Register to attend in person
Desription
The Meat of the Story: Cattle Capitalism and Veterinary Public Health in Colonial Nigeria
This study historicises colonial veterinary and nutrition sciences in British Nigeria vis-à-vis the imperial exploitation of the Central Sudan’s livestock economies from 1860 to 1960. Bringing together social histories of veterinary medicine, food systems, human–animal relations, and of colonial Nigeria, the work interrogates the place of the cow — migrant, fattened, diseased, dying, or dead — in the colonial economy and transimperial politics. The account follows the colonial cattle as it bridged human and livestock health by virtue of the colonial meatification of Nigerian foodways. The dissertation finds that colonial nutrition and veterinary sciences were political and capitalist sciences mobilised by the colonial state for actualising its imperialist interests. It centres diverse actors — nonhuman and human — as well as multiple epistemes and expertise — expatriate and indigenous — that were involved in the various colonial public health schemes. The research relies on a rich trove of colonial reports, correspondences, and other occasional publications, newspapers and oral testimonies held at various archives in different countries. Fundamentally multidisciplinary in approach, the study borrows analytical frameworks and discursive tools from the fields of multispecies studies and human–animal studies in foregrounding nonhuman life forms as historical subjects, objects and agents.
This Research Café will be presented by Oluwaseun Williams, Doctoral Researcher in the International History and Politics Department. Save your spot now by registering above!
Organised by
The Global Health Centre.
