Elephant Paths, Veterinarians, Mules and Refugees: The Multispecies Territorialization of an Asian Borderland

This study examines how the borderlands stretching from Northeast India to Northern Burma were gradually territorialized in the nineteenth century through complex interactions among ecologies, human communities, and multiple species. Departing from the human-centered “impact–response” paradigm common in frontier studies and from empire-focused narratives of “colonial territorialization,” this project proposes multispecies territorialization as a new lens for understanding the history of Asian borderlands. The spatial knowledge and migratory infrastructures of wild Asian elephants, the tensions between indigenous medical traditions and colonial veterinary science, the rise of mules and horses as key infrastructural species, and the interactions among the British-Indian colonial state, Zomia highland communities, and Panthay Muslim networks together shaped a territorializing process co-produced by animals, empires, and diverse human actors.

Cao Yin is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Peking University and a recipient of the Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researcher. His research spans global history, modern Indian history, and South/Southeast Asian studies. He works on infrastructures, multispecies ecologies, technological circulation, and state formation in tropical Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of Chinese Sojourners in Wartime Raj, 1942–45 (Oxford University Press, 2022) and From Policemen to Revolutionaries: A Sikh Diaspora in Global Shanghai, 1885–1945 (Brill, 2018).