![]() War Elephant As An IdeaJulie E. Hughes ELEPHANTS AND KINGS: AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY By Thomas R. Trautmann Permanent Black /Ashoka University, 2015, pp. 372, Rs. 995.00 VOLUME XXXIX NUMBER 10 October 2015 Elephants and Kings is a thorough survey of where war elephants
came from, where they went, and where they did not go. It
clearly and competently addresses major reasons why war elephants
were trained and why they were adopted by some kingdoms
and not others. Given its topical coverage and wide chronological
and geographical scope, it is a natural companion to Thomas T. Allsen’s
Royal Hunt in Eurasian History (University of Pennsylvania Press,
2006).
Trautmann sums up his main argument as follows: ‘The specific
desire of kings for elephants in their army creates an interest in protecting
live wild elephants and their habitats. I am asking whether
that interest may not have been effective enough to account, in part,
for the India-China difference,’ that is, significant pockets of surviving
wild elephants and elephant forests in India today, but very few
in China. A subsidiary argument is that war elephants and associated
technologies disseminated from South Asia and were adopted
in South East Asia, Persia, northern Africa, and
the Mediterranean world. China, too, received
war elephants but despite repeated exposure rejected
them because of their Chinese ‘land ethic’.
Trautmann successfully keeps his narrative
from becoming a ‘story of environmental degradation’
(p. 306), freeing his analysis from overreliance
on ‘the story of economic progress’ as the
overwhelming explanation for all kinds of environmental
decay. In addition he wisely leaves
space for ‘something deep and stubborn’, what
he calls a ‘land ethic’ in homage to Aldo Leopold
(p. 313). Trautmann’s land ethic is a ‘a sense of
how land [and wildlife] should be used’ (p. 307;
emphasis original). It is subject to historical
change, it may relate to but is not determined
by economic interests, and it helps explain (when
understood in combination with climate change
and, yes, economic interests) why more elephants
and elephant forests were preserved in India than
China.
Notably, Trautmann cautions that his argument is ‘not a claim
about ideas of non-violence, or nature reverence, or divinity . . . but
about royal interest’ (p. 315). Indian kings, alas, did not preserve
elephants because they were environmentally friendly rulers, but
because these animals were useful to them. Nor did Chinese emperors
fail because they were poor environmental stewards, but because
they did not find elephants terribly useful. The explanation is simple:
South Asia’s elephants were war elephants; in China they were ceremonial
beasts or agricultural pests.
The book has appealing transnational aspects. It puts ... Table of Contents >> |