(Post)Colonial Cattle Frontiers: Capitalism, Science and Empire in Southern and Central Africa, 1890s-1970s

Abstract

Having played a key role in economic, social and cultural life in many African societies for centuries, cattle became a focal point of colonial intervention, capitalist enterprise and veterinary science after European conquest in the late nineteenth century. Partly driven by negative views of ‘traditional’ and ‘uneconomic’ pastoralist practices, colonial governments, scientists, entrepreneurs, settlers and other actors promoted a broad range of interventions aimed at turning cattle into profitable imperial and global commodities. While triggering (or sometimes just running parallel to) manifold African strategies of accomodation, adaptation and resistance, these interventions gradually transformed pre-existing cattle economies, pastoralist societies and animal environments in many and often unexpected ways.

The collaborative research project CATTLEFRONTIERS (ERC Starting Grant, Oct. 2023-Sept. 2028), that includes four researchers and myself as Principal Investigator, sets out to offer a first more comprehensive history of these transformation processes, which are still marginalised and only partially understood in both African and global history. Through a series of interlocking case studies on French, Portuguese and Belgian (post)colonies in Southern and Central Africa, it analyses how the interplay of global capitalism, science and empire created new ‘cattle frontiers’ and transformed pre-existing cattle economies in Africa.

 For more information on the project, please see the attached file. If you would like to know more about the project, please contact any of the project leads:  Hannah.Brown@durham.ac.uk; emily.webster@durham.ac.uk; justin.willis@durham.ac.uk

This is the second  event in a series to launch the IAS major project Interest in cattle: value, risk and security in eastern and southern Africa.  

This project, which will run up to Easter 2026, with fellows resident in Durham from January to March 2026, takes an innovative approach to questions of value and well-being in eastern and southern Africa. It will bring together scholars from diverse disciplines - from public health to history and anthropology, all of whom share an interest in cattle. Cattle, we suggest, lie at the intersection of multiple, distributed, strategies for securing the future. They are an everyday resource in livelihood strategies; a target of bio-security interventions informed by contemporary One Health approaches; a way to build and reaffirm horizontal social ties; an investment opportunity for those who seek to accumulate – and they are the centre of an enduring aesthetic which valorises them as things of beauty as well as cultural and economic resources.

The project will enable us to develop and refine a series of questions around these intersecting forms of interest in cattle – and to draw on historical experience as well as contemporary research in producing a series of outputs that will inform current debates, encourage engagement with the complex questions raised by the place of cattle in our more-than-human world, and enable and guide future research on this topic.

ADDITIONAL EVENTS

7 May 2025, 13.00 – 14.30
Institute of Advanced Study
Professor Salome Bukachi (University of Nairobi)
The Unseen Histories of One Health: Tracing the Colonial and Post-Colonial Footprints of Disease Control

19 June 2025, 10.00 – 17.00
Institute of Advanced Study
Launch event and workshop – details to follow