In this chapter I uncover the place of animals within imperial discourses. This repertoire of representations served to denigrate Burmese populations as being too close to animals but did so ambivalently. Imperial texts also revealed their authors’ barely sublimated desires for the colonized Other and their own close, emotional connections with non-human creatures.

This chapter examines the anti-colonial deployment of animals as figures within counter-hegemonic discourses of reformed Buddhist practice and aspirational Burmese nationalism. The chapter first analyzes the long-running gossip column of the nationalist Burmese-language newspaper The Sun that was authored under the pen name ‘Town Mouse’. It then looks at the more eclectic writings of the anti-colonial poet and journalist Thakhin Kodaw Hmaing, particularly his texts on primates.

Drawing upon the arguments made throughout the book, in this concluding chapter I argue that as well as negating humanism through a focus on the non-human, animal historians have an imperative to find subjects and actors who can be ‘necessary fictions’ for radical politics. The animal remains important in this but not as a destabilizing spectre haunting humanistic assumptions. The animal can be a radical subject through our recognition that it represents more than just the organism itself. The animal is a synecdoche for the environments that they emerge from and are reproduced within. To include animals in our histories is to value the ecologies that make possible their continued existence in the world. But lest this claim become an empty gesture towards a liberal, inclusive environmental politics, it is a radical position that needs to be attenuated by a critique of the commoditization of life and marginalization of human populations.

Focussing on elephants and oxen to uncover how they came to be fostered, mobilized, and employed as vital workers in Myanmar’s two major industries of timber extraction and rice cultivation, this chapter explores how both became framed as particular types of resources.

In this chapter I focus on interspecies relationship in moments of open insurrection and disorder. It first applies an animal lens to the history of the Hsaya San rebellion which swept across the colony at the end of 1930 and took more than a year and in excess of 10,000 troops to suppress. It then explores the shifting material and symbolic place of animals in the colonial order as Rangoon fell to the Japanese in 1942, focussing particularly on the zoo.

In this chapter I explore how the colonial regime in Myanmar attempted to regulate the killing of animals, first in schemes to encourage the slaughter of vermin and second in regimes for limiting and controlling animal death. In both of these areas of colonial governance, fraud was an unintended consequence of imperial policies, in part because of the perverse incentives produced through giving animal death a state-sanctioned monetary value.

Studying the history of animals in colonial Myanmar is a project that reveals new understandings of the impact of British imperialism, necessitating historians to attend to both the material and cultural transformations in the colony. However, studying animals and colonized people throws up two challenges to the historian. First, how can we recover the historical experiences of both within the same analytical frame. Second, how can postcolonial and post-humanist animal studies be integrated. This introduction offers an approach to studying interspecies relations as way of addressing these issues.

Here I outline two crucial concepts that are returned to throughout the book. The first is the notion of ‘undead capital’, a concept that provides a lens to analyze the specific commodity form that working animals took in the colony. The second is an expanded understanding of colonial bio-politics, a politics that I argue served to render animals (including humans) into three states, namely, as subjects, as objects, and as abject. Together these concepts outline two key underpinning forces that shaped how animals came to be valued under colonial rule in Myanmar. In the first concept, this was through a process of valorisation as animal capital. In the second concept, this was through a governmentalizing evaluation of an animal.

The body of the creature

The recent rise in animal histories of colonial Asia has contributed mostly to our understanding of the imperial control of human populations. Histories examining hunting, vermin eradication, cow protection, veterinary science and laboratory experimentation have revealed how imperial attempts to regulate human-animal interactions shaped ‘political rationalities’ in India (Adcock, 2010; Chakrabarti, 2010; Hussain, 2012; Mishra, 2011; Pandian, 2001; Rangarajan, 1998). But in the wider field of animal studies, historians and geographers have urged scholars to go further and to take account of the materiality and even the agency of animals. Some have argued that today's scientific understandings of animals’ sensory worlds can enable us to explore the subjective experience of animals in the past (Fudge, 2013; Hribal, 2003; Philo and Wilbert, 2000b; Ritvo, 2004; Rothfels, 2010). These calls raise particular challenges for those of us influenced by Foucauldian approaches and thus habitually wary of reifying the products of historically contingent arrangements of power–knowledge. This chapter addresses this issue of animal subjectivity through imperial representations of elephants in colonial Burma – creatures often noted to be playful, clever and occasionally, vindictive. By returning to Foucault's work, particularly through Judith Butler's reading of his ‘political anatomy’, I argue for a reconceiving of the problem of animal subjectivity as a process of materialisation.

First, in order to illustrate the problem of animal subjectivity, I begin, as Foucault might have, with a body in pain: