133 tools 163 Gardner, George 70, 128, 144

301

garments see clothing Gaynor, Andrea 263 geese 214–15, 267, 278, 282 Chinese 162 magpie 250 wild 215 gender, representations of 76–7 genealogy 158 geography/geographies avian 96 geographers 23–4, 32 geographical knowledge 31, 33, 68, 95 imagined 12 urban 181 see also zoogeographic regions geomancy (fengshui) 166–8, 171 Georgetti, James 193 Germanness of birds 106 Germans in China 48, 59 in Sri Lanka 139 Germany 15, 52, 58–9, 93, 94, 99, 101–3, 106, 247 germ theory of disease 33–4 Ghana 108, 114–15n. 38 ghosts (gui) 167–70 Gibraltar 95, 105 gifts, indigenous crafts 189 Gill, Samuel 183 Gillespie, Richard (historian) 30 ginger 132, 161 plantations 163 Glasgow 68 Gleeson, M. J. 247 Gliddon, George 96 glue 161 goats 54, 59, 183, 185, 282–3 Godfrey, P. C. 212 gold alluvial 161 extraction 160 goldfields 153–4, 157, 161, 167, 237 ‘Gold Mountain’ see California mining technology 159 dredges 164 New Zealand Gold Dredge 161 hydraulic elevating 160–1 Californian Pump 160 ‘New Gold Mountain’ see New Zealand

302 golf 104 Goodwin, George 184 Gordon Cumming, Constance 130 Goullart, Peter 56 government colonial 5, 54, 79 departments Bureau of Development, Xikang (jianshe ting) 56 Bureau of Imperial Gardens and Hunting Lands, Qing Chinese 205 Bureau of Military Livestock, Chinese (junmusi) 54, 59 bureaus of agriculture and forestry, Chinese regional 56 bureaus of economic development, Chinese provincial 57 Department of Agriculture, NSW 238–43, 245–6, 247, 249 Department of Tourist and Health Resorts, NZ 185 Government Gardens and Tree Planting Department, Hong Kong 210 Immigration Department, Canadian 264 Imperial Maritime Custom Service, Chinese 206 Repression of Slavery Department, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan 100 United States Department of Agriculture 52 federal 249 local 56, 214 municipal 263–4, 271–5, 277, 279, 281–3 national 244, 247 provincial 153 state 235, 237–46, 248 governors colonial 22, 125, 129, 133, 139, 204, 206–7, 211, 214, 219 provincial 48–50, 52–3, 59 Grafton Experiment Farm (NSW) 242 grain 53, 156, 268 storage 24 supply 46 trade 28–9

Index Granger, Charles 273 grapes 238, 268 grasses Guinea grass 210 introduced 165 grasshoppers 103 grasslands 60, 182–3 graves 221 Chinese, in New Zealand 158, 168 exhumation 168 see also repatriation graziers 237 grazing 55, 282–3, 284 Great Lakes (North America) 189 Greece, ancient 93 Green, Thomas 185 greengage trees 159 ‘Green Revolution’ 250–1 Greer, Kirsten (historian) 95 Gregory, Sir William 129, 137, 142 Griqua people 189 grocers 68 Grosskopf, J. F. W. 105 grouse 211 Grove, Richard H. (historian) 23, 26 Grzimek, Bernhard 106, 108 Guangdong see Canton province Guangxi province 155 Guangzhou see Canton city guano 75, 78 guidebooks 202 sportsmen’s handbooks 202 guides, hunting 190–2, 203 Guinea 130 Gujaratis 29 gulls 105, 215 guns see firearms habitats 93 bird 110, 194 destruction of 109, 194 protection of 108–9 wildlife 217 Haeckel, Ernst 139, 143 Hakgala (Sri Lanka) 132, 137, 138, 139, 144–5 Hall, Stuart 82 Hami (Kumul) 49 Hamilton, Charles Edward 282

Index Hamilton (Ontario) 267 Han An 56 Hankow (Hankou) 214, 221 Hanway, Jonas An Essay on Tea (1757) 71 Haputale (Sri Lanka) 78 Hardy, Rev. E. J. 213 hares 211, 213–14 hunting 207 Harrison, Alice 193 Harrison, Mark (historian) 32 Hart, Herbert 190–2 Hart, Sir Robert 206 harvests 24, 221, 241 failures 156 harvesting 133, 140, 219, 241 Harwood, Richard 185 hats 182, 192–4 pith helmets or topis 32, 134, 218 Havana (Cuba) 130 Hawaii 75 hawks 212 sparrow-hawks 215 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 77 health 25, 32–4 animal 272–3, 277, 279 mental 32–3 public 14, 271–81, 284 workers’ 28 heaven see religious beliefs Hebei province 58 Heber, Reginald, Anglican Bishop of Calcutta 123, 125, 128 Hector, Sir James 194 hell, belief in 170 Hemileia vastatrix (fungus) 137 hemp 46 Manila 132 seed 161 Heneratgoda (Sri Lanka) 132 herbaria 132 Herbert, Eugenia W. (historian) 9, 14, 69 herbs, culinary 161 Her Man Gilbey (film, 1944) 104 Hermann, Ottó 99, 101 Recensio critica automatica of the Doctrine of Bird-Migration (1905) 97 herons 105, 110, 212, 215

303

Herrmann, Bernd (historian) 266 hibernation 93, 95 hides 187, 189, 193 see also skins highlands see Scotland hill stations 33, 137 Himmler, Heinrich 106 Hindus 73–4 see also Tamils historians economic xiv, 11 of empire xiv, 7–8 environmental 4, 8 historiography xv–xvi, 4, 107, 152–3, 203 hockey 207 hoes 163 hogs see pigs Hokkaido 50, 52, 54, 59 holidaymaking 204, 221 Holland 95 Hollander, Gail (geographer) 68 Holt, Richard (historian) 213 Holy Roman Empire 93 see also Germany Hong Kong 5, 13–14, 151, 154, 156–7, 169, 204, 206–8, 210–14, 220 New Territories 212 Stonecutters’ Island 212 Victoria Harbour 210 Hongkong Daily Press (newspaper) 211 Hongkong Telegraph (newspaper) 212 Hooker, Sir Joseph 129–31, 138 Hooker, Sir William 128–9, 131 horns 193 horses 59, 183, 263–4, 267–8, 269, 272–5, 278–81, 282, 283 English 54, 59 Mongolian 54 polo ponies 207 racehorses 207 runaway 282–3 Russian 54 horticulture/horticultural 53, 237 competitions 162 equipment 163 horticulturalists 126 knowledge 162 societies 162 hounds see dogs

