Animals and the Age of Empires: Local Histories and Global Trends

• Abstract of the Keynote Lecture

Pets and Breeding Cattle on the Move – Animal Individuals in the Core of Modernisation

The lecture examines domesticated animals’ role in modernisation by focusing on the transnational mobility of pets and breeding cattle. It discusses the visibility and invisibility of animals and their roles at a time of intensifying exploitation of animals and in the prevailing context of the belief in (human) progress. The lecture problematises the priority given to species and breeds vs. animal individuals’ geographies. The empirical cases deal with pets and breeding cattle who arrived in Finland between the 1860s and the 1890s and show how a relatively small number of animal individuals had a fundamental role in the modernisation of the entire society. The lecture is based on qualitative and contextualising historical research. The theoretical starting point is the notion of animal subjectivity and shared agency in multispecies interactions.

• About the speaker
  

Taina Syrjämaa is a Professor of European and World History at the University of Turku. Her current research focuses on nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century multispecies history. Her research interests include animal agency, animal mobilities, multispecies families, and the question of visibility vs. invisibility of animals in society. Among her publications can be mentioned two co-edited anthologies: Shared Lives of Humans and Animals. Animal Agency in the Global North (Routledge 2017) and Animal Industries. Nordic Perspectives on the Exploitation of Animals since 1860 (De Gruyter 2024).

• 08:30 – 09:00 – Coffee and getting together
• 09:00 – 09:10 – Opening of the conference
• 09:15 – 10:15 – Keynote lecture by professor Taina Syrjämaa (University of Turku), Pets and Breeding Cattle on the Move – Animal Individuals in the Core of Modernisation
• 10:15 – 11:45 – Panel 1. Animals Trapped by Modernity

• Chair: Per Bolin (Södertörn University)

Onur İnal (University of Vienna), Rafts, Railroads, and Refrigerators: Animals in the Age of Steam in the Modern Middle East

Anna Olenenko (University of Alberta), Modernizing the Steppe: Uncanny Animals and the Russian Empire's Quest to Transform Nature

Deniz Dölek Sever (Zonguldak Bülent Ecevit University), Empire and Animals: Captivity of the Wild in the Ottoman Empire

• 11:45 – 12:00 – Break
• 12:00 – 13:00 – Panel 2. Commodifying the Empire’s Herd

• Chair: Oleksandr Polianichev (Södertörn University)

Julia Malitska (Södertörn University), Meatification as Imperial Situation. A New Research Agenda for the late Romanov Empire?

Jan Surman (The Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences), Designing Cows: Between the Empire and the Nation

• 13:00 – 14:00 – Lunch in Alle Elva restaurant (below Södertörn University’s library)
• 14:15 – 15:15– Panel 3. Sheep-keeping amidst Imperial Expansion

• Chair: Yulia Gradskova (Södertörn University)

Aibubi Duisebayeva (Al-Farabi Kazakh National University), The Impact of Commodity Relations on the Kazakh Animal Husbandry in the late Russian Empire: Sheep as Commodity is a Loss of Value or Triumph of Worth

Svitlana Arabadzhy (University of Oslo/Mariupol State University), From Sheep-herding to Cereal Cultivation: A Case Study of Greeks in the Azov Sea Region during Russian Colonial Expansion and the Rise of Maritime Trade

• 15:15– 15:30 – Break
• 16:00 – 17:30 – Panel 4. Caring for Animals

• Chair: Ann-Sofie Lönngren (Södertörn University)

Daša Ličen (Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts/University of Maribor), Animal Welfare and Social Boundaries in late Habsburg Trieste

Paul van Dijk (University of Amsterdam), ‘The Righteous Also Has Mercy on His Livestock’: Animal Protection Activists in Livland as a Political Factor in the Agricultural Transformations in Imperial Russia, 1861–1917.

Karl Hein (Tallinn University), Animal Welfare Movement in Estonia, 1869–1918

• 17:00– 17:30– Concluding Discussion
• 18:30 – Conference dinner in the city (for speakers and chairs)

