num_pages: 304
description: Because of their enormous size elephants have long been irresistible for kings as symbols of their eminence. In early civilizationssuch as Egypt Mesopotamia the Indus Civilization and Chinakings used elephants for royal sacrifice spectacular hunts public display of live captives or the conspicuous consumption of ivoryall of them tending toward the elephants extinction. The kings of India however as Thomas R. Trautmann shows in this study found a use for elephants that actually helped preserve their habitat and numbers in the war. Trautmann traces the history of the war elephant in India and the spread of the institution to the westwhere elephants took part in some of the greatest wars of antiquityand Southeast Asia (but not China significantly) a history that spans 3000 years and a considerable part of the globe from Spain to Java. He shows that because elephants eat such massive quantities of food it was uneconomic to raise them from birth. Rather in a unique form of domestication Indian kings captured wild adults and trained them one by one through millennia. Kings were thus compelled to protect wild elephants from hunters and elephant forests from being cut down. By taking a wide-angle view of human-elephant relations Trautmann throws into relief the structure of Indias environmental history and the reasons for the persistence of wild elephants in its forests. 
language: English
title: Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History
publisher: University of Chicago Press