304

Index

houseboats 204, 216, 219–20 housing Chinese, in New Zealand 167 design 26 impermanency of 167 plantation 75, 142 rural 46, 51, 58, 135 urban 167 Hua district (China) 168 Hudson’s Bay Company 266 Hughes, Lotte (historian) 180, 188 (with William Beinart) Environment and Empire (2007) 4 Hughes, Mr (of Hughes and Hough) 220–1 Hughes and Hough (brokerage firm) 220 huia 189, 194 Hulme, Mike 36 human–animal relations see animals, human relationship with humanitarianism 82, 249 campaigns 83 organizations Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Women, Children and Animals 272 see also slavery Humboldt, Alexander von 23 Hume, David 37n. 7 Hume dams (NSW) 247 Humpty Doo (NT) 250 Hunan province 47–8 Hungarians 99, 101 Hungary 99–100 Hunter, Kate (historian) 12 hunters 195, 204, 214 athleticism and resourcefulness of 206 British, in Japan 230n. 114 Chinese 217, 221–3 in British hunts 221 hunting xv, 13, 94, 100, 103, 105, 114–15n. 38, 129, 143, 180–2, 183, 184–9, 190, 191–6, 202–7, 208, 209–14, 215, 216, 217, 218–23 commodity 181 cult of 206 cultures 188, 195

enclosures, imperial Chinese 205 hunts drag hunts 212 Fanling Hunt 212 Shanghai Hunt Club 221 Shanghai Paper Hunt (‘Hare and Hounds’) 214 Yokohama Hunt Club 230n. 114 licences 187, 211, 218 over-hunting 208 ‘pot-hunting’ (for food) 186–7 practices Chinese 220 indigenous 187, 216 Japanese 220 Portuguese 220 restrictions on 187–8, 191, 205, 211, 218–19, 221, 230n. 114 rights 187–8 social restriction of 186–7 techniques: drag-netting 216 traditional 190, 191 traditions 191–2 Huntington, Ellsworth Civilization and Climate (1915) 24 Hu Pingzhi 49 Hursthouse, Charles 185 Hyde-Baker, Harold 199n. 48 hydraulic elevating 160–1 sluicing 160 technology 48 hydro-electricity, Snowy Mountains Scheme 250 hygiene 247 food 72 Ice Age, Little 30 identity, cultural 153 illiteracy 155 illness see disease Illustrated London News (periodical) 73, 77 immigration see migration Imperial Economic Committee Report on Tea (1931) 82 imperial expansion 5, 14, 180 imperialism 3, 21, 44, 46, 49, 103–4, 172 informal xiv, 5, 7, 207

Index implements, gardening 163 India 7, 15, 24, 28–9, 35, 50, 58–9, 70–2, 79, 105, 123, 125, 127, 138, 140–1, 181, 190, 194, 203–7, 209, 242, 244, 246 hill stations 33, 137 southern 74, 138, 142 Indian Ocean 26, 94, 130 Indians, in Sri Lanka 73–5, 76–7, 135, 142 indigenous peoples 5, 9, 30–1, 182, 186–8, 190, 191–2, 195–6, 205, 207, 218–20, 222–3, 265 alleged apathy of 29 alleged environmental sensitivity of 13, 18n. 30 alleged laziness of 23, 57–8 and hunting 180–1 indigenous Australians 182–3, 187, 189, 236 women 189–90 industrial relations 80 revolution 79 industrialization 14, 79, 81, 268 industry 235, 237 noxious 275 information exchange 15 inheritance 47 inscriptions, memorial 170 insects 97, 103, 105, 132, 191, 213 institutions 5 interior decoration, exotic 164 intermarriage 189 international agreements African–Eurasian Waterbird Agreement 119n. 89 Bonn Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (1979) 108–9 Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (1971) 108 relations Australian-American 244–5 Australian-Japanese 240 Sino-British 151, 202, 204, 206 International Export Company 222–3 interpreters 199n. 48

305

introduction of plants and animals see acclimatization invasion, Japanese, of China 56 investment 11–12, 134, 143, 157, 245 irrigation 44, 48–50, 58–9, 159, 160, 163, 223, 234, 235–7, 239, 241–4, 246–7, 249–51 Irrigation Act, Victoria (1886) 244 irrigation districts Coleambally Irrigation Area 235, 250 Mildura Irrigation Colony 244 Murray Valley irrigation district 235, 248–50 Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area 233, 234, 235–9, 242, 244–9 Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission (NSW) 237, 245–6 Italians in Australia 248 in the United States 187 ivory 189, 193–4 piano keys 181 trade 195 jackals 145 Jacobs, J. 194 Jacobs, Nancy (historian) 13–15 Jade Emperor 170 Jamaica 82 James, Henry E. M. 209 Jamieson, George 219–20 Japan 15, 46, 50–5, 57–9, 239–40, 246 Japanese in Australia 238–41, 243, 247 in China 44, 60, 209 in Hong Kong 220 in Manchuria 49 Jardine Matheson & Co. 214, 216 Java 133, 138–9, 246 Javanese, in Sri Lanka 125 jerboas 222 Jernigan, Thomas R. Shooting in China (1908) 205 Jesuits 29, 188 jewellery 99 Jiangsu province 53 Jilin (Manchuria) 53, 56 Jinan (Shandong) 52

306 Jingyuan (Ningxia) 48 Johnson, James 32 Jonville, Eudelin de 126–7 Joong Chew Lee 164 journalists 79, 151 judicial system 170 jungles 70, 133–4, 140, 155, 181, 188 clearance 28 Kafue 189 Kaitakushi (Hokkaido Development Agency) 52 horse-breeding station 54, 59 kakapos 193 Kalahari 100 Kalutara (Sri Lanka) 128 Kandy 83, 123, 128, 136–7 highlands 78 independent territories 125 kingdom of 123, 128, 133 region 70, 79 kanganies (Tamil foremen) 73–5, 136 kangany system 76, 133 see also debt peonage system kangaroos 182 hunting 183, 184 karez (kan’er jing) irrigation system 48 Karonga (Malawi) 100–1 Kashmir 105, 204 Kawandanuwara plantation (Sri Lanka) 143 Kerala 74 Kerr, Dr George H. 275–6 Kerr, William 127–8 kestrels 212 Kew, Royal Botanic Garden see botanic gardens Kham 50–4, 56, 59–60 Khartoum 99 Kheraj, Sean (historian) xv, 13–14 Kingston (Ontario) 267 Kirk-Greene, Anthony 203 Kirthi Sri Rajasinghe, King of Kandy 128 kites (birds) 93, 215 Kiukiang (Jiujiang) 209, 214 kiwi 189, 192 little spotted 193 skins 194

Index Klingle, Matthew W. (historian) 11 knives 264 knowledge botanical 127 indigenous 32, 36, 92–5, 216 institutional 242 local 15 networks 165 scientific 102 vernacular 95, 106, 243 Koreans, in Manchuria 49 Kozspout (Hungarian ornithologist) 100 Kunming 56 KwaZulu-Natal 100, 191 labour 27, 29, 49, 73–6 agricultural 57–9, 133, 219–21, 236, 246 bonded 75 child 76, 140 Chinese 165, 171 coercion 12 factory 79 indentured 75, 133 indigenous 236 migration 9, 11, 25, 142 networks 76 pastoral 237 plantation 73–4, 83, 139 recruitment 73–5, 133, 142 relations 69, 82 skilled 73 slave 82–3 un-free 75–6 women 76, 140, 248 lambs 237, 238 lamps, whale-oil 181 Lancashire 82 land clearance 142 common 79 cultivation 46 degradation 47 leasing 240 marginal 156 measurement 143 ownership 9, 46–7, 51, 143, 158 prices 136 settlement 238

