Jonathan Saha
Biographic Data
| ID | 114142 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathan Saha |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathan |
| FAMILY NAME | Saha |
| SIGNATURE | SAHA J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bristol |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8023-8294 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 138 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Decolonizing Elephants
The growing call to decolonize Animal Studies, and Environmental Humanities more broadly, is overdue and welcome. The imperative to decolonize enables scholars in the field to better recognize the underlying hierarchies, biases, and occlusions in our research, encouraging us to find creative ways of reconceptualizing our work anew. Nevertheless, there is something of a tendency in the literature towards considering decolonization as an abstract p…
Entangled Lives
Joy L.K. Pachuau and Willem van Schendel. Entangled Lives: Human-Animal-Plant Histories of the Eastern Himalayan Triangle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2022. (pp. 363) Hardcover (ISBN: 978-1-009-21547-3) £90.00. There has been a tendency, perhaps born out of an earlier maligning of non-human histories by mainstream scholars, for historians of animals and plants to proselytise the benefits of the widening ambit of the discipline (Fudge 2…
Communal Geographies and Peasant Insurgency in Colonial Myanmar
This article makes two arguments, one theoretical and the other empirical. The first is that Ranajit Guha's classic text, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, contains generative but overlooked spatial concepts for uncovering communal geographies. The second is that the Hsaya San peasant rebellion, which rocked British authority in Myanmar from late 1930 until 1932, fostered a new communal geography. These two arguments com…
On Accumulation and Empire
In recent decades, accumulation has become a curiously neglected concept in imperial history. Despite this, it remains a powerful heuristic for understanding the drives, dynamics, and effects of modern imperialism. Juxtaposing early Marxist conceptualizations of accumulation with some formative historiographic debates about colonial knowledge in Africa and Asia, I argue that accumulation can provide a better account of the ‘lumpy’ spatiality of e…
Accumulations and Cascades
What effect did British imperialism in Myanmar have on frogs? And, given that the lives of these small amphibian creatures were rarely ever recorded or preserved in archival collections, how might we find out? Sceptical readers may also wish to take a step back and ask, why should historians even care about their lives? These are unusual questions for a historian to confront, but they are occasioned by the deepening conversation between ecology a…
Racial Capitalism and Peasant Insurgency in Colonial Myanmar
The Hsaya San Rebellion swept through colonial Myanmar between 1930 and 1932. It took eighteen months and over seven thousand Indian Army troops to suppress. Triggered by acute pressures in the agrarian economy that were compounded by a global fall in rice prices, the violence of the revolt cannot be fully explained by this crisis alone. Bands of peasant rebels massacred Indians; not only moneylenders but cattle-herders, who were themselves a pre…
Colonizing Animals
E is for Elephant
Do Elephants Have Souls? Animal Subjectivities and Colonial Encounters
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; Mi…
Whiteness, Masculinity and the Ambivalent Embodiment of ‘British Justice’ in Colonial Burma
When British judges in colonial South Asia attempted to perform their duties with detached objectivity they were also performatively enacting a particular construction of imperial white masculinity. This was an ambivalent embodied enactment. When the figure of the objective judge was confronted by critics as white and male, its claims to be objective were under threat. As a result of this ambivalence, it was an imperial white masculinity that cou…
Antoinette Burton. The Trouble with Empire
Perhaps the most stubborn of the problematic framing devices grappled with by imperial historians—particularly those sympathetic to postcolonial concerns but who have found themselves tasked with teaching the British Empire to undergraduate students—is the story of imperialism’s rise and fall. Academic and celebrity historians alike have plotted British imperial history as one that moves through successful conquests and triumphant global ascendan…
Colonizing elephants
Elephants were vital agents of empire. In British Burma their unique abilities made them essential workers in the colony’s booming teak industry. Their labour was integral to the commercial exploitation of the country’s vast forests. They helped to fell the trees, transport the logs and load the timber onto ships. As a result of their utility, capturing and caring for them was of utmost importance to timber firms. Elephants became a peculiar form…
Milk to Mandalay
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 t…
Moral Economies of Corruption
all made sharp comments that made me reconsider key aspects of my argument.The anonymous readers for Duke University Press and my editor, Miriam Angress, have vastly improved the book with their careful attention to my argument and its implications.With such interlocutors, this book should be much better than it is; the fault for that, of course, is mine rather than theirs.I owe many people thanks for personal and professional support over the ye…
Murder at London Zoo
