 Yn cael deall—y dych chi'n gweld, eich cyfnodd a'n ystod yn lle i'r ystyried yng Nghymru Fy rydych chi'n cywirol i fod yn y fawr hwnnw i ddim yn ymddydd. Rwy'n masur i'r gwlaeth, rydych chi'n gryf yn meddwl yn ganhwy a gydweud y gallwn cyfnodd ac yn llwytaethol. Wrth gwrs, cynnau'n fwy o'r hoff iawn o'r hoff, o blwyddyn o'r hoff iawn o'r hoff iawn. yng Nghymru yn 1906 ac ymddai'r operasio Cedda, cyllid cyllid Cedda yma, yn Caethat, sy'n yn y Ndorffedd Cllunio Bermud. Ac mae'n operasio Cedda'r operasio Cedda, yn wneud i'r gwrthon, iawn i'r ffordd yma, dyma 250-160 elefans, ond yn gallu ddweithio'r 240 o'r ddweithio'r ffordd, Mae'n amlwg ar y cyffredin iawn, yn ddiwedd ar y ddechrau'n hanfodol o'r proses yw dylai'r amlwg ar hyn o'r amlwgau ar unrhyw. Ieith gael i'r rhan o'r gweld, oherwydd yr unrhyw o'r cwestiynau, oherwydd yma o'r amlwg o'r ymlaen, oherwydd iawn i'r cyffredin iawn i'r rhan, oherwydd i'r gwerthoedd. Rydym yn ei hunain a ddim yn rhywbeth y gondol, ac mae'n gyfnod o'r ddweudio'r hyn o'r hyn. Ond ydych chi'n cael ei gwrdd, y ddweud y Ddechrau'r Ddwylliant yn ystod o'r ddysgu yma i'r ymgyrchol, yw'n ddweud y clywed o'r cyflwyno'n cyflwyno o'r ddweud. ac mae'n defnyddio'r cyfrifau a'r ystafell ar y gyfer cyfnodd. Mae'r byw yw'r bwysig y dyfodol, mae'r bwysig yn ôl 400,000 rŵp, ac mae'r bwysig yn ddechrau'r ddechrau'r barong ar y byddol. Mae'r bwysig yw'r tragiadau o'r ff嚴, os yw'r bwysig yn ymdraeth ychydig yn ei bwysig oed o'r bwysig yn y bwysig. It was just in 2006, at the end of 2006, after this event, one of the Burmese clerks working in the Kedda department accuses a guy called the Rumpel Clark, who is the head of the department, and his immediate subordinates of massive frauds in the department, dating back to its origins and being established in the colony in 1904. More of the witnesses come forward living in the Kedda area saying that they never witnessed anything to suggest that this event happened. They saw no flames, they saw no piles of burning carcasses as you would expect to have been a pretty prominent part of the landscape. European timber firms, and this is more of a damning in diamond within the context of Colonial Burma, but European timber firms claim that they didn't know anything about anthrax outbreak in the region, otherwise they would have moved their elephants away. Even more suspicious, the elephant that was bringing the blood samples down to Yangon to be tested disappeared when it fell into a river and died. Any exonerating evidence also disappeared with it. It wasn't just this particular case that was bound up in this notion that there might have been a massive fraud going on. There were a few others, and there were lots of different forms of embezzlement that were repairing. In this case, they were trying to believe that he was just embezzling the funds which would go in to maintaining the tamed elephants who also died in this anthrax outbreak, and the wider establishment by claiming that there were all these elephants, claiming money for all these elephants, and then killing them all off, whether they existed beyond paper as another question. Other methods of corruption that appeared to have been going on in the department were more small scale, so in one case the case of Tommy and Maud, as it's described in the court records, there were two elephants which were sold to steel brothers timber firm, live timber firm operating in Colonial Burma, when they were already dead apparently. According to the government records, they died two years earlier. According to the timber firm's records, they bought them alive and well. So this is an example of how they're using this paperwork around the elephants for their own ends. Now, ultimately, Durham per Clark, the guy who is the head of this corrupt organisation of the credit department, manages to escape any punishment himself, and it is through his strategy of keeping himself somewhere at arm's length from all the operation and all his subordinates. He is the joint shareholder of a small elephant capturing and selling company in Burma, but is selling a huge number of elephants in this time, coincidentally, which are likely being caught by the Kedda, moved to his own operation and then sold on. But the colonial state is so keen on people having their own forms of enterprise to supplement their incomes. They don't want to stamp on this operation, but they can't totally link him to the day-to-day running of this organisation called Green Inc. So he avoids prosecution on that point. He also avoids prosecution mainly because a lot of the witnesses against him were Burmese, and substantiating their evidence proved very difficult when it was opposed to the statements of an Indian civil serviceman. So, that is one of the reasons he manages to escape. His immediate subordinates do not. A guy called Mr Birch and several of his Chittagonian staff all get done for fraud and get jail time. I can go into the history of the call case itself, his attempts to escape it, the way a race plays out in there, but that's not really the point of this talk. Instead, I'm going to go about backwards in time to see how this situation could have arisen and then to talk a little bit more about the status of elephants as lively commodities and how that affects their management and their lives. So, how did this come about? Well, the colonisation of Burma during the 19th century happens in three stages, but it's