Milk to Mandalay

Dairy consumption, animal history and the political geography of colonial Burma

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8102933
AutoresJonathan Saha (0000-0001-8023-8294, University of Leeds, autor de correspondencia)
Año2016
Volumen54
Páginas1-12
Fecha de publicación2016-07-27
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Historical Geography (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0305-7488 • E-ISSN: 1095-8614
EditorialElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.jhg.2016.05.016
OpenAlexW2465338509
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas12

British imperial writers in Burma regularly moaned about milk. They complained about the difficulties they faced acquiring it in the colony. They were selfconscious about how their consumption of it might be viewed by the Burmese population, who predominantly did not drink cow's milk. And they worried about the quality of the supply provided by itinerant Indian dairymen, who they viewed as being neglectful and insanitary. Through these concerns the absence of milk became a marker of the colony's difference from the rest of the Raj. At the same time, the colonial government came to recognise the importance of locally-bred working cattle for Burmese agriculture. In their attempts to protect these valuable nonhuman labourers, Indian dairy herds were represented as a problem breed that threatened the indigenous stock. The threat from foreign cattle coalesced around epizootic disease and uncontrolled crossbreeding. These concerns were coterminous with official and nationalist anxieties about the Indian human population in the colony. Building on recent scholarship uncovering more-than-human geographies, this article reveals how colonial policies designed to improve the dairy industry and protect Burmese cattle contributed to the material and imaginative territorialisation of Burma, and its eventual separation from British India

Archaeology · Biology · Burmese · Colonialism · Ethnology · Geography · Indigenous · Livestock · Political science · Politics · Population · Socioeconomics · Sociology · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Cambodian History and Society · Demography · History · Law · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Ecology