Review: <i>Colonizing Animals: Interspecies Empire in Myanmar</i>, by Jonathan Saha

The publication of the inaugural issue of Animal History, the first academic journal dedicated to the histories of animals and human-animal relationships, coming two decades after "Animals in History," the first history conference to focus on animals (in 2005), seems like an opportune moment to take stock of the development of and suggest some new theoretical ideas for this burgeoning subfield.As if anticipating this prospect, Colonizing Animals provides a timely review and stimulating preview of possible approaches going forward.Author Jonathan Saha, who realized he had been overlooking the many animals who appear in archives as he re-read records from his earlier research on the Rangoon asylum (p.13), brings a veteran historian's able hand to the task.In clear, punchy prose, he adeptly assesses much of animal history's historical and theoretical work over the past 20 years and makes some striking theoretical interventions that go well beyond the stories of colonizing and colonized people and other creatures in British Myanmar.The interactions among these various actors form what Saha calls "interspecies empire."Myanmar and the book are animated by nearly every imaginable animaldomesticated and wild and in liminal spaces in between, vertebrate and invertebrate, pets and pests, massive and microscopic-and Saha seems to consider every possible one, and their colonized and colonizing relationships with colonizing and colonized humans.In five topical chapters that roughly proceed chronologically from the East India Company's