Elephants and Kings
An Environmental History
“The intelligence, majestic presence, and physical prowess of the Asian elephant was not lost on India’s monarchs. As historian Thomas Trautmann shows in this scholarly environmental history, the beast’s usefulness in warfare and its prodigious dietary needs ensured royal protection for swathes of forest in ancient India, where the wild animals were captured for specialized training. That the country still has 30,000 elephants is a testament to their enduring place in the collective imagination; but as Trautmann argues, India’s surviving patchwork of thirty-one elephant reserves may not sustain them.”
Scholars, students, and general readers should take note of how the physical, faunal,
and floral environments can deeply inform political, social, military and cultural history. Further,
Trautmann demonstrates the value of taking the long-range perspective of the entire
sweep of India’s recorded history, indeed of its natural history from the Holocene to the
Anthropocene, within the vast geography of all of Eurasia and also parts of Africa, to show
patterns that more limited time and space definitions could not."
Asian Studies: East Asia | General Asian Studies | South Asia
History: Environmental History | General History
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