Martha Chaiklin received her PhD from Leiden University, The Netherlands. She first became interested in animals when researching her book, Cultural Commerce and Dutch Commercial Culture (2003), and has since combined her interest in material culture and animals in publications on elephants, live animal gifts, tortoiseshell and ivory.

Philip Gooding is a postdoctoral fellow at the Indian Ocean World Centre, and a course lecturer in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University, Canada. He has published articles in Slavery and Abolition and The Journal of African History, among other journals.

Gwyn Campbell is the founding Director of the Indian Ocean World Centre at McGill University, Canada. His publications include Africa and the Indian Ocean World from early times to circa 1900 (2019), David Griffiths and the Missionary "History of Madagascar" (2012), and An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750-1895 (2005).

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction: Investigating Animals, their products, and their trades in the Indian Ocean World

Martha Chaiklin and Philip Gooding

Chapter 2: The Dutch East India Company and the transport of live exotic animals in the seventeenth and eighteenth century

Ria Winters

Chapter 3: Can the Oyster Speak? Pearling Empires and the Marine Environments of South India and Sri Lanka, c. 1600-1900

Samuel Ostroff

Chapter 4: Chank Fishing in South India under the East India Company, 1800-1840

Sundar Vadlamudi

Chapter 5: Horses and Power in the Southern Red Sea Region Since the Seventeenth Century

Steven Serels

Chapter 6: The donkey trade of the Indian Ocean World in the long nineteenth century

William Gervase Clarence-Smith

Chapter 7: Commercialisation of Cattle in Imperial Madagascar, 1795-1895

Gwyn Campbell

Chapter 8: Ayutthaya's Seventeenth-Century Deerskin Trade in the Extended Eastern Indian Ocean and South China Sea

Ilicia J. Sprey and Kenneth R. Hall

Chapter 9: The Ivory Trade and Political Power in Nineteenth-Century East Africa

Philip Gooding

Chapter 10: The Flight of the Peacock, or how Peacocks became Japanese

Martha Chaiklin