Military Ornithology in Place
Keyword(s):
The concluding chapter demonstrates how the accumulation of their avian collections and documentation served as an ideological force in imagining control over universal knowledge and, in turn, the British Empire and its territories, as officers studied birds as part of surveying, mapping, and surveillance. It analyzes how military ornithologists encountered different local cultures (with different attitudes toward hunting, birds, and field science) and different local natures (with different climates, avian populations, and environments), and how imperial knowledge was contingent on local networks and of different trajectories across the British Empire.