Geopolitics and the Avian Imperial Archive: The Zoogeography of Region-Making in the Nineteenth-Century British Mediterranean

Abstract

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Mediterranean region emerged as a crucial site for the security of the British Empire route to India and South Asia, especially with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Military stations served as trans-imperial sites, connecting Britain to India through the flow of military manpower, commodities, information, and bodily experiences across the empire from 1850 through 1880. By examining the material remnants of the “avian imperial archive” (avian lists, bird skins, eggs, travel writing), I demonstrate how British military ornithology helped to materialize imaginatively and empirically the British Mediterranean as a transitional region for the physical and cultural acclimatization of British officers en route to and from India and to extend British imperial interests into North Africa. As this article reveals, the production of zoogeography by British military officers in the Mediterranean was coconstituted by imperial military geopolitics.