The recent “animal turn” in the humanities has led to a flourishing of scholarly interest in imperial animal history, and many surprising stories of animals’ involvement in the British Empire have emerged. Animalia: An Anti-imperial Bestiary for Our Times, edited by Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani, is an exciting new addition to this field, and what sets it apart from the rest is the playful and innovative way in which it tells animal stories. As its subtitle states, it is presented as a bestiary, which takes the form of an animal alphabet. There are twenty-six chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet, starting with “A is for Ape” and ending with “Z is for Zebu.” Each chapter, written by a leading historian or animal studies expert, focuses on one species, and the chapters intersect through cross-referencing and the discussion of common colonial themes. The collection thereby reassesses the history of the British Empire as that of “a multispecies enterprise” (1). True to the bestiary tradition, each chapter is accompanied by an illustration, and juxtaposes real, imaginary, and symbolic animals (for example, “L is for Lion” includes a discussion of this animal as a symbol of the British Empire); there is even a chapter dedicated to the unicorn, and the chapter “J is for Jackal (and Dingo)” discusses the importance of the two animals as folkloric creatures. Moreover, by drawing attention to the power of the English alphabet as a naming and classificatory device of the anglophone world, the book critically analyzes how empire ruled over the living world by creating hierarchies of races and species. For instance, it tells how some animals, such as the platypus and the sacred ibis “defied taxonomic systems and questioned the veracity of imperial knowledge” (89). The result is a joyous anti-imperial bestiary, much reminiscent of Edward Lear's nonsense animal alphabet, which teaches us how to read and upend the workings of imperial power.

The chapters follow the global movements created through empire's animal projects, taking the reader on a journey around the world. For instance, we follow Europeans’ footsteps into the heart of the Congo, in search of the elusive okapi, then dubbed “the African Unicorn” (133). Some chapters center on a particular region and its colonial history, such as the kiwi for New Zealand, the Xerus (a genus of various African ground squirrels) for the Cape Colony, and the tiger for British India, while the raccoon teaches us the history of the North American colonies and the United States. The empire's oceanic reach is represented by two whale chapters—the North Atlantic right whale and the whale—and by many shipborne episodes of migration and transportation interspersed throughout the book. For instance, in the chapter “G is for Giraffe,” we learn about the early nineteenth-century efforts to secure and transport these animals from Africa to London's menageries.

Notably, exotic animals are hardly the only characters in the world of Animalia. Several of the alphabet letters are made of British animals, such as the dog, the fox, the horse, and the boar (which includes pigs), who became entangled with the affairs of empire. For instance, horses, just like elephants in India, were trained to serve as “instruments of warfare” (57), while foxes and pigs, introduced to new colonies as a sustainable source of food (pork) and for entertainment (fox hunting), became troublesome and destroyed ecosystems in many colonies. Talking of pests or other much-maligned creatures, Animalia brilliantly includes the mosquito, the scorpion, and the vulture, and the chapter on the mosquito, which discusses the role of colonialism and its modernizing projects in spreading malaria epidemics (122), is of particular relevance to today's global pandemic.

The animal alphabet collected in Animalia is just one of the countless possible sets, and the book invites us to create our own. Nevertheless, it is interesting to observe that this happens to be a predominantly mammalian bestiary: twenty out of the twenty-six alphabet animals are mammals, mostly hoofed creatures, and the bovine kind is particularly well represented: there is a chapter dedicated to cattle, together with separate chapters on the yak (the bushy-tailed bull of the Himalayas) and the zebu (a kind of humped cattle originating in South Asia). The volume's emphasis on cattle aligns with its exploration of settlers’ relations with their colonial environment. For instance, their use of the land for agriculture has altered many landscapes and contributed immensely to the destruction of native ecosystems: the quagga, a species of zebra, was driven to extinction by the South African farmers who regarded them “as unwelcome competitors with domestic livestock” (147). Indeed, the theme of environmental crisis and the threat of species extinction, caused by farming, hunting, wildlife trade, deforestation, and so on runs through the whole book, touching each of the alphabet animals in different ways. These issues are clearly identified as legacies of the British Empire that we are left to tackle today.

Burton and Mawani's brilliant introduction not only provides the historical and imperial contexts for the twenty-six chapters, but it also explains the theoretical thinking behind the collection. It can be read as a manifesto for us all: writing the history of animals’ involvements in British imperialism is, and should be, an “anti-imperial” activity. Such a narrative not only disrupts conventional imperial histories, but also invites us to recognize “the willfulness of creaturely worlds” (7) and their ability to challenge the anthropocentric history and practices of exploitation. Animalia is informative and encyclopedic and a must-have book for anyone who loves and studies animals.