Between symbolic and material: global entanglements in the Dutch East India Company's knowledge and management of elephants in early modern Ceylon

After the Dutch East India Company (VOC) gained dominance over the coastal areas of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) from the middle of the seventeenth century, the company started to exploit one of the natural resources on the island, elephants, for its own commercial and diplomatic purposes. With the help of local people, the VOC captured elephants and stabled them systematically. Historians have seen this practice as part of European imperial and trading enterprises rationally valuing material knowledge of the natural world over the symbolic. However, by reading VOC documents alongside other Asian and European sources on elephants, it is evident that VOC empirical knowledge and material management of elephants in Ceylon were compatible with symbolic systems of various elephant traditions in South and Southeast Asia and also in Europe. These traditions valued elephants not only for their material capabilities but also their symbolic significance considered through their bodies as a whole as well as interpreted through their specific physical characteristics. The union between the material and symbolic in the case of Dutch elephant knowledge and management in Ceylon reveals global entanglements in which Europeans internalized Asian cultural values and incorporated non-Western knowledge into their own schemata and philosophies. These entanglements bring to light a non-Western diffusionist view on the history of natural history of the elephant.