Ecological Networks and Transfers between Australia, South Asia and Africa, 1850-1920

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In the age of high imperialism, European scientists in Australia, Africa and British India exchanged a large variety of species of plants and animals. They had different reasons to do so. Economic interests and scientific curiosity about how species adjusted to new ecosystems were closely connected with the desire to improve and to civilize non-European environments. These networks and transfers across the Indian Ocean have been much neglected by current research. This project wants to contribute to uncovering them. By doing so, it aims to shed new light on the history of ecological imperialism. The project pursues three goals: By analysing the correspondences of a selection of relevant scientists, it will, firstly, describe the networks and species transfers across the Indian Ocean more precisely than it has been done before. It will examine the ways in which these networks and transfers were entangled in wider global networks, and, in particular, how they can be related to the core-periphery structures of imperial scientific exchange and transfer. Secondly, the project will revisit transcontinental species transfer by applying new results of Actor-Network-Theory and animal studies. Plants and animals will be defined as actors endowed with agency. Based upon this methodological approach, the project will show how relations between human and non-human actors changed in the context of transoceanic transfers. Introduced species often developed in unexpected ways. They could, for example, increase disproportionately in new environments and were then perceived as threatening and invasive. Hierarchies between humans and non-humans shifted in the process of transfer. Scientists lost control over transfers and realized the limits of ecological engineering. Thirdly, the project will examine the question in how far such experiences created a specific awareness for ecological imbalances and environmental destruction. It will, furthermore, be explored whether these sensitivities, developed by scientists in the colonies, resulted in demands for state intervention to protect the environment. Thus, the projected study on the so far neglected species transfers between Australia, Africa and South Asia in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will, not least by integrating non-humans as actors, make a new contribution to the discussions about the causes and origins of colonial dynamics.