Elephants and Kings (Paperback)

Because of their enormous size, elephants have long been irresistible for kings as symbols of their eminence. In early civilizations - such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Civilization, and China - kings used elephants for royal sacrifice, spectacular hunts, public display of live captives, or the conspicuous consumption of ivory - all of them tending toward the elephant's extinction. The kings of India, however, as Thomas R Trautmann shows in this study, found a use for elephants that actually helped preserve their habitat and numbers in the wild: war. Trautmann traces the history of the war elephant in India and the spread of the institution to the West-where elephants took part in some of the greatest wars of antiquity - and Southeast Asia (but not China, significantly), a history that spans 3,000 years and a considerable part of the globe, from Spain to Java. He shows that because elephants eat such massive quantities of food, it was uneconomic to raise them from birth. Rather, in a unique form of domestication, Indian kings captured wild adults and trained them, one by one, through millennia. Kings were thus compelled to protect wild elephants from hunters and elephant forests from being cut down. By taking a wide-angle view of human-elephant relations, Trautmann throws into relief the structure of India's environmental history and the reasons for the persistence of wild elephants in its forests.

General

Imprint:	University of Chicago Press
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	August 2015
Authors:	Thomas R. Trautmann
Dimensions:	144 x 217 x 28mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	304
ISBN-13:	978-0-226-26436-3
Categories:	Books > Humanities > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > General Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology > Social & cultural anthropology > General Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Animals & society > General Books > Earth & environment > The environment > Conservation of the environment > Conservation of wildlife & habitats > General Books > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > General
LSN:	0-226-26436-X
Barcode:	9780226264363

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