In the age of high imperialism, thousands of species of plants and animals were transferred between Australia, Asia, and Africa. Some of them were exchanged deliberately for economic, scientific, or aesthetic reasons. European settlers, for example, transported cattle, horses, and sheep between South Africa, Asia, and Australia; camels were exported from Northern India to Australia; and exotic birds from South Asia, such as, for example, the Myna bird, were taken to Australia and South Africa. Other species travelled between the continents accidentally, as stowaways. Whether intentional or not, these transfers changed ecologies and livelihoods on the three continents forever.

This workshop aims to uncover the exchanges that have modified African, Asian and Australian environments. Integrating both human and non-human agency in our understanding of ecological networks, we will ask in our workshop how different participants in the transfers related to each other and how these relationships changed in the context of ecological transfers. In our workshop we will examine in particular how Europeans built on non-European traditions of species transfer, and we will investigate where colonial exchanges met with opposition. Moreover, we will track the extent to which species transfers across the Indian Ocean led to a greater awareness of ecological imbalances, environmental destruction, and climate change. We aim to reassess the significance of the networks and transfers across the Indian Ocean in the broader context of imperial and global relations. By these means, we hope to develop an agenda that integrates the transfer processes between the three continents into a transoceanic environmental history.

We invite proposals for papers that will shed new light on these questions. Particularly welcome are proposals that explore innovative concepts and theories, including approaches that bring together natural sciences and humanities, animal studies, Actor-Network-Theory etc.

Proposals might address some of the following questions:

- How and why did experts and travelers cross the Indian Ocean and how did they establish networks of exchange and transfer?

- How have hierarchies between different human and non-human participants in the transfers shifted over time?

- Which role did indigenous, local knowledge play in the transcontinental transfers?

- To what extent were participants in different places aware of environmental change and destruction?

- What are the links between the observation of ecological change and environmentalism?

- What were the long-term effects of species transfer?

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words along with a short CV to <events@rcc.lmu.de>

The deadline for proposals is 28 February 2018.

We will discuss precirculated papers at the workshop: final papers should be submitted by 15 September 2018.