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James L. Hevia, Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani, eds. Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times., The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 1, March 2023, Pages 531–532, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad110
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The subtitle of Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times signals clearly that it is no ordinary bestiary, but one situated in ongoing debates over Euroamerican imperialism and its living legacy. Joining with a number of contemporary scholars, the editors make a strong case that human-animal relationships provide a potent entry point for understanding British imperialism, particularly in relation to its long term environmental, political, and social impacts on British colonies. The editors settled on the medieval bestiary genre, it would seem, to add complexity and flexibility to the book’s otherwise confining alphabetical organization. Thus, we find twenty-six animal entries from almost as many authors, who themselves are generously scattered across humanities and social science disciplines. The effect is to produce, as the editors put it, a “primer” for examining imperial power through nonhuman animal worlds.
The animals considered here can be roughly divided into two groups: those that are brought into colonies and those that are native to them. Cattle, for example, were widely diffused out of the British Isles, and beef eating became an unquestioned marker of Englishness. Pigs, discussed here under “B is for Boars,” were also broadly distributed in colonized areas and, like cattle, they fundamentally altered the ecosystems they populated. The environmental impact of these two animals, particularly the deforestation linked to expanded grazing land for cattle herds, not only connects imperialism to current eating patterns in the global north but also adds an important historical dimension to debates about the Anthropocene and its sources.