This article examines the tragic case of San Dwe, a young Karen man from Burma who was employed as one of London Zoo's elephant drivers. In 1928 his roommate, the famous and celebrated mahout Said Ali, was murdered in his bed, bludgeoned to death with a sledgehammer. San Dwe claimed that Ali had been attacked by a group of white men. However, this explanation of events proved inconsistent and was swiftly dismissed by the police. In the days that …
Mandy Sadan. Being and Becoming Kachin
Mandy Sadan's new study examines the emergence of modern Kachin ethno-nationalism in the borderworlds where northern Burma, northeast India, and southern China meet. For most of the second half of the twentieth century, the predominant Kachin political organizations were at war with the postcolonial Burmese state. In the midst of recent political reforms in Burma, the cease-fire established at the end of the last millennium has unraveled and viol…
Is it in India? Colonial Burma as a ‘problem’ in South Asian history
Despite being governed as an integral part of the Indian Empire for over 50 years, it is commonplace for historians to consider Myanmar/Burma as a distinct entity beyond what is usually taken to be South Asia. This is a heuristic separation indulged by both scholars of colonial India and colonial Burma and is in part a legacy of the territorial assumptions of Area Studies. Recently new geographic frameworks – particularly the Indian Ocean, Eurasi…
Among the Beasts of Burma
Journal Article Among the Beasts of Burma: Animals and the Politics of Colonial Sensibilities, c. 1840-1940 Get access Jonathan Saha Jonathan Saha Email: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 48, Issue 4, Summer 2015, Pages 910-932, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shv003 Published: 21 April 2015
Global History, Imperial History and Connected Histories of Empire
The turn towards Global history shows no sign of abating. It seems that across the discipline, historians are becoming increasingly interested in understanding the past on a planetary scale. Prominent Imperial historians, in particular, have been among the most fervent advocates of Global history. So close are the concerns of some Imperial history-particularly British Imperial history-to those of Global history, that it is getting harder to disen…
Conclusion
‘There probably was corruption in colonial times, but it wasn’t as bad as today.’ These were the thoughts of a Yangon resident who I spoke to about my research during the frantic weeks I spent there, most of which I passed shut away in the national archives of Myanmar. These were sentiments shared by others I met in the city as well: it was perhaps bad then, but it is worse now. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This pr…
Making Misconduct
Defining ‘corruption’ is notoriously difficult. Various authors with different disciplinary backgrounds have pointed out that the term has often been used to denigrate post-colonial regimes, depicting corruption as something that belongs to non-Western ‘others’. 1 The sentiments of a recent commentator on corruption in Burma reveal how casually such essentialising moral judgements are made: ‘Burma is one of those countries where corruption is wel…
Whiter than White
Almost all scholarly attempts to define colonial states rely, to varying degrees, on the existence of a division between the rulers and the ruled. For most post-colonial historians, this division in colonial Asia was marked primarily by conceptions of racial difference. 1 This was apparent in many formal bureaucratic structures and employment practices in which certain powers and positions were reserved for white Europeans. But while this was usu…
The Male State
It does not take a deep psychoanalytic reading of Kipling’s Mandalay to reveal the slippage in his words between the desires of the British soldier and the broader drives of imperialism. There is a mutual gendering at work in the poem through which British imperial power is represented as masculine and colonised Burmese society as feminine. 1 ‘Supi-yaw-lat’ was not only the soldier’s former Burmese lover, but she represented all of the exotic att…
The Career of Inspector Pakiri
The relationship between the colonial state and its subordinate employees was a complex one. Part of the complexity is neatly captured in Hobbes’s phrase, quoted in the epigraph above, that subordinate officials were ‘the matter thereof, and the artificer’ of the colonial state.1 In other words, subordinate officials were not only employed by the colonial state, but also they made the state. This was apparent in the banal sense that the vast majo…
Colonization, Criminalization and Complicity
As Professor Ian Brown's recent work on the colonial prison in British Burma has shown, the proportion of the population convicted of crimes was routinely and markedly higher than in any other province of British India. Part of the explanation for the exceptionally high figures may be the colonial criminalization of practices that were previously lawful. Gambling was one such activity that the British, at least according to their rhetoric, were i…
Global History, Imperial History and Connected Histories of Empire
The turn towards Global history shows no sign of abating. It seems that across the discipline, historians are becoming increasingly interested in understanding the past on a planetary scale. Prominent Imperial historians, in particular, have been among the most fervent advocates of Global history. So close are the concerns of some Imperial history-particularly British Imperial history-to those of Global history, that it is getting harder to disen…
Law, Disorder and the Colonial State