• Svitlana Arabadzhy is a Postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo and an Associate Professor at the Department of History and Archaeology at Mariupol State University.
• Paul van Dijk writes a PhD dissertation at the University of Amsterdam on the land question in imperial Russia after 1861 in two of the empire's peripheries: Livland in the Baltics and Ufa province in the southern Urals. He approaches landownership and land use as inherently political and sees them as part of changing ‘imperial situations’ to understand why similar modernizing policies from the imperial center played out so differently in Livland and Ufa. Due to long-term illness, he is no longer able to write about the relation between land and public health, but is still very interested in public health, especially in relation to animals and agriculture. Finally, he is also a member of the Dutch Party for the Animals.
• Aibubi Duisebayeva is a senior lecturer at the Department of History of Kazakhstan, Faculty of History of Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (Almaty, Kazakhstan). Her research interests cover many aspects of human interactions with the natural world, and colonial context of environmental history of the Kazakh steppe in the late imperial period. Her last dissertation work provides a fuller understanding of the tsarist state’s motivations for intervening in Kazakh stock-raising through veterinary services.
• Deniz Dölek-Sever is a faculty member at the Department of History, Zonguldak Bülent Ecevit University, Turkey. Previously, she worked as a research assistant at Middle East Technical University (METU), Department of History. In 2012–2013, she was a visiting researcher at Georgetown University, Department of History. In 2015, she received her PhD from METU, Department of History, and in 2018, her dissertation was published as a book titled Istanbul’s Great War: Public Order, Crime, and Punishment in the Ottoman Capital, 1914–1918. In 2020–2021, she conducted a post-doctoral project entitled “A Legal Perspective on Environmental History: Regulations on Animal Theft in the Late Ottoman Empire” at METU, Department of History. Dölek-Sever, who has authored various articles and studies on environmental and animal history in the late Ottoman Empire, local reflections of the Second Constitutional Regime, the emergence and development of Turkish nationalism, and state-society relations in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, continues to work on human-environment and human-animal relations in the context of modernization.'
• Karl Hein is a PhD student and junior researcher at Tallinn University. With a background in religious studies and education, his master’s thesis focused on ecotheology. Currently, his research interests lie in animal history and environmental humanities. His PhD thesis examines the Estonian animal welfare movement before World War II, tracing its roots to the latter half of the nineteenth century.
• Onur İnal is a senior postdoctoral researcher and the project leader of the FWF-funded project “DANFront: An Environmental History of the Early-Modern Ottoman Military Frontier in the Middle and Lower Danube” at the University of Vienna. His research interests center on environmental history, the history of technology, and human-animal encounters, with a regional focus on the Middle East. He is the regional representative for Turkey at the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) and the founder of the Network for the Study of Environmental History of Turkey (NEHT). He is the author of Gateway to the Mediterranean: An Environmental History of Late Ottoman Izmir (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). He has co-edited Transforming Empire: The Ottomans from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (Brill, 2024), Seeds of Power: Explorations in Ottoman Environmental History (White Horse Press, 2019) and Transforming Socio-Natures in Turkey: Landscapes, State and Environmental Movements (Routledge, 2019). His scholarly work has appeared in edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of World History, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Journal of Ottoman Studies, Journal of Urban History, Environmental History, and Environment and History.
• Daša Ličen is a researcher at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and an Assistant Professor at the University of Maribor. She works in the fields of cultural anthropology, ethnology, and history, specializing on late Habsburg Trieste. Daša is currently finishing her postdoctoral project entitled For Beasts, Against Animals: Towards the Long History of Animal Rights Movement, in which she examines the rise of the animal rights movement as a means of class differentiation.
• Julia Malitska is a senior researcher at Södertörn University (Stockholm, Sweden). She is the author of the book “Negotiating Imperial Rule: Colonists and Marriage in the Nineteenth-Century Black Sea Steppe” (2017), which is her doctoral dissertation. Between 2019–2022, Malitska conducted her postdoctoral project on the history of vegetarian social activism in the late Romanov empire. She has published on different aspects of the topic in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Malitska’s current project entitled “To Eat or Not to Eat: Human Health, Scientific Knowledge and the Biopolitics of Meat in Eastern Europe in 1860s–1939,” financed by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies (Östersjöstiftelsen), deals with the intertwined histories of food, scientific knowledge, and animals in the late Romanov empire and the early Soviet Union.
• Anna Olenenko is a PhD Candidate in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta, a Regional Representative of Ukraine and a member of the Board of the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH), a co-founder of the EnvHistUA Research Group. She graduated from Zaporizhzhia National University in 2007 and got her Candidate of Sciences in History degree from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 2013. Anna’s research interests are related to the environmental history of Ukraine, especially the Steppe region, and animal studies. The latest publication is a chapter (co-authored with Stefan Dorondel) “In Quest of Development: Territorialization and the Transformation of the Southern Ukrainian Wetlands, 1880–1960” in A New Ecological Order. Development and the Transformation of Nature in Eastern Europe (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022) and a chapter “Camels in European Russia: Exotic Farm Animals and Agricultural Knowledge” in Thinking Russia’s History Environmentally (Berghahn, 2023).
• Jan Surman is a historian specializing in the history of science and scholarship, with a focus on the Habsburg Empire, scientific mobility, and internationalism in Central and Eastern Europe, working currently at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Vienna and has held research positions at institutions such as and the Herder Institute, Marburg or IFK Vienna. Key publications: Jan Surman, Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918: A Social History of a Multilingual Space (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2018); Jan Surman, ed. Science Interconnected: German-Polish Scientific Entanglements in Modern History (Marburg: Herder Institute, 2022).

The conference aims to tackle a wide range of topics, such as:

• animals and colonial expansion; subjection of societies and lands; imperial violence and colonial complicity;
• animals in imperial, national and indigenous mindsets; competing knowledge regimes;
• animals as agents and objects of empire, and modernity;
• animals and ideas of progress, civilization and barbarism;
• imperial versus indigenous economies and agriculture; industrialization of animal agriculture;
• veterinary, zootechnical, agricultural and ecological sciences and technology;
• breeding, rearing, feeding and medical treatment of animals;
• commodification and exploitation of animals; trading animals and animal commodities;
• exhibited and performing animals: zoos, menageries, and circuses;
• “other-than-human immigrants” and animal geographies; animals on the move;
• eating animals;
  
• counter-narratives and countercultures: animal welfare, vegetarianism, anti-vivisection;
• hunting and slaughtering, extermination, epizootics;
  
• historicizing animal agency: possibilities and limitations.