in the 1850s after the Second Anglo-Burmese War that the elephants really get noted as a potential useful resource from the country. And in 1857 is an order that comes to send as many elephants they possibly can from colonial Burma into India, so the company to use to suppress that rebellion. Now, that's not a particularly successful demand, but I don't get that many elephants across, but the point is at this time there is a number of reports coming back saying that the colony is just overwhelmed by elephants. There is an abundance of them. There's more than could possibly ever run out of in the claims in the 1850s and 1860s. Now, this led to several issues and slight convergence in Burma's place within British India in how they managed and dealt with elephants. The Elephant Protection Act, which was brought in in 1879, was not immediately applied to Burma because they saw there was absolutely no way that the elephants would become an endangered species. Of course, by the end of the 19th century they are, but at that point they don't believe that can possibly happen. It also brings about a set of difficulties in the Delta region as the mangrove forests disappear and are replaced by rice frontier that brings elephants into conflict with cultivators. And as a result, the colonial states starts to issue rewards of 100 rupees for the killing of an elephant that is deemed to be a danger to either human life or to human settlements. So they try and reward the killing of some particular elephants. At the same time as this, elephants are becoming far more important in the timber industry. During the late 19th century, the easily accessible forests in colonial Burma are overworked. And to get further in to get the take, elephants become absolutely necessary for the timber industry's practices at almost every stage of the industry. This means that there is all of a sudden a growing market for elephant labour. In 1891, when the idea of cedaring elephants rather than killing them and then supplying them either to the state or to timber firms is first raised, it is no one less than George Sanderson who says, no, this is not necessary, colonial Burma's elephants aren't good enough, and quaches the whole thing. By 1901, the situation has changed in the timber industry so much that now it is to have firmly on the tables an economically viable, or they perceived it to be an economically viable thing for the colonial state itself to be involved in. This also is a part in which elephants are shifting from being predominantly used in military capacity by the state, to being used increasingly in a commercial use in the timber industry. And this is part of the discussions which they're having internally is what are elephants going to be used for in the future, whereas it's worth investing in this operation any more. So this is successful, this campaign to move the cedar operations which has been operating in various parts of British India to consolidating them just in Burma. And Darren Paul Clark is the guy who's put in charge of this. He starts off and when it's established in 1903 he bargains hard for increasing his expenditure from beyond. In every other month almost he's saying we need more money for this aspect, we need more money for that aspect. Whether he did or not is another matter entirely when we look back on that correspondence. But he was in a series of very personal battles with other people in the forest officers who did not see a worth in this process. Now as the years goes on from 1903 to 1904 the expenditure almost goes up by 50%. But they have some perceived successes. They capture around 60 to 70 elephants and sell them to timber firms. Now their idea is that they'll sell them immediately without training them, thus increasing their profit margin. Unfortunately the next year it turns out that all but three of the elephants which they sold died in that first year. In their first year of being with those timber firms. So the timber firms are increasingly suspicious and not happy with this arrangement at all. And the funding behind it starts to get questioned. And in 1907 following this was initially perceived to be a devastating anthrax attack. The whole thing gets scaled back and the numbers are reduced. And whilst the Rumpol Clark is on trial, first of all when they try to extradite him, that takes two years. They give it to someone else to control. They put it under the control of the Conservatory of Forests in Burma. And the whole thing is brought into a much more manageable state until 1913 when the whole thing is abandoned. And instead what they do is license Burmese elephant capturers to capture the elephants. And this shifting of the economic arrangements for producing these lively commodities demonstrates that it shows some remarkable success at least for the timber firms. So between 1919 and 1924 the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation, which is the largest timber firm operating in the colony, employs about 3,000 working elephants. Those are the ones which they own themselves. In the late 19th century they just hired Burmese with their elephants to do the work. Now they're owning her developments. Now that's about 3,000 working elephants that represents a third of their liabilities. It's the single biggest part of their capital. And actually for smaller firms it's the main thing that they are able to raise money on. They borrow