In this original study British rule in Burma is examined through quotidian acts of corruption. Saha outlines a novel way to study the colonial state as it was experienced in everyday life, revealing a
Colonizing elephants
Elephants were vital agents of empire. In British Burma their unique abilities made them essential workers in the colony’s booming teak industry. Their labour was integral to the commercial exploitation of the country’s vast forests. They helped to fell the trees, transport the logs and load the timber onto ships. As a result of their utility, capturing and caring for them was of utmost importance to timber firms. Elephants became a peculiar form…
A Mockery of Justice? Colonial Law, the Everyday State and Village Politics in the Burma Delta, c.1890-1910
In the conclusion to his celebrated study of the Black Act in eighteenth-century England, Whigs and Hunters, E. P. Thompson made a now famous, but still surprising, defence of English law: 'this law could become an instrument of imperialism ... But even here the rules and rhetoric have imposed some inhibitions upon the imperial power'.1 As bad as colonial rule was, for Thompson the rule of law ensured that British colonizers could not rule arbitr…
Is it in India? Colonial Burma as a ‘problem’ in South Asian history
Despite being governed as an integral part of the Indian Empire for over 50 years, it is commonplace for historians to consider Myanmar/Burma as a distinct entity beyond what is usually taken to be South Asia. This is a heuristic separation indulged by both scholars of colonial India and colonial Burma and is in part a legacy of the territorial assumptions of Area Studies. Recently new geographic frameworks – particularly the Indian Ocean, Eurasi…
Madness and the Making of a Colonial Order in Burma
In general, during the nineteenth century the British were indifferent to the condition of the insane in colonial Burma. This was most apparent in the Rangoon lunatic asylum, which was a neglected institution reformed reluctantly and episodically following internal crises of discipline and the occasional public scandal. However, whilst psychiatry was generally neglected, British officials did intervene when and where insanity threatened the colon…
Among the Beasts of Burma
Journal Article Among the Beasts of Burma: Animals and the Politics of Colonial Sensibilities, c. 1840-1940 Get access Jonathan Saha Jonathan Saha Email: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 48, Issue 4, Summer 2015, Pages 910-932, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shv003 Published: 21 April 2015
The male state
At the turn of the twentieth century British colonial officials imagined women in Burma to be distinctly more liberated than their sisters in other quarters of British India, but this posed a set of specific problems. The perceived influence women held over their husbands in official positions led to fears that they caused corruption. Women represented private interests infiltrating public duties. Thus the desired, normative subordinate colonial …
Milk to Mandalay
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 t…
Colonization, Criminalization and Complicity
As Professor Ian Brown's recent work on the colonial prison in British Burma has shown, the proportion of the population convicted of crimes was routinely and markedly higher than in any other province of British India. Part of the explanation for the exceptionally high figures may be the colonial criminalization of practices that were previously lawful. Gambling was one such activity that the British, at least according to their rhetoric, were i…
Histories of Everyday Violence In British India
Historians of British India and colonial rule more generally have inevitably had to approach the difficult subject of colonial violence. Often, however, historians have explored colonial violence by focusing on exceptional and spectacular moments. Recently two books have been published that shift the terms of the historiography by examining colonial violence as an aspect of everyday life in British India: Taylor Sherman’s State Violence and Punis…
Whiteness, Masculinity and the Ambivalent Embodiment of ‘British Justice’ in Colonial Burma
When British judges in colonial South Asia attempted to perform their duties with detached objectivity they were also performatively enacting a particular construction of imperial white masculinity. This was an ambivalent embodied enactment. When the figure of the objective judge was confronted by critics as white and male, its claims to be objective were under threat. As a result of this ambivalence, it was an imperial white masculinity that cou…
Racial Capitalism and Peasant Insurgency in Colonial Myanmar
The Hsaya San Rebellion swept through colonial Myanmar between 1930 and 1932. It took eighteen months and over seven thousand Indian Army troops to suppress. Triggered by acute pressures in the agrarian economy that were compounded by a global fall in rice prices, the violence of the revolt cannot be fully explained by this crisis alone. Bands of peasant rebels massacred Indians; not only moneylenders but cattle-herders, who were themselves a pre…
On Accumulation and Empire
In recent decades, accumulation has become a curiously neglected concept in imperial history. Despite this, it remains a powerful heuristic for understanding the drives, dynamics, and effects of modern imperialism. Juxtaposing early Marxist conceptualizations of accumulation with some formative historiographic debates about colonial knowledge in Africa and Asia, I argue that accumulation can provide a better account of the ‘lumpy’ spatiality of e…
Accumulations and Cascades
