Book ID: CBB240815000

Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History (2015)

unapi

Trautmann, Thomas R. (Author)


University of Chicago Press


Publication Date: 2015
Physical Details: 304
Language: English

Because of their enormous size, elephants have long been irresistible for kings as symbols of their eminence. In early civilizations—such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Civilization, and China—kings used elephants for royal sacrifice, spectacular hunts, public display of live captives, or the conspicuous consumption of ivory—all of them tending toward the elephant’s extinction. The kings of India, however, as Thomas R. Trautmann shows in this study, found a use for elephants that actually helped preserve their habitat and numbers in the wild: war. Trautmann traces the history of the war elephant in India and the spread of the institution to the west—where elephants took part in some of the greatest wars of antiquity—and Southeast Asia (but not China, significantly), a history that spans 3,000 years and a considerable part of the globe, from Spain to Java. He shows that because elephants eat such massive quantities of food, it was uneconomic to raise them from birth. Rather, in a unique form of domestication, Indian kings captured wild adults and trained them, one by one, through millennia. Kings were thus compelled to protect wild elephants from hunters and elephant forests from being cut down. By taking a wide-angle view of human-elephant relations, Trautmann throws into relief the structure of India’s environmental history and the reasons for the persistence of wild elephants in its forests.

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Reviewed By

Review Sujit Sivasundaram (2017) Review of "Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History". Comparative Studies in Society and History (pp. 239-240). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB240815000/

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Authors & Contributors
Rajkhowa, Rasna
Adam Fish
Paul G. Keil
Cristina Brito
Shibani Bose
Leslie K. Miller
Concepts
Human-animal relationships
Wildlife conservation
Endangered species
Elephants
Nature and its relationship to culture; human-nature relationships
Animals
Time Periods
21st century
20th century
Medieval
20th century, late
19th century
Early modern
Places
India
Australia
Great Britain
Puget Sound
Atlantic world
Western states (U.S.)
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