Meat, Mercy, Morality

This book analyzes how discourses of cruelty against animals - in veterinary, dietary, and transport registers - inform the colonial imagination of humanitarianism. It argues that debates concerning animals invoked less protectionism, and reflected in microcosm the nature of British Empire and Bengali anxieties over dietetics and identity. Imagining animals as diseased, eaten and overworked, the study reveals that animal cruelty was often enacted in a space where control and submission were the dominant form of governance.