Index use 5, 23, 48, 55, 59, 79, 110, 140, 143, 156, 168, 236–7, 245, 247 use-rights 47 waste 46–8, 50–1, 79, 205, 216 Waste Lands Ordinance, Ceylon (1897) 79 landrail 211 landscapes 3, 5, 151, 153–4, 169, 171–2, 203, 207, 210, 218–19 barren 156 Cantonese 171 change 165, 167 Chinese 155–7 cosmological 169 cultural significance of 166–7, 219 idealised 76, 77 views 155 Landseer, Sir Edwin Queen Victoria Meeting the Prince Consort on his Return from Deer Stalking in the Year 1850 (painting) 210–11 Langhorne, George 187 language Cantonese 154 Chinese characters 170 dialects 158 Japanese 240 linguistic barriers 152 Lantao Island (Hong Kong) 212 Lapland 104–5 La Shijun 53–4 Latour, Bruno 101 Science in Action (1987) 102 law 11 Chinese 5 international 104 legal apparatus 165 see also legislation Lawrence (Otago) cemetery 168 Chinatown 167 Lawson, Joseph (historian) 12, 15 laziness 23, 25, 57–8 League of Nations 5, 7, 104 see also United Nations learned societies Royal Asiatic Society, North China Branch 213

307

learning, traditional Chinese 59–60 leather, moose 189 leeches 134 leeks 161 legislation acts Animals Protection Act, New Zealand (1895) 188 Crown Lands Encroachment Ordinance, Ceylon (1840) 79 Enclosure Acts, English 79 Immigration Restriction Act, Australia (1901) 237, 239–40, 243 Irrigation Act, Victoria (1886) 244 Migratory Bird Act (Weeks–McLean Law), USA (1913) 116n. 56 Ordinance for the Preservation of Birds, Hong Kong (1870) 211 Waste Lands Ordinance, Ceylon (1897) 79 Wild Bird and Game Preservation Ordinance, Hong Kong (1885; amended 1892) 211 game laws 184, 186–7, 191, 195, 205, 218 land 236 municipal by-laws 14, 264, 270–4, 276–84 racist 157, 239 Leong Foy 176n. 61 leopards 145, 209 leprosy 33 Lesotho 100 Lester, Alan (geographer) 12, 107, 180, 188 lettuces 161 Lever Brothers (Unilever) 81 Lewis, Frederick 139 Liang Qichao 49–50 Liaodong 47 Liardet, Hector 194 lifestyles Chinese 154 European 32–3 lighting, street 181 Li Hongzhang 50 lily, Chinese sacred (Narcissus tazetta var. chinensis) 162 lineage ancestral 158 groups 167

308

Index

Lingnan region (southern China) 155, 158 Linnaeus, Carl Migrationes avium (1757) 95 Systema Naturae, tenth edition (1758–9) 95 Lin Zexu 48 lions 188, 207 stone 167 Lipton, Sir Thomas 12, 68–72, 76, 80–2, 140 Lipton Tea Company 12, 73, 76–7, 80, 81 Litchi chinensis see lychees literacy 99, 101, 155 ‘Literary Hero’ (nickname) 169 literature adventure fiction 188 children’s 105–6 hunting 203, 206–7, 209 Liu Kunyi 54 Liu Wenhui 56 Liu Yiyan 56 livestock 46, 54, 58, 165, 182–3, 210, 242, 263, 271, 273–4, 276, 278–81, 283 domestic 263, 265 farming 54–5, 59 see also animal husbandry urban 264, 272 Livingstone, David (historian) 31, 34, 36 Livingstone, David (missionary) 50, 189 Lloyd, C. J. (historian) 236 loans 74–5 agricultural 46, 51, 58 Loie, Timothy Fay 154 London 3, 70, 100, 140, 192–4 British Museum 132, 222 London Commercial Salerooms, Mincing Lane 140 Royal Botanic Garden, Kew 126–7, 129–30, 137–8 London (Ontario) 267 Loo, Tina (historian) 192 Loolecondera Estate (Sri Lanka) 70, 143 Lop Nur region 55 Luangua River (Zambia) 191 Luapula River (Zambia) 190 lucerne (alfalfa) 237 Luding (Chakzam) 53 Forest and Horticulture Plantation 57 Lugard, Sir Frederick 206 Lushan 209

lychees 132, 156 Lye Bow 159 lyrebirds 187, 193 Macartney, George, first Earl 47 McCaughey, Samuel 237, 239 McConochie, Newton 195 McDonald, A. H. E. 247 Macdowell, General Hay 127 machinery agricultural 77, 241, 243, 247, 250 tea-processing 140 MacKenzie, John M. (historian) 203 Empire of Nature (1988) 180 McKeown, Adam (historian) 153, 156 McKinney, Hugh 244 Macmillan, Allister 81 McNeill, J. R. (historian) 8 McNeur, Catherine (historian) 266 Macquarie Island 194 McShane, Clay (historian) 266 Madagascar 50, 131 magazines see periodicals magic, belief in 205 magistrates 47, 50 colonial 100–1 Magoses people (amaXhosa) 94 magpies 215 Mahaweli Ganga (Sri Lanka) 128 Malabar coast (India) 125 Malabar people, in Sri Lanka 135 malaria 28, 33, 69, 105, 107 anti-malarial drugs 138 Malawi 100–1 Mali 93 Malinger (Zambian servant) 190–1 Malta 95 mammals, lack of native, in New Zealand 183 Manchester 79 Manchuria 44, 46–7, 49–51, 53–4, 56, 207, 209 Manchus 55, 205 mandated territories, League of Nations 5, 7 see also individual states mangoes 132 Manitoba northern 187 southern 263–7, 268–70, 271–84

Index Manitoba Gazette (periodical) 280 Mannar (Sri Lanka) 142 manslaughter 219 Manson, Sir Patrick 208 manuals, hunting 205 manufacturing 11, 14 manure 159, 163, 274–5 animal 175n. 41 goat 78 ‘night soil’ 78, 175n. 41, 273, 276 Maoism 60 Maori 5, 152, 155, 164–5, 168, 175n. 41, 185, 187–9, 190 mapping 95 marine studies xv market gardens 128, 159, 165, 172, 263 Chinese 151–2, 157–9, 160, 161–6 marketing 81, 136, 165–6 commodity 12, 72 direct 12 Empire Marketing Board 16, 71, 248, 259n. 99 markets 277 commodity 12 domestic 11 international 11, 16 public 276–9 regulations 277–9 Market, License and Health Committee, Winnipeg 276 Marks, Robert (historian) 24 Marsh, George Perkins Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864) 23 marshbuck (sitatunga) 191 marshlands 240 marsh warbler (Acrocephalus palustris) 93 Marx, Karl 89n. 63 Marx, Leo The Machine in the Garden (1964) 77 Marxism xvi masculinity 180, 202, 213 Mason, Jennifer (historian) 266 Matale (Sri Lanka) 74–5, 142 material culture, Chinese 155 Matsuyama (Shikoku) 239

Matthews, W. Thomas 277 Matura (Sri Lanka) 125 Mauritania 110 Mauritius 26 mausolea 168 May, Sir Francis Henry 207, 211, 214 Mayobode School (Zimbabwe) 106 Mead, Elwood 243–4 meadows 79 meat 184, 187–9, 274, 278 production 271 rights to 191–2 sale 279 supply 275 game 186 mechanization, of plantation agriculture 140 media see press medicine/medical 23, 25, 32–4 Chinese 161 herbal 161 knowledge, indigenous 34 practitioners 29, 32 research 33 tropical 33, 36 see also plants, medicinal Mediterranean 95, 193 Melanesians, in Australia 75 Melbourne (Vic) 240, 242 Melillo, Edward (historian) 12 Melosi, Martin (historian) 265, 272 Melville, Herman 77 memorials, funerary 170 mental health 32–3 merchants 3 British, in China 58–9 Chinese, in New Zealand 164–5 Japanese, in Australia 239–40 messages, carried by birds 99 meterology 30 see also climate; weather Methodists 209 Métis communities 189 MIA see Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area miasma theory of disease transmission 271–4 Middle East 5

