Decolonizing Elephants: Animal Capital at the End of Empire in Myanmar

The end of British rule in Myanmar brought few discernible benefits to Burmese elephants. Still, there were important shifts. Imperial timber firms were nationalized by the post-colonial social democratic state. Through this, the vast majority the country’s thousands of working elephants became state-owned property. Alongside this, elephants were also enlisted into the civil wars that marked independence. But for most elephants, the persistence of their subsumption to the timber industry was an overarching continuity from the colonial period onwards. This elephant history of decolonization in Myanmar reveals that a decolonial agenda must be aligned to a project of animal decommodification. This, however, means entering a tense and contestable arena of political action where the needs of marginalized human groups are often at odds with the liberation of captive creatures.