Conclusion

The conclusion draws together the diverse narrative strands that characterized the 19th- and 20th-century colonial humanitarian project. It reemphasizes the argument of the book by redirecting attention to the colonial ambivalence towards animals. It argues that the colonial project of protection towards animals – a largely unsuccessful one at that – demonstrated how the colonial state, predicated on benevolence, constantly sought to control, subjugate and discipline its subjects – human and non-human. Nonhuman animals became powerful signifiers and markers of identities, and yet remained marginal to the larger project of colonial control, which was bent on dominating human subjects more than nonhumans. Each of the case studies in the preceding chapters – politics of rinderpest control, slaughterhouse inspection, and carters’ strikes are the outcome of the colonial ambivalence. Additionally, the conclusion argues that knowledge produced in the colony was a product of a network of material, social, and scientific relations between and among human and non-human actors.