309

310 migration avian xv, 13, 15, 92–6, 97–8, 99–110 Palearctic 92, 102, 104–10 Palearctic–Afrotropical 93 human 11, 49–50, 104–5, 181, 218 Cantonese 15, 152–3, 154, 156–7 Chinese 14, 151–2, 155, 157, 172, 237, 242 English 184–5, 247 immigration policies 154 Immigration Department, Canadian 264 Japanese 239 labour 74, 142 networks 153, 164 restriction 237, 240 return 151, 153, 157, 163, 171 routes 102 Mildura Irrigation Colony 244 military campaigns 180, 203 economies xvi forces 47, 151 history xiv occupation, Japanese 248 officers 95, 99, 127, 142, 206, 211 power 11 training 205 uniforms, plumes 181, 193 milk 165, 263, 280 millet 53 millinery 192–4 milling 246 miners, gold 154, 155–6, 161, 169, 171 Ming dynasty 51, 58, 60, 155 mining 191 gold 153–4, 157–60, 165, 172, 237 guano 75 hydraulic 14 Mintz, Sidney (anthropologist) 79 mirrors 167 missionaries 26, 31, 44, 46, 57, 99, 154, 167, 171, 183, 187–8, 191, 202, 204–5, 209, 221 missions 180, 203–4, 236 Canton Villages Mission 171 China Inland Mission 225n. 21 see also universities, missionary

Index Mitchell, Timothy Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (2002) 107–8 Mitchell, William J. T. 219 moa, giant 184 Moa Creek (Otago) 169 modernism xvi modernity 72, 77 modernization 47, 78 Mongolia 44, 46–7, 49–50, 54–6, 60 mongooses 145 monkies 70 monocultures 12, 14, 128, 137, 144 monopolies 125–6, 139 monsoons 137–8, 156, 242 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de 22 Montreal (Quebec) 273 Monty Python and the Holy Grail (film, 1975) 113n. 27 Moon, Alexander 128, 133 moose (Alces alces) 186–7, 189, 197n. 24 moral degeneracy 71 health 32–3 virtue 46 Morija (Lesotho) 100 mortality, human 24 Mortensen, Hans Christian 99 Moses (Zambian capito or head guide) 190 mosquitoes 105 mountain ranges 5 Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme 250 Mudd (botanist) 131 muffs 193–4 mulberries 46 mules 278, 282 Mulvey, Stewart 275, 280 Murray–Darling Basin 235 Murray River 236, 238, 240–1, 244, 246, 250–1 Murray Valley irrigation district 235, 248–50 Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area 233, 234, 235–9, 242, 244–9 Murrumbidgee River 223, 236, 250–1 lower, floodplain 235 Muscolino, Micah (historian) 153

Index museums 192 American Museum of Natural History 209, 218 British Museum 132 Colonial Museum, Auckland 194 Hong Kong City Hall museum of zoological specimens 213 Hong Kong Police Museum, former Wan Chai Gap Police Station, Coombe Road 213 Livingstone Museum (Livingstone, Zambia) 106 Shanghai Museum 213, 222 muskrats 215 Muslims 47 mustelids 197n. 24 mycologists 137 mysticism, in relation to characteristics of food and drink 82 Nagpur 194 names, garden 170 narcissus, Chinese (Chinese Sacred Lily or daffodil, Narcissus tazetta var. chinensis) 162 Natal 100, 191 national identity 81 nationalism and birds 106, 108 culinary patriotism 82 Nationalist Party, Chinese 58 nationalization 81 natural environment xiv history 30, 127, 132, 192, 222 resources 23, 27, 35 world attitudes toward 180–2, 186 human relationship with 26, 30, 89n. 63, 166, 265 representations of 219 naturalists 26, 32, 139, 189, 192, 194, 204, 213, 218, 221, 225n. 21 nature, ‘wild’ 9 Nauru 7 naval forces 48 officers 210 supplies 26

311

Nazis 106 Ncube, Cosmos 106 Negumbo (Sri Lanka) 125 neocolonialism 110 Netherlands 54, 95, 109–10 networks eco-cultural xiv, xvi, 3–16, 25, 32, 36, 44, 58, 81, 83, 107–8, 151–2, 156, 162, 165, 168–9, 171–2, 265 ideas 44, 251 imperial 15–16 transnational 4, 55 neutrality 106 ‘New Gold Mountain’ see New Zealand New Guinea 192 New Health Society 247 New Plymouth (NZ) 164–5 New South Wales 164–5, 182–3, 187, 193, 223, 234, 235, 238–9, 241, 243–4, 246, 250 Department of Agriculture 238–43, 245–6, 247, 249 newspapers 71, 80, 99, 157–8, 163, 188–9, 194, 203, 211–12, 241, 247, 280–1 see also periodicals New Territories see Hong Kong Newton, Ian (ornithologist) 93 New Year, Chinese 221 New York 193 New York Times Magazine 68 New Zealand xiv, 3, 5, 7, 12, 24, 83, 151–3, 154, 155–72, 183–4, 187, 189, 190, 193, 248, 194–5, 239 southern 5, 14, 189 United Tribes of New Zealand 165 New Zealanders in Africa 190, 192 New Zealand Gold Dredge 161 Ng, James (historian) 157 Nigeria 109–10 nightingales 105 Nile, River 97, 108 White Nile 105 Nilgiris 138, 141 Nimar 194 Nimmo and Blair (nurserymen) 162 Ningpo (Ningbo) 204, 215 Ningxia 48

312 nomads 26, 54 sedentarization of 26 semi-nomadic peoples 55 non-governmental organizations 110 Norfolk, north 216 Norris, William 132 North, Frederick 125–6 North, Marianne 129–30, 132 Northern Rhodesia see Zambia Northern Territory (Australia) 242, 250 North Island (NZ) 157–8 Nott, Josiah 96 Novak, William J. 264 Ntiamoa-Baidu, Yaa 108 nudity 105 nuisances 274–6 Nuosu chiefs 56 nurseries 161–2 nutmegs 132 Nuwara Eliya (Sri Lanka) 137 Nyah (Vic) 243 Nyerere, Julius 108 offal 273, 275 offerings, to spirits of dead 170 officials 15, 47 in the afterlife 170 Chinese 12, 44, 46 colonial 29, 50, 54–5, 73, 99–101, 125, 127, 129, 132–3, 139, 142, 194, 202, 204, 206, 209, 214, 219 consular 206, 219–20, 225n. 21, 241 government 29, 48, 50, 53–4, 59–60, 264 public health 274–5, 278, 280 Ohio 52 olfactory imperialism see aromas; fragrance; scent omens, birds as bearers of 99 Ondaatje, Michael 143 onions 161 Ontario 267 Ootacamund (Udhagamandalam, India) 138 Ophir (Otago) 171 opium 71 opium wars see wars orchards 128, 157, 159 organisms 271