against the ownership of their elephants. That's how important the elephant is. It's not just as a means of production and as a worker, it is also security. So that's part of the increasing importance of this. And when you think of in 1910, so that's nine years before they're applying 3,000, the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation owned only about 1,000 elephants. And when numbers increase, and the estimated number just before the Japanese occupation is of roughly 10,000 working elephants in colonial Burma, the vast majority of which are owned by a small number of European timber firms. Because the ownership of elephants means that small Burmese timber firms can no longer compete. They can't raise the capital necessary for employing and purchasing these elephants. So that's how this comes about and how this gets resolved. Now I want to kind of step back and talk a bit about what this might mean on a more conceptual level. So that the phrase I've been using throwing around about defining lively commodities is one that comes out of partly the work you've done at Haraway. And what it suggests of elephants, or she's not talking about elephants, she talks more about pets, and animals that their value comes from the capacities that they have as living beings. That's what their value is generated out of. And one of the things which we need to remember is that as commodities, they are a product of labour in all sorts of different ways, and they're a product of various social relations. And one of those in this context is colonialism, and colonialism is an encouragement of a particular type of capitalism in this area. Now at the same time as being commodities, they're also a form of animal capital. And here I'm borrowing on the ideas of a woman called Nicola Surkin, or Shukin, sorry, who used this term animal capital to try and reveal the way in which animals within animals are often naturalised a set of other relationships by which the animal comes to be useful to humans, either as symbols, but also as economic resources. And what we're getting here in the late 19th century, early 20th century, are a set of arrangements that are going about in order to try and convert elephants into a stable form of capital. And a stable form of capital, particularly for timber firms which are financed largely in Europe and in London. So what we have here is a story of elephants being changed, materially and conceptually. And this happens in different ways, and it has impacts on different elephants in different ways. So some elephants which are brought into the timber camps, the elephant camps, become subjects of colonialism. People start to generate individual pieces of knowledge on them, on their management, on them as individuals, on their life, on their genealogies, all those types of things. They become entities that people are interacting with on their own terms, or trying to understand them on their own terms. Other elephants, and sometimes those very same elephants, become objects as well. They become objects which people used to study, their bodies are interfered with and interacted with, in order to learn more scientifically about these entities, so they become objects. But at the same time as them becoming subjects and objects within this new arrangement, they are many becoming objects. Elephants are becoming killable in a way that they previously had them done. And here the point about the rewards for killing elephants, I think, comes through. The licensing of guns to timber firms in order to kill wild elephants who threaten their own elephant herds, demonstrates this new way that the making of some elephants as subjects means rendering others as objects. So you can be killed. The final thing which I want to say is the role of corruption in this process. Now in my wider work I argue that corruption is not a sort of pathology of state practices. Instead it's something which is embedded in how the state operates in everyday life. For many people it's how they interact with the state. It is the state in many ways. Someone being corrupt makes the state real in someone's life. You don't pay a bribe or get framed because the state doesn't work. You do it because the state is a very real threat. Now in this set of contexts what you have is corruption being an inevitable or endemic part of the laws and practices that are established around elephants. So what we need to recognise is inherently a lot of legislation around elephant preservation has within it the potential for its own perversion. It can create perverse incentives as the establishment of the KEDA department did itself. You can see these perverse incentives operating not just within the KEDA department but within the licensing laws. So the licensing law is the game for weapon holding. A lot of these licenses are either frauds or fabricated or not used or stolen. Corruption is an endemic part of how licensing works. Licenses are crucial in making these elephants commodities and generating whether they are going to be subject or absolute. So that's where I'm going to finish here to try and get us to think a bit more about the history of how elephants become commodities. Because I think that might help us think through how we manage them a bit better perhaps in the future. Recognising that in the process of which that happens and the conceptual nature of that as well as the material nature of it. Thanks.