Elephants and Empire in Colonial Burma: Exhibiting Historical Photographs in Myanmar and the UK

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Colonial rule precipitated dramatic ecological change in Myanmar during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. One of the consequences of this change is the current precarious position of Myanmar's elephant populations. Their insecurity is primarily the result of a loss of habitat, hunting and the capture of wild elephants for timber work. Both are legacies of imperial-era forestry policies. Today Myanmar has the second largest Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) population, with an estimated 5000 working elephants kept in a state of semi-captivity and 4000 remaining in the wild. At its peak in the 1930s, there were between 7000 and 10000 working elephants in Myanmar. It is evident from the findings of my research fellowship 'An Animal History of Colonial Burma' (AH/L014939/1) that under British rule the balance of wild to working elephants shifted decisively against the former. More widely, Asian elephants are listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as an endangered species. In this context, the form of semi-captivity in which working elephants are kept offers some prospect for helping to protect the species as whole. Ongoing research by the Myanmar Timber Elephant project at the University of Sheffield has looked into ways of improving the mortality and fertility of semi-captive elephants in the country. Through their research they hope to relieve some of the current pressures put on the remaining wild herds created by the demand to capture replacement working elephants. My project aims to raise awareness of the history of Myanmar's elephant population, and the role of British imperialism within it. It also seeks to frame ongoing attempts to protect elephants within debates around environmental justice and colonial legacies, facilitating a debate about former imperial powers' responsibility for ecological degradation in the Majority World. At the same time the project will signpost audiences to projects helping to protect Myanmar's elephants.The project will raise awareness of, facilitate debate about, and signpost support for, Myanmar's elephants through an exhibition displaying historical photographs of working elephants in colonial Burma in the interwar years. The free public exhibition will be held at the University of Leeds and then move to Yangon, where it will be hosted by the country's only not-for-profit gallery dedicated to photography, Myanmar Deitta. Following the end of the exhibition in Yangon, the photographs will go to the Green Hill Valley Elephant Camp, a sanctuary for retired working elephants near Kalaw in the Southern Shan States. Once there they will form part of an educational display. The photographs were uncovered during my fellowship whilst I was conducting research in the London Metropolitan Archives. The full collection of 64 photographs, from which the exhibits will be selected, are in the archives of Steel Brothers and Company Ltd., a British timber firm that operated in colonial Burma. In order to make all these images freely available for researchers they will be scanned and stored on an online archive hosted by the University of Leeds. The images held in this archive will be useful for environmental historians, imperial historians, visual culture scholars, and specialists working in Myanmar studies.