Index ‘Ornamentalism’ as interpretation of imperialism 207, 223 ornithologists 95, 101–2, 104, 106, 108–9, 189, 193–4 Royal Hungarian Central Bureau for Ornithology 99 ornithology 95, 99, 106, 209 Orwell, George 71 ospreys 215 ostriches 189 feathers 193, 238 Otago 153, 154, 155, 158, 163, 168–72, 184 Central 156, 159 Provincial Council 153 Otago Witness (newspaper) 157, 163 Ottawa (Ontario) 267 overseers 77 owls 215 ‘The Ox’ (nickname) 169 oxen 267, 281–2 Pacific Islands 7, 152, 163, 182, 248 Pacific Ocean 157 packaging 76, 82 paddy fields 51, 208, 212, 214, 220, 235, 246 Paeroa (NZ) 193 Pagani, Catherine (historian) 206 painters 210–11 Pakistan 105, 204 Palearctic and Palaeotropical zones see zoogeographic regions Palk Strait (Bay of Bengal) 74 Palmerston North (NZ) 158 palm trees 131 coconut 130 date 130 palmyra 130 talipot (Corypha umbriculifera) 130 use in building construction 135 pamphlets, propaganda 106 panthers 213 Panyu (part of Sanyip or Sanyi, Three Districts, China) 156, 158, 168–9 Paraiyans 74 parasites 134 fungal 69

Index parasitologists 208 Paredeniya (Sri Lanka), botanic garden 9, 70, 123, 126–9, 130–2, 133, 137, 139, 141, 143–5 Paris 194 parks national 205 public 126 recreation grounds 215 parliaments Japanese 239 provincial 270–1 parsnips 161 partridges 209, 211–12, 214–15 pastoral ideal 77 pastoralism 55, 59, 79, 94, 183, 236 nomadic 54–5 pathogens, transmission using birds 117n. 68 patriotism, culinary 82 peach trees 52, 159 pearl fishery 126 Pearl River delta 155, 157 region 156 peas 161 peasants 75, 79, 134, 142, 144, 220 Peckham, Robert (historian) 13 Peking 52, 54, 151 pelicans 215 Peliyagoda (Sri Lanka), botanic garden 127 pelts, animal 189 see also furs; skins penal colonies 182, 184 see also convicts Peng Jinmen 51 penguin, Royal 194 Peradeniya (Sri Lanka), Royal Botanic Garden 9, 70, 123, 126–9, 130–2, 133, 137, 139, 141, 143–5 Percival, William Spencer 218–19 periodicals 78, 100, 167, 188, 193, 213, 280 see also newspapers Peru 75, 138 Peruvians in Chile 75 pestilence see disease

313

pests animal 129 bird 103, 250 extermination of 103 insect 105, 191 pets 264 pewit (northern lapwing) 105 Pfeilstorch (stork impaled with a spear) 93, 94 pheasants 185, 197n. 24, 209, 211, 214–16, 217, 220, 222 Menura 187 philanthropy 107 Philippines 248 phosphate 7 photographers 104–5, 283 photography 203, 213 physicians 208 physiocrats 26, 46 picnics 214, 221 picturesqueness, of plantations 140–1 pigeons 185, 212 New Zealand native (kereru) 185, 188 shooting 185 pigs 182–4, 237, 263–4, 267–8, 269, 272–4, 276, 278–81, 282, 283 breeding 60 hunting 183, 185, 195, 204 piggeries 263, 268 wild 185, 212 Pike, Robert M. (historian) 11 Pioneer (newspaper) 194 place names Cantonese, in Otago 170 English 143 Scottish 143 Sinhalese 143 plains 5, 142 plantations 14, 75, 78, 83, 125, 135, 136, 138, 139–40, 141, 142, 144, 163, 165 coffee 68, 78, 133 economics of 9, 143 planters Dutch 125 in Sri Lanka 134–5, 137–9, 141–5 West Indian 133 tea 12, 68, 72–5, 77, 78

314 see also agriculture; individual plantations planting 133, 241 methods 163 times 93 plant/plants 44 breeding 55, 245 chinese 127, 171 collecting 127–8, 171 commercially useful 127, 132, 145 cryptogamic 131 economic 132, 143–4 exotic 59, 126, 131, 161–2, 165, 171–2, 239 extinction 128 food 153 indigenous 161 introduced 4, 9, 14, 153, 162 medicinal 126–7, 138, 153 movement of 139–40 ornamental 162 rare 162 very large 130 Platt, Harold (historian) 265 ploughing 133 plovers 212, 215 plumes, feather 181, 193 plumassiers 194 Plumtree (Zimbabwe) 106 plum trees 159 poaching 184–5, 203, 205 Point Douglas (Manitoba) 281 poisoning 216 Poivre, Pierre 26 Pokfulam (Hong Kong) 210 police 211–12, 273–5, 277, 280–1 policy makers 110 political movements 75 unrest 216, 218 politicians, municipal 282 politics 239, 251 Pollan, Michael 68 pollution 14, 271–2, 279 air 274, 271 by animals 274 environmental 279 water 81 polo 207

Index polygeneticism 32, 96 Pomeranz, Kenneth (historian) 4 Poon Fah grouping 168 population 269 animal 268 Chinese, in New Zealand 157, 171 density 158 growth 156, 267–8 porcupines 145, 213 pork 278 Port Chalmers (NZ) 157 portents 29 porters 190–1 ports 157 Portuguese in Hong Kong 211, 220 in Sri Lanka 69, 123 postcolonialism 108 post offices 280 Potts, Thomas 192 poultry 278, 282 pounds, animal 271, 279–81, 282, 283 poverty 28, 79 prairies 265, 275, 284 predators 182, 183, 194 animal 186 avian 93 Presbyterians 154, 168 Presbyterian Synod of Otago and Southland 171 preservation of game species see conservation press 9, 78, 80, 99–100, 157–8, 163, 167, 188–9, 193–4, 203, 211–13, 241, 247, 280–1 prices, coffee 136 Prince Consort, Albert 210–11 Prince of Wales, Albert 129, 131 prisoners see convicts prisoners of war, Italian in Australia 248 privatization 81 privileges, of crop-growing farmers 47 productivity 27–8 product placement see advertising products, tropical 28 proletariat 79 propaganda 106

Index property animals as 272 boundaries 271 damage to 280–1 interests 280 private 9, 14 relations 271 protection see conservation protests 220–1 proverbs 106 pruning 140 Prussia, East 99–103 publications 154, 202, 215 botanical 128 ornithological 102, 104–5 Purry, Jean-Pierre 27 Pusilawa Estate (Sri Lanka) 139 Qianlong emperor 47 Qing dynasty 58–9, 60, 202, 204–5, 212, 216 Qinghai 60 quail 93, 188, 211–15, 220 Californian (Callipepla californica) 185 Quebec province 273 Queensland 242, 250 Quick, Maggie 193 quinine 69, 138–9 rabbits 211–12, 215 hunting 185 race 9, 32, 34, 46, 71, 96, 103, 109, 181, 196, 202–3, 205, 207 racing, horse 207 racism 24, 72, 153–4, 157, 162, 188, 191, 219–20, 222, 237, 239, 241, 251 radishes 161 Raiffeisen, Friedrich 58 rails, water 212 railways 9, 11, 14, 44, 49, 77, 141, 154, 165, 186, 246, 265 construction 75, 180 employees 193 rainfall 159, 183, 242, 250 rainforests 78 rainmaking 31 Rajahwella (Sri Lanka) 133 rams 282

