Abstract
This article shows how the exhibition of a white elephant, owned by Phineas Taylor Barnum, the American showman and trickster, became a forum to discuss nineteenth-century theories of race. To nineteenth-century Britons, white elephants were potent symbols of white superiority, allegedly holy to the kings of Siam and Burma, and worshipped because of their white pigmentation, even if this whiteness was artificially produced. When Barnum exhibited an authentic elephant of splotchy colouration, he provoked a debate about the elephant’s financial value and religious significance. In evaluating the beast, newspaper reports, scientific discussions and advertisements revealed a complex understanding of human whiteness, acknowledging that it was an artificial construct, and a status of the most superficial kind.
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