What effect did British imperialism in Myanmar have on frogs? And, given that the lives of these small amphibian creatures were rarely ever recorded or preserved in archival collections, how might we find out? Sceptical readers may also wish to take a step back and ask, why should historians even care about their lives? These are unusual questions for a historian to confront, but they are occasioned by the deepening conversation between ecology a…
Uncivilized Practitioners’
Indian and Burmese medical subordinates were problematic figures for British colonial officials in Burma during the nineteenth century. They were intrinsic to their plans for furthering colonial medicine in the colony, at the expense of indigenous practices. Yet, at the same time, they were never under the complete control of British officials, often being accused of negligence, misconduct and outright corruption. In short, they were seen as a ne…
The male state
At the turn of the twentieth century British colonial officials imagined women in Burma to be distinctly more liberated than their sisters in other quarters of British India, but this posed a set of specific problems. The perceived influence women held over their husbands in official positions led to fears that they caused corruption. Women represented private interests infiltrating public duties. Thus the desired, normative subordinate colonial …
Histories of Everyday Violence In British India
Historians of British India and colonial rule more generally have inevitably had to approach the difficult subject of colonial violence. Often, however, historians have explored colonial violence by focusing on exceptional and spectacular moments. Recently two books have been published that shift the terms of the historiography by examining colonial violence as an aspect of everyday life in British India: Taylor Sherman’s State Violence and Punis…
Uncivilized Practitioners’
Indian and Burmese medical subordinates were problematic figures for British colonial officials in Burma during the nineteenth century. They were intrinsic to their plans for furthering colonial medicine in the colony, at the expense of indigenous practices. Yet, at the same time, they were never under the complete control of British officials, often being accused of negligence, misconduct and outright corruption. In short, they were seen as a ne…
A Mockery of Justice? Colonial Law, the Everyday State and Village Politics in the Burma Delta, c.1890-1910
In the conclusion to his celebrated study of the Black Act in eighteenth-century England, Whigs and Hunters, E. P. Thompson made a now famous, but still surprising, defence of English law: 'this law could become an instrument of imperialism ... But even here the rules and rhetoric have imposed some inhibitions upon the imperial power'.1 As bad as colonial rule was, for Thompson the rule of law ensured that British colonizers could not rule arbitr…
Conclusion
‘There probably was corruption in colonial times, but it wasn’t as bad as today.’ These were the thoughts of a Yangon resident who I spoke to about my research during the frantic weeks I spent there, most of which I passed shut away in the national archives of Myanmar. These were sentiments shared by others I met in the city as well: it was perhaps bad then, but it is worse now. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This pr…
Making Misconduct
Defining ‘corruption’ is notoriously difficult. Various authors with different disciplinary backgrounds have pointed out that the term has often been used to denigrate post-colonial regimes, depicting corruption as something that belongs to non-Western ‘others’. 1 The sentiments of a recent commentator on corruption in Burma reveal how casually such essentialising moral judgements are made: ‘Burma is one of those countries where corruption is wel…
Whiter than White
Almost all scholarly attempts to define colonial states rely, to varying degrees, on the existence of a division between the rulers and the ruled. For most post-colonial historians, this division in colonial Asia was marked primarily by conceptions of racial difference. 1 This was apparent in many formal bureaucratic structures and employment practices in which certain powers and positions were reserved for white Europeans. But while this was usu…
The Male State
It does not take a deep psychoanalytic reading of Kipling’s Mandalay to reveal the slippage in his words between the desires of the British soldier and the broader drives of imperialism. There is a mutual gendering at work in the poem through which British imperial power is represented as masculine and colonised Burmese society as feminine. 1 ‘Supi-yaw-lat’ was not only the soldier’s former Burmese lover, but she represented all of the exotic att…
The Career of Inspector Pakiri
The relationship between the colonial state and its subordinate employees was a complex one. Part of the complexity is neatly captured in Hobbes’s phrase, quoted in the epigraph above, that subordinate officials were ‘the matter thereof, and the artificer’ of the colonial state.1 In other words, subordinate officials were not only employed by the colonial state, but also they made the state. This was apparent in the banal sense that the vast majo…
Colonization, Criminalization and Complicity
As Professor Ian Brown's recent work on the colonial prison in British Burma has shown, the proportion of the population convicted of crimes was routinely and markedly higher than in any other province of British India. Part of the explanation for the exceptionally high figures may be the colonial criminalization of practices that were previously lawful. Gambling was one such activity that the British, at least according to their rhetoric, were i…