315

ranches 54–5, 59 Randalls, Samuel (historian) 8 rats 183, 186 Raven-Hart, Roland 140 raw materials 11 Ray, John (ornithologist) 95 Reade, Alfred Arthur 79 Tea and Tea Drinking (1884) 71 Ready, Oliver 218–19 rebellions 27, 29, 47–8 Boxer Uprising (1900) 49, 151 Indian ‘Mutiny’ (1857) 75 Kandyan Province nationalist uprising (1818) 74–5 Matale Rebellion (1848) 74–5 Taiping Revolt (1851–64) 156 recipes 247 record-keeping, hunting 203 recreation 185, 214, 221 Red River (Manitoba) 266 redstarts 110 reforestation see forests refrigeration 164, 222 regulations, urban animal 270–3 religious attitudes 9 beliefs 30–1, 170–1, 205 Chinese 166–71 Sri Lankan 127 repatriation of bodies 168–9, 172 reserves 205 resettlement 46 resistance, colonial 4, 74–5 to foreign hunters 221 resources, natural 9 conflict 156 depletion 12 exploitation 9, 14, 23 extraction 4, 165 management 205 scarcity 156 restaurants 163 revenue, colonial 126 revolts see rebellions rhinoceros hunting 191 Rhodesia Northern (Zambia) 100, 106, 190–1 Southern (Zimbabwe) 106 rhubarb 161

316

Index

rice 5, 53 cultivation 11–12, 51, 156, 160, 208, 210, 212, 214, 220, 233–51 in diet 247 exports 247–9, 251 imports 247 market 246–7 Rice Marketing Board, Australian 247 production 247 trade 248, 251 varieties 241, 244–5, 250–1 Richards, Audrey 191 rifles 195, 208 ringing of birds see bird leg ringing Ritchie, Neville (archaeologist) 160, 167 rituals Chinese religious 167–8 mortuary 170 social 207 Riverina 235, 247, 250–1 Riverina Welfare Farm (formerly Yanco Experiment Farm) 249 rivers 14, 161, 244 see also individual rivers roads 165, 206, 266, 277 building 134, 137, 141 Robertson, B. 194 Robin, Libby (historian) 4 Rocky Mountains (Canada) 189 Rome, Adam (historian) 271 Roseires (Sudan) 100 Rosen, Christine Meisner (historian) 265 roses 162 Rossitten (Rybachy, East Prussia), Vogelwarte 99–103 Rostock 93 University 94 Rothschild Emma Louise, Baroness de 194 Nathan Mayer, Baron de 139 Round Hill (Otago) 161–2 royal tours 129, 131 royalty 129, 131, 194, 210–11 rubber 69, 79, 130, 132, 144 Ruggles-Brise, Cecily J. 104, 109 Russell, William Howard 130 Russia 49, 99–103, 106 southern 99

Russians, in China 56, 60 Ryan, James (historian) 213 Rybachy (Russian Federation) Ryrie, Phineas 212

99–103

safaris 190–1 Saga Prefecture (Japan) 52 Sahara 50, 93, 96, 99 Sahel 97, 109–10 sailors 29, 94, 181, 183 Sai Louie 164 salinity, soil 237, 245, 251 sambhur 145 Sam Chew Lain 168 sandpiper 105 sanitation 277 see also scavenging; waste, disposal Sanyip (Sanyi, Three Districts, China) 156 sap 161 Saraca declinata 131 Savage, Victor (geographer) 33 savannahs 181, 188 Saxony 52 scavenging 273–6, 279–80 scent 81–2, 133 see also aromas; fragrance Schama, Simon (historian) 13 Schmalzer, Sigrid (historian) 60 scholarship 30 Schüz, Ernst 103, 106 science 26–7, 30, 35, 60, 72, 107–8, 127, 141 agricultural 57, 242–3 Western 47 scientific knowledge 13, 29–32, 36, 96 method 23 networks 107 research 78, 218 Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation 250 societies 5 scientists 9, 15, 44, 57, 102, 106, 110, 209 Sclater, Philip Lutley 96 scorpions, dried 161 Scotland 68, 185, 190 highlands 210–11 Scots, in Sri Lanka 141

Index seagulls 194 sealing 183, 189 seasons 92–3, 98 Secheli people 189 secret societies 156 security, plantation 75 seeds 46, 51, 53, 58, 144, 161, 165–6, 233, 241–3 Senegal 110 sermons 29 servants 135, 190 settlement 133, 250 agricultural 12 closer 235 convict 182 frontier agricultural (kenzhi) 51 impermanence of 170 land 240 resettlement 46 soldier 249 urban 267 settlers agricultural 60 Chinese 46, 49–51, 155 European 30–1, 99, 104, 180, 187, 237 Seychelles 130 Shaanxi province 48 shags, speckled 194 Shandong 204 Shanghai 204, 214, 216, 219–20, 222, 230n. 114 Museum 213, 222 Shanxi province 50, 207, 221 Shapin, Stephen (historian) 31 Shapiro, Judith (historian) 60 sheep 183, 221, 237, 264, 267–8, 269, 273, 276, 278 Shek Moon (Upper Panyu, China) 169 shellfish 184 shikar see safaris Shikoku (Japan) 239 shipping 16, 77, 157, 271 networks 151–2, 165 ships 14, 206, 216 crews, multiracial 181 shipbuilding 48 shipwrecks 94, 168–9 shooting 184–5, 190, 214–16 accidental 219–21

317

of animals 129 see also bird shooting shopkeeping 163, 282 shovels 163 Shōzō, Kusubara 52 shrines 170 Shunzhi Emperor of China 47 Sichuan 47, 51–2, 54 sickness 32 see also disease sightseeing 203 silk 46 Simmons, Mr (fl. 1874) 185 sin, concepts of 30 Singapore 164 Sinhalese people 125, 128 Sinologists 56, 205 Sissons, David (historian) 240 Sitara, Georgia (historian) 272 sitatunga (marshbuck) 191 Siyip (Siyi or Four Districts, China) 156 The Sketch (newspaper) 80 Skinner, Major Thomas 142 skins 187, 193 animal 189–90, 193 bird 192, 194 Slatin, Rudolf 99 slaughter, animal 270–1 slaughterhouses 275, 278 slavery abolition of 133 Age of Abolition (1780s–1880s) 75 anti-slavery 82, 83 Repression of Slavery Department, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan 100 slaves 79, 82–3, 125, 258–9n. 88 slave trade, Atlantic 75 sleeping sickness 191 sluicing 160 smallpox 236 smells, foul 274–6 Smith, William Clark 52 snakes 70 black-tailed 161 snares 190, 216 snipe 105, 208–9, 211–12, 214–15 social antagonism 184 Darwinism xvi

