ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Imperial Edges: Private Menageries and Animal Circulations at Pilawin Park (1901–1918)

• In Event: Animal Networks. Zoos in the Peripheries 2

English Abstract

This paper examines Pilawin Park, a private menagerie founded in 1901 by Count Józef Mikołaj Potocki on his family estate in Volhynia (present-day Ukraine), then on the southwestern frontier of the Russian Empire. Situated at a political and ecological periphery, Pilawin offers a revealing case for understanding how private actors mobilized imperial, national, and colonial networks to move, manage, and remake animal populations in early 20th-century Eastern Europe. Initially conceived as a game park for local species, the 6,800-hectare site soon became an experimental space where Potocki imported animals from afar (such as wapiti deer and Dybowski’s maral from Manchuria), while simultaneously attempting to reintroduce species he framed as native to the former Polish-Lithuanian lands, including the iconic European bison. By tracing these intersecting practices of acclimatization, reintroduction, and selective breeding, the paper highlights how Pilawin functioned as a node within broader trans-imperial circuits of animal exchange. Pilawin’s menagerie thus becomes a lens through which to examine how ecological interventions were used to articulate, stabilize, or challenge imperial and national imaginaries. Through archival sources and contemporary zoological debates, the paper argues that private menageries on imperial peripheries were not marginal curiosities but active sites of knowledge production and environmental engineering, shaping both animal mobilities and political visions of territory, belonging, and power.

Author

• Marianna Szczygielska, Max Planck institute for the History of Science