Interview with Jonathan Eacott, Author of the Summer 2024 Free Access EAS Article

EAS Miscellany sat down recently with Summer 2024 author Jonathan Eacott to talk about his article, “‘Elephant Murder’: ‘Lessons on Humanity and Benevolence’.” For a short period of time, it’s freely available on Project MUSE.

Why did you choose to research your topic? What interested you about the topic?

I kept stumbling into elephants when I was working on my first book, Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600-1830. As I encountered more and more elephants in more and more contexts, they were too big to fit into that book. In some ways writing about elephants did not feel like a choice – I was finding so much material without really looking for it that the only option that felt right was to keep following wherever the elephants led me. They led me first to this article and next to a new book project, tentatively titled Elephantasmagoria: Elephants in British and American Imperialism. I had never studied human and non-human animal relations before, and learning a new area of scholarship has been a welcome challenge. There is so much terrific work in the field, including on elephants, by scholars such as Susan Nance, Nigel Rothfels, and Raman Sukumar. Building on their work, I’ve been bringing questions from my training in imperial history and the history of colonialism to elephants. This includes the crafting of human-to-human emotional bonds over elephants and the animals’ many lives and uses as laborers, warriors, symbols of power, performers, and tools for thinking.

Figure 1. This satirical image depicts an annual Christmas pantomime in Covent Garden with a live elephant. The purpose of the image was to criticize actor-manager John Kemble for using the elephant and accuse him of sacrificing traditional drama for profit. “The Rehearsal or the Baron and the Elephant,” *George Cruikshank, January 1, 1812*. Hand-colored etching, sheet: 7 13/16 x 20 5/16 in. (19.8 x 51.6 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine,” September 13, 2011–March 4, 2012. New York, NY.

What do you think is the most interesting source you looked at as part of your research?

There are so many sources on elephant murder that I find fun, emotional, challenging, and productive. A lot of my sources in my EAS article are short newspaper pieces, and that makes it even harder to choose just one. I first found British caricaturist George Cruikshank’s engraving, The Rehearsal or the Baron and the Elephant (1812), nearly 20 years ago and I’ve wanted to use it ever since. I like the energy, the details, and the juxtaposition of the elephant with Shakespeare and all the other people and animals. The engraving also helped me make the connection between elephants and murder, and the image has been largely forgotten until now. Around the same time, I encountered the pamphlet Murder of the Elephant (1816). It made a different connection to an elephant murder on the other side of the Atlantic. Although historians have used the pamphlet, it has taken me a long time to make sense of these elephant and murder connections. Both sources led me to many more accounts of elephant murders.

Figure 2. Armed keepers situate themselves in front of a captive elephant to prevent him from breaking down his man-made den at Mr. Cross’s Exeter Change. “Scene of the destruction of the noble elephant at Mr. Cross’s Exeter Change,” *Ingrey & Madeley, March 1, 1826*. lithograph, 24.6cm by 34.4cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK..

What do you hope readers will take away from reading your article?

I hope readers will come away from the article with a stronger sense of how important seemingly minor but shared emotional stories can be as tools for making social and national norms, and that they will look for these processes in the world around them today. I also hope they will learn a new way to think about how Americans and Britons have defined which animals can be killed in which places and by which people – this history continues to shape thinking, norms, and policies about animal killing every day. Additionally, how people think about killing other animals has many implications for how people eat, entertain each other, treat each other, and think and act in the world as a human species that interacts with countless other species. I’d like people to come away with new ideas and questions about how history shapes current patterns of care and killing. I hope this history might help people collectively discuss what we would like our norms and policies to be rather than assuming that they are natural, unchangeable, or right or wrong.

Jonathan Eacott is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside. He uses a global approach to study the British empire, India, Africa, and America. He is completing a new book on elephants in British and American imperialism. He can be reached at: jonathan.eacott@ucr.edu.