The Enigma of the Asian Elephant: Sovereignty, Reproductive Nature, and the Limits of Empire

This article examines the dependency of British teak logging and shipbuilding on elephant-based labor in Burma (Myanmar) and India during the nineteenth century. Asian elephants were essential as a means of commodity extraction, offering irreplaceable forms of mobility across difficult forest terrain. At the same time, from the standpoint of colonial control, a frustrating feature of the elephants was their unwillingness to mate when in captivity, raising the issue of how to replenish this animal workforce. Practices of elephant stewardship in Burma, where trained elephants were released into the forest on a nightly basis to roam and mate, became of great interest to the very technics of empire. This release system came with a political limitation, however: The humans in the forest adept at working this system of nightly elephant releases presented challenges to colonial control, not least because of the nature of the work such people did, which occurred in a zone beyond the view of the state. These elephant tenders, and perhaps by extension the elephants themselves, were “Zomian” in J. C. Scott’s sense of being spatially state-evasive—indeed, means of politically evasive mobility was the most robust use-value of the trained elephants. The case of colonial elephant logging stands as an important indicator that if an intelligent creature with irreplaceable labor power refuses to compromise sovereign control over its practices of reproduction, the creature could force territorial and political concessions from the surrounding edifice of power. The article draws mainly on archival research and also on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2013 and 2017. Key Words: Burma (Myanmar), colonialism, elephants, logging, Zomia.