Law, Disorder and the Colonial State
In this original study British rule in Burma is examined through quotidian acts of corruption. Saha outlines a novel way to study the colonial state as it was experienced in everyday life, revealing a
Madness and the Making of a Colonial Order in Burma
In general, during the nineteenth century the British were indifferent to the condition of the insane in colonial Burma. This was most apparent in the Rangoon lunatic asylum, which was a neglected institution reformed reluctantly and episodically following internal crises of discipline and the occasional public scandal. However, whilst psychiatry was generally neglected, British officials did intervene when and where insanity threatened the colon…
Mandy Sadan. Being and Becoming Kachin
Mandy Sadan's new study examines the emergence of modern Kachin ethno-nationalism in the borderworlds where northern Burma, northeast India, and southern China meet. For most of the second half of the twentieth century, the predominant Kachin political organizations were at war with the postcolonial Burmese state. In the midst of recent political reforms in Burma, the cease-fire established at the end of the last millennium has unraveled and viol…
Is it in India? Colonial Burma as a ‘problem’ in South Asian history
Despite being governed as an integral part of the Indian Empire for over 50 years, it is commonplace for historians to consider Myanmar/Burma as a distinct entity beyond what is usually taken to be South Asia. This is a heuristic separation indulged by both scholars of colonial India and colonial Burma and is in part a legacy of the territorial assumptions of Area Studies. Recently new geographic frameworks – particularly the Indian Ocean, Eurasi…
Among the Beasts of Burma
Journal Article Among the Beasts of Burma: Animals and the Politics of Colonial Sensibilities, c. 1840-1940 Get access Jonathan Saha Jonathan Saha Email: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 48, Issue 4, Summer 2015, Pages 910-932, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shv003 Published: 21 April 2015
Global History, Imperial History and Connected Histories of Empire
The turn towards Global history shows no sign of abating. It seems that across the discipline, historians are becoming increasingly interested in understanding the past on a planetary scale. Prominent Imperial historians, in particular, have been among the most fervent advocates of Global history. So close are the concerns of some Imperial history-particularly British Imperial history-to those of Global history, that it is getting harder to disen…
Milk to Mandalay
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 t…
Moral Economies of Corruption
all made sharp comments that made me reconsider key aspects of my argument.The anonymous readers for Duke University Press and my editor, Miriam Angress, have vastly improved the book with their careful attention to my argument and its implications.With such interlocutors, this book should be much better than it is; the fault for that, of course, is mine rather than theirs.I owe many people thanks for personal and professional support over the ye…
Murder at London Zoo
This article examines the tragic case of San Dwe, a young Karen man from Burma who was employed as one of London Zoo's elephant drivers. In 1928 his roommate, the famous and celebrated mahout Said Ali, was murdered in his bed, bludgeoned to death with a sledgehammer. San Dwe claimed that Ali had been attacked by a group of white men. However, this explanation of events proved inconsistent and was swiftly dismissed by the police. In the days that …
Whiteness, Masculinity and the Ambivalent Embodiment of ‘British Justice’ in Colonial Burma
When British judges in colonial South Asia attempted to perform their duties with detached objectivity they were also performatively enacting a particular construction of imperial white masculinity. This was an ambivalent embodied enactment. When the figure of the objective judge was confronted by critics as white and male, its claims to be objective were under threat. As a result of this ambivalence, it was an imperial white masculinity that cou…
Antoinette Burton. The Trouble with Empire
Perhaps the most stubborn of the problematic framing devices grappled with by imperial historians—particularly those sympathetic to postcolonial concerns but who have found themselves tasked with teaching the British Empire to undergraduate students—is the story of imperialism’s rise and fall. Academic and celebrity historians alike have plotted British imperial history as one that moves through successful conquests and triumphant global ascendan…
Colonizing elephants
Elephants were vital agents of empire. In British Burma their unique abilities made them essential workers in the colony’s booming teak industry. Their labour was integral to the commercial exploitation of the country’s vast forests. They helped to fell the trees, transport the logs and load the timber onto ships. As a result of their utility, capturing and caring for them was of utmost importance to timber firms. Elephants became a peculiar form…
Do Elephants Have Souls? Animal Subjectivities and Colonial Encounters
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; Mi…
E is for Elephant
Colonizing Animals
Political science (23 works) · Colonialism (22 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Law (19 works) · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography (18 works) · History (18 works) · History (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Politics (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works)