Hybrid event: Animals and the Age of Empires: Local Histories and Global Trends

Hybrid event:  Animals and the Age of Empires: Local Histories and Global Trends, 4.4.2025

Explore the intertwined history of human-animal relations during the international conference that shifts the focus onto the regions and countries once ruled by the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Ottomans.

URL: https://www.sh.se/kalender/kalenderposter/2025-04-04-animals-and-the-age-of-empires-local-histories-and-global-trends

The concept of the conference

Animals were part of colonial expansion, empire building and empire maintenance in Western and non-Western empires. Although the intertwined history of human-animal relations is global, with some shared dynamics and pathways, the practices and patterns were hardly unified. With regard to the increasingly challenged Anglophone bias and Western-centrism of scholarly work on empire and animals, this proposed conference shifts the focus onto the regions and countries once ruled by the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Ottomans. 

Focusing on the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, the conference aims to explore the intertwined histories of animals and empires in the countries and regions that once belonged to the Russian, Habsburg and Ottoman empires. With three empires as its prime analytical concern, the conference’s ambition is not only to explore the dynamics between the empires’ localities and regions, as well as individual empires, but also to transcend the usual boundaries of Area Studies and provide a more global view on the intertwined histories. The overarching purpose of the conference is to advance this area of research. Chronologically, the conference focuses on colonial expansion and globalization in the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century.