318

Index

hierarchy 207 justice 68 organizations informal 5 traditional Chinese 158 relations 69 rituals 202 security 81 status 211 support 158 unrest 156 values 202 welfare 272 sodium nitrate (fertilizer) 75, 78 soil 133, 144–5, 159, 245–6, 271 deficiencies 78 degradation 69, 79 nutrients, depletion of 14 productivity 78 salinity 237, 245, 251 soldiers 181–2, 202 soldier settlement 249 soul, fate of 170 South Africa 83, 94, 97, 100–1, 103, 105–6, 109, 187, 189, 191, 193, 195 South African Ornithologists Union 100 South China Sea 205 South Island (NZ) 185 Southland 171 souvenirs, indigenous weapons as 194–5 Sowerby, Arthur de Carle 221 Fur and Feather in North China (1914) 222 Sowerby, James 221 sowing times 93 soya beans 49 Spanish, in South America 138 sparrows 215 spears 195 specimens natural history 203, 213–14, 218 zoological 192–3, 203, 218, 222 spectacles, tinted 32 speculation 134 Spence, James 281 spices 123, 125–6, 144 spies, alleged 106, 113n. 28 spinach 161 spirits, belief in 169

sports 203, 207 blood sports see hunting sporting societies Game Club 212 Hongkong Angling Club 212 Hong Kong Jockey Club 212 Hong Kong Yacht Club 207 see also hunts sportsmanship, ideas of 216 squatters 47 squirrels, grey xv Sri Lanka 3, 5, 9, 12, 14, 16, 68–79, 80, 81–3, 123, 124, 125–9, 130, 131–4, 135–6, 137–45 stables 268, 271, 276 stalactite dust 161 starvation 182, 248 state control 26 statistics Bureau of Agriculture and Statistics, Canada 267 Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Canada 267 Stavenisse (ship) 94 steamships 9, 11, 14, 212, 214 steppes 49 Still, John 145 Stoffwechsel or metabolism see natural world storks 93, 99, 101, 103, 108, 167 white (Ciconia ciconia) 97, 98, 100 Stott & Hoare’s Business College, Melbourne 240 street layout 166–7 strikes 80 structuralism xvi students 48 Sudan 97, 99–100, 105 suffrage, women’s 80 sugar 82, 132 cultivation 83 East Indian 83 plantations 75 Suiyuan province (Mongolia) 56 Sumatra 131 sunglasses 32 ‘supermarket narratives’ of origins of foodstuffs 68, 82 supernatural beliefs 153, 169–70 surveillance of workers 75

Index surveying 180 swallows 93, 95, 105, 113n. 27 swamps 133, 155 Swan Hill (Vic) 238 Local Land Board 240 swans 190 Sweden 104–5 sweet potatoes 156 swimming 185, 207 swine see pigs Swinhoe, Robert 209, 225n. 21 Sydney (NSW) 164–5, 182, 193 Sydney Morning Herald (newspaper) 247 Symonds, A. J. 282 Tahltan people 192 Tahr, Himalayan (Hemitragus jemlahicus) 185–6, 197n. 24 tailorbirds 215 tails, birds’ 193 Taining 56 Taiping Rebellion (1850–64) 156, 216 Tai Tam (Hong Kong) 210 Taiwan 208 Takasuka, Ichiko 239 Takasuka, Isaburo (Jō) 238–43, 246, 251 Takasuka family 240, 243 takin (Budorcas taxicolor bedfordi) 222 Tamil Nadu 74 Tamils images of 76 in Sri Lanka 16, 73–5, 77, 83, 142 Tanganyika see Tanzania Tangires, Helen (historian) 277 tanning of bird skins 192 tanneries 54 Tantangara Dam (NSW) 250 Tanzania 104, 108 Tan Zhonglin 48 tapioca 132 Taranaki 164–5 Jubilee Butter factory 164 tariffs imperial preference 248 rice 247 Tariff Board, Australian 247 Tarr, Joel (historian) 265–6 Tasmania 182–4, 189

319

taste 82 Tate, Harry 199n. 48 Tau (Daofu), Kham region 50 taxation 46, 49, 74 of dogs 271 Imperial Maritime Customs Service, Chinese 206 taxidermy 194, 213 Taylor, James 69–70, 140 tea (Camellia sinensis) 5, 15–16, 68–83, 132, 137–41 afternoon 80–1 cultivation 12, 68–9, 70–1, 73, 79, 124, 137, 139–40, 141, 142, 144–5 estates (gardens) 73, 75, 82, 141 feminine associations of 80 marketing 166 medicinal benefits of 70 parties 83 pickers 3, 15, 73 production 69, 72, 82, 139–40 teal 212, 214–15 Te Aro Seed Company 165 technology/technological 9, 14, 99, 165 agricultural 152, 243, 250 change 14, 77 Chinese 160 gold mining 161 hydraulic 159, 160 transfer of 163 Western 47, 160, 164 telecommunications 9, 11, 58, 99 networks 6, 10 use of birds in 92 telegraphy 9, 11 temples, mortuary 169 Tennent, Sir James Emerson 73, 123, 134, 137, 139, 140 tennis, lawn 207 terroir 82 Te Wai Pounamu see South Island Texas 240 Thienemann, Johannes 98, 99–100, 102–3, 109 Thomas, Nicholas (anthropologist) 79 Thompson, E. P. (historian) 79 Thorsheim, Peter (historian) 271 Three Gorges (Yangtze River) 204 thrushes 215

320 Thwaites, G. H. K. 128–32, 137–9, 144 Enumeratio plantarum Zeylaniae (1864) 131 Tianjin 205, 207 Tibet 44, 50–1, 53–4, 56 tigers 155, 188, 207, 209, 215 hunting of 207, 208, 221 man-eating 209, 215 Tytam 212–13 Timbuktu 93 The Times (newspaper) 100 tippets (stoles) 194 tobacco 156, 238 cultivation 163 Shiraz 132 tomahawks 181 tools, gardening 163 topography 4, 210 Toronto (Ontario) 267 Torrington, George Byng, seventh Viscount 139 tourism 28, 81, 123, 130, 202–5 hunting 181, 185, 189, 191–2, 206, 209–10 trade 16, 79, 82, 125, 134, 136, 139–40, 188, 202 concessions 204 export 164 goods 181 imperial 16, 71, 248 international 11, 68–71, 157, 204, 222 networks 249 routes 6, 10, 69, 151–2, 157 trade unions 75 National Agricultural Labourers’ Union, English 185 traditions, invented 205 trams 270 transport 9, 11, 14, 58, 82, 125, 136, 140, 154, 164, 186, 206, 246, 271, 280 coaches 134 costs 139 networks 16 sea 151–2, 157, 165 urban 270 Transvaal 101 trapping 216 birds 190

Index rhinoceros 191 travel 206 restrictions 204 travellers 29, 205, 207 writing 81 treaties, international 102, 110 Convention of Peking (1860) 225n. 18 Treaty of Nanking (1842) 204 Treaty of Tianjin (1858) 225n. 18 Treaty of Waitangi (1840) 187, 188 Treaty Ports, China 5, 151, 156, 202–23 trees 131, 182 apricot 52, 159 greengage 159 India rubber 130 palm 130, 131, 135 peach 159 planting see forests willow 52 trespass 221, 279–83 by animals 280 triads 156 Trimen, Henry 137, 144 Trollope, Anthony 129, 130 trophies animal 181, 189–90 hunting 192, 203, 213, 222 Tropical Agriculturalist (periodical) 78 tropics 25–8, 32 tsetse fly 191 Tswana people 31 Tuapeka (Otago) 154 Tumut River (NSW) 250 tun (military farming colonies) 46–7, 51 Tunis 95 turkeys 267, 278 swamp 185 turnips 161 Turpan 48, 52 turtle hunting 212 Tuticorin (India) 142 Twain, Mark 77 Tyndtynder West (Victoria) 240 typhoid 272 Tyrrell, Ian (historian) 244 ugliness, of plantations 140–1 ulendo see safaris Unilever 81

