ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Captive Subjects: Barrackpore Menagerie, British India, and the Global Animal Trade

• In Event: Animal Networks. Zoos in the Peripheries 1

English Abstract

In 1801, the British East India Company opened the latest institution in their expanding colonial state: Barrackpore Menagerie. At once a laboratory, warehouse, amphitheater, and prison, the Calcutta collection served as a microcosm of an expanding zoological empire. Whether through study, acclimatization, or sale, British naturalists and colonial officials used Barrackpore to turn animals into entirely governable subjects—not merely killed but extracted, confined, maximized, and transformed. Visitors to the gardens could find chemists experimenting with civet perfumes, witness military officers setting cheetahs upon live prey, or find naturalists attempting to tame the “untamable” hyena. Behind these displays of imperial confidence, the collection’s longevity depended upon local labor, economies, and knowledge—acts of care and expertise that colonial administrators and naturalists often marginalized. Centering Barrackpore, therefore, highlights the role of zoological collections as active sites of colonial governance, rather than simply as metropolitan representations of imperial power. This paper highlights how the menagerie served a two-fold role: connecting British officials and naturalists to India, but also connecting British India to the world. Animals arrived in the menagerie as the prizes of militarized networks of capture and transportation, just as they departed as commodities destined for zoological gardens and touring displays across Britain, Europe, and North America. By examining Barrackpore as a center of an expanding global animal trade, the menagerie reveals the infrastructures, networks, and knowledge that built the British Empire as a whole.

Author

• Alexander Clayton, University of Vermont