Animal Labor and Colonial Warfare

In a richly documented and skilfully constructed story of animal bio-power, Hevia investigates the role that camels and mules played in the military logistics of British India as it struggled to recover from the disaster of the Anglo-Afghan War. Moving between frontier wars and global trade, local knowledge and imperial science, he sheds fresh light on animals at war and their impressment into service of the colonial war-state. His fascinating and meticulous discussion unites the intricacies of camel culture, mule breeding, animal dietetics, and human affect, with imperial strategy, army reform, environmental transformation, and veterinary science. Transcending many more conventional histories of animals and armies, this book makes a major contribution, substantively, methodologically, and intellectually, to how we conceptualize warfare, welfare, and the animal estate. --David Arnold, University of Warwick The role of animals in colonial conquest along the northwestern frontier of British India has never been subjected to scholarly analysis of the sort provided by this path-breaking book. Showing the shifting visions of power, science, and ecology intertwined in the establishment of the new forms of state power, Hevia details how changing relations between humans and animals can provide a critical key to understanding the transformations that have marked modern colonial history. --David Gilmartin, North Carolina State University An intriguing work. . . . This interesting volume is a valuable contribution. Recommended. --Choice Animal Labor and Colonial Warfare brilliantly reveals the brutal and bestial life of British imperialism. With exceptional panache, James Hevia assembles graceful and music-loving camels, well-bred mules, maddening insects, unremitting parasites, indispensable animal handlers, and cosmopolitan veterinarians, showing us how together they structured--or disrupted--the colonial human-animal biosecurity regime. Above all, we learn how the military on colonial frontiers forged a mechanism for managing human-animal interactions and rerouting local ecologies. After reading this book, it is hard to imagine how future historians of colonial biopolitics can ever again ignore frontier ecologies and the teeming--or teaming--non-human animals that made human life possible. --Warwick Anderson, University of Sydney