Article ID: CBB019172597

The Strange Ecologies of Empire (2021)

unapi

This essay reads nineteenth-century imperial India as the mise en scène for certain critical concatenations of human sovereignty, divinity, and animality. It does so by focusing on the imperial state's war upon human and extrahuman forms of predation, showcasing in the process a cluster of texts on collective criminal activity, hunting, and popular religion and folklore that share certain grids of intelligibility and vocabularies of rule. Collocating these texts on human and nonhuman predation brings into visibility the degree to which imperial sovereignty in the Victorian period entails traffic across human and extrahuman domains. Thus, thinking about the sanctioned killing of fearsome animal predators comes to be twinned with thinking about wars of pacification against dangerous humans and noxious deities. To think imperial sovereignty consequently involves thinking with humans and animals but also thinking with mutually antagonistic theological forces, Hindu and Christian—and in thinking these together. An attentiveness to these heterogeneous ecologies of empire might serve to illuminate the degree to which the imperial project depends on a complex mesh of transversal and co-constitutive life-forms and forces.

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Authors & Contributors
Voskuil, Lynn
Banerjee, Sukanya
Paul G. Keil
Shibani Bose
Ulrike, Kirchberger
Robert Michael Morrissey
Concepts
Nature and its relationship to culture; human-nature relationships
Imperialism
Ecology
Environmental history
Agriculture
Theology
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
18th century
Qing dynasty (China, 1644-1912)
Ancient
21st century
Places
India
Great Britain
Mississippi River (North America)
England
Tokyo (Japan)
United States
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