Index United Kingdom xv, 248 see also Britain; England; Scotland United Nations 5, 7, 249 see also League of Nations United States 7, 15, 25, 49, 52, 55–6, 59, 72, 76, 80, 101–2, 158, 187, 193, 237, 239–41, 244, 247, 251, 271–2, 277 south-western 30 western 49–50, 59, 271 see also America, North United States Department of Agriculture 52 universities Cape Town, Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology 109 Chinese 56 Cornell 56–8 De Pauw (Indiana) 239 Glasgow 56 Jos (Nigeria), A. P. Leventis Ornithological Research Institute 109 Michigan 56 missionary 44, 46, 55–7 Nanking (Jinling daxue), College of Agriculture and Forestry 57–8 Pittsburgh 56 Rostock 94 Tokyo Imperial University 56 Westminster College (Missouri) 239 Wisconsin 56 urbanization see cities Uva (Sri Lanka) 137, 144 Valentia, George Annesley, Viscount 126 Van Diemen’s Land see Tasmania vanilla 132 van Someren, V. G. L. 102 vegetables 5, 54, 162, 274, 278 cultivation 127, 158–9, 161, 163, 172, 238 exotic 53, 161–2 vegetation, loss of 79 Ventnor (ship) 168–9 Victoria 153, 160–1, 163, 237–8, 240–1, 243–4, 246 Victoria, Queen 210–11 Vigour, physical 24

321

VOC (Dutch East India Company) 27 Vogelbescherming Nederland (Dutch chapter of BirdLife International) 110 Wade, Henling Thomas 203 Wade, Henry 220 wages 74 walking, long-distance 154 Wall, George 132 wallabies 182 hunting 183 Wallace, Alfred Russel 96, 192, 207, 222 Wallace, Harold Frank 204 Wang Xinjing, Handbook on Dividing the Fields 48 Wanhalla, Angela (historian) 189 wapiti (elk) 186 warfare 35, 46–7, 180, 203 Warren, Louis (historian) 187 wars Arrow War or Second Opium War (1856–60) 204, 206 Chinese Civil War 60 First World War 106 Opium War (1839–42) 48, 140, 151, 204, 206 Second World War 106–7, 248–9 South African War (1899–1902) 195 waste disposal 271, 273–6, 278–80 hazardous 263 lands see land, waste ‘night soil’ 78, 175n. 41, 273, 276 water 79, 271 conservation 49 Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission (NSW) 237, 245–6 drinking 159 extraction 246 management 244 pollution 81 purity 274 races 159 supply 110, 156, 210, 236–7, 241–2, 245–6, 249, 251, 274, 276 technology 159 use 235, 246 waterways 14

322

Index

waterwheels, pedal 160 Watkins, W. R. 258n. 82 weapons 94, 181, 195 hunting 264 indigenous 194–5 weasels 215 weather interpretation of 29, 31 knowledge, folk 30 observations 29–30, 32 prognostication, traditional 31 unusual 29 Webb, James L. (historian) 78 weddings 193–4 weeding 51, 133, 140, 246 weeds, airborne 271 Weihaiwei (Weihai) 204, 214 Wellington (NZ) 83, 157–8, 165, 185, 194 Welsh, in Australia 237 West, Kathleen (historian) 266 West Coast (NZ) 157 Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network 110 West Indies 7, 28, 75, 79, 82–3, 110, 133 wetlands 5, 110, 251 protection of 110 whalers 183 whaling 181, 189 Whanganui (NZ) 158 New Criterion Hotel 187–8 wharves 277 wheat 53, 156, 216 ‘White Australia Policy’ 237 The Wide World (periodical) 100 widgeon 211 wildfowl see fowl, wild wildlife 70, 145, 155, 188, 205, 211–12, 220 dioramas 203, 213 habitat destruction 109, 194 Williams, Dee Mack (historian) 55 Williamson, Hugh (historian) 25 willow trees 52 willow warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus) 104 wings, bird 193–4 Winnipeg (Manitoba) 13–14, 83, 187, 263–84, 268–70, 282 Carlton Street 283, 284 Central Public Market 277, 278

city council 263, 271–2, 274–6, 279, 281–3 hospital 275 Main Street 276, 282 municipal nuisance ground 263, 275, 276 Portage Road 281 Winsek, Dwayne R. (historian) 11 wintering habits of birds 93, 95, 97–8 Wiradjuri people 236 witches, execution of 30 Witsen, Nicholaas (geographer) 95 Wolch, Jennifer (historian) 266 Wolf, Arthur P. 167 wolves 209, 212, 264 women 76–9, 189 Chinese 218 fashions 193–4 representations of 76–7 Women’s Land Army, Australia 248 Wong Koo 162 Wong-ma-kok 212 Wong-Quincey, John 202 woodcock 211–12, 214 wood supply 26 Woolf, Bella 131 Worboys, Michael (historian) 34 workers 16, 24, 80 agricultural 249 Bolivian, in Chile 75 child 76, 140 Chinese 139–40 in Cuba 75 in Peru 75 factory 79 immigrant 26 Indian, south 142 indigenous 190 Japanese, in Hawaii 75 male 76 Melanesian, in Australia 75 migrant 14, 135 mobility 75 Peruvian, in Chile 75 plantation 28, 73–4, 83, 135–6, 140, 142 Sinhalese, in Sri Lanka 134, 140, 142 Tamil, in Sri Lanka 142 welfare of 81 women 76, 140 see also labour

Index

323

working classes 3, 181, 184 Worms, Gabriel Benedict de 139–40 Worms, Maurice Benedict de 139–40 Worster, Donald (historian) 24 Wright, Arnold 80 Writing, Chinese characters 170

Yorkshire Post (newspaper) 80 Young, Miss (fl. 1893) 194 Younghusband, Sir Francis 209 Yuan Dahua 50 Yuan Shikai 52 Yunnan 46

Xhosa 93 Xiang River (Hunan) 48 Xikang 56 Xinjiang 44, 47–50, 52–5, 60 Xizhimen 54 Xu Cheng (Paul Hsu) 58 Xu Shichang 53–4 Xu Xiaohui 56

Zambezi River 191 Zambia 100, 106, 190–1 Zengcheng district 158 Zhang, David D. 24 Zhang Zhidong 49, 54 Zhao Erfeng 50–3, 55 Zhili 52 Zhu Zengyun 50 Zimbabwe 106 zoogeographic regions 95 Afrotropical region 96, 98–9 Palaeotropical regions 96 Palearctic region 96, 99 zoology 96, 213, 218, 222 Zulu people 195 Zuni tribe 30 Zuo Zongtang 48, 50–1, 55, 59 Agricultural Treatise from the Pavilion of Pucun 48 Manual for Cotton 48 Ten Principles of Cotton Growing 48 Zwarts, Leo Living on the Edge: Wetlands and Birds in a Changing Sahel (2009) 109

Ya’an (Xikang) 56 yachting 204, 206–7 Yahagaha Pitiya (Sri Lanka) 133 Yanco Experiment Farm (NSW) 238–9, 242–3, 245, 249 Yangtze River 204, 209, 215–16, 219 Yangtze Valley 203 Yaqub Beg 48 Yardle, Mrs 194 yellow fever 33 ‘yellow peril’ 222 yeoman farmers 235–8 ideal 238 Ye Xiufeng 56