One of the reminders in this marvelously interdisciplinary book is that elephants are big. Unlike humans, who came to rely increasingly on food processed outside the body, the elephant's size is the maximum that its metabolism can sustain. In other words, the contrast between humans and elephants is one between efficient and inefficient digestive systems. Given this difference, the rise of human populations and the spread of agriculture made human-elephant conflict inevitable. Such conflict—most apparent in elephants rampaging through planted fields—has remained a feature of South Asian life right up to today. Yet Trautmann's fascinating argument is that the fortunes of elephants were once quite different, during a period when a triangle emerged between kings, forest peoples, and elephants with the deployment of war elephants. As he writes: “Kings were called upon to protect farmers; but insofar as they needed elephants for war and had to cater for their diet, they had simultaneously to protect elephants from the wrath of the farmer” (p. 56). From the institution of the war elephant came other symbolic significations of bigness: an equation with royalty, an inspiration for art, a storehouse of symbols for Indian religions, and a focal point for classificatory regimes. Elephants also became a focus for the honing of skills and rituals, among, for instance, mahouts, physicians, riders, and forest dwellers.

In sketching this story, Trautmann ranges from 1000 BCE to the present. This is not simply a South Asian narrative; the relation between kingship and elephants spread west to Carthage and Rome and east to the Indianizing kingdoms of Southeast Asia. The implication, then, is that elephants, together with their trainers and riders, returned to sites where they had become extinct or where there were no wild elephants. Here they generated something of an arms race. In Southeast Asia, for instance, Trautmann argues that war elephants are absent in the Bronze Age, “but they come into view as soon as kingdoms arise, about the first century CE” (262). Trautmann rightly locates the mechanisms of transfer here in processes of gift-giving, battlefield capture, and tribute.

One contrast that lingers throughout this book pertains to China. Trautmann argues that the Chinese refusal of the war elephant caused an “inexorable retreat of elephants” unseen in India (318). This claim counts as a sophisticated response to Mark Elvin's magisterial The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (Yale University Press, 2004). Trautmann dismisses Elvin's account of “interest,” where the elephant becomes an emblem for the expansion of agriculture and environmental change. Instead, his proposition is that interest in the environment is always plural and that it emerges out of a range of choices and involves diverse agents. Aldo Leopold's land-ethic, Trautmann argues, should not be approached as a trans-historical phenomenon: “An environmental history built on such a foundation … is likely to be one in which the outcome, in gross, is already known before the data are examined” (307). While in China the clearing of dangerous animals from forests and the expansion of cropland were critical components of the land ethic, in India kingly protection and the domestication of elephants meant that forest degradation could go together with rising numbers of elephants. Meanwhile, different styles of warfare were critical: Trautmann asserts that in China warfare became more pragmatic and highly organized infantry tactics were developed that left less room for the Indian war elephant model.

Trautmann guards himself against an obvious line of critique: he is adamant that he is not arguing for the “greenness” of Indian kingship; instead, his claim is about the relative placement of the triangle of kings, forest people/farmers, and elephants against prior modes of hunting elephants for ivory and food. Still, I would have liked to see further defense on this point, particularly a better integration of the royal hunt into the argument. Furthermore, the role of other beasts appears from time to time (especially the horse), but if the claim is for a relative protection of elephants, kingly attitudes to other creatures could have problematized the story further. As a modern historian, I also wanted the end of the story to be handled with greater care. Trautmann proposes that the timber elephant replaced the war elephant at great cost; this goes together with the transition from kingdoms to nation states. Yet colonial warfare, hunting, and display still operated within inherited idioms and practices. In all, cultural, commercial, and religious significations of the elephant may have been further pluralized in analytical terms. Yet these are very minor points and quibbles—this absorbing and counterintuitive environmental history of South Asia will remain a lasting focus of debate and reference, and its imaginative integration of a range of sources and methods is highly instructive.