Staff profile

My research focuses on the history of British imperialism in Myanmar (Burma) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My first book, Law, Disorder and the Colonial State, looked at the history of corruption in the Ayeyarwady delta. I have also published on the history of imperial masculinity, crime, medicine, and colonial psychiatry---as well as an article on a murder that took place in London Zoo in the 1920s.

My second book Colonizing Animals: Interspecies Empire in Myanmar came out with Cambridge University Press in 2021. It examines the animal history of British colonialism in Myanmar. Through an "interspecies lens" it tackles the topics of commoditization, imperial ideologies, and anticolonial thought. 

I have just finished an Independent Social Research Foundation mid-career fellowship on the topic of "Accumulation and Empire". The project explored the utility of the conception of accumulation for better interrogating the imperial past.

I was educated at Healing Comprehensive School and Franklin Sixth Form College in Grimsby, before studying for my undergraduate degree in History and Politics at the University of Sheffield. I completed my Master's degree and PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Before coming to Durham I was an associate professor at the University of Leeds and lecturer at the University of Bristol.

Editorial Work

I am a member of the editorial collective of the radical history journal, the History Workshop Journal. I am also an editor for the Empire's Other Histories series published by Bloomsbury.

Equalities

I was a member of the Royal Historical Society's Race, Ethnicity and Equality Working Group from 2017 to 2022, and was a co-author of the Group's 2018 report. From 2019, I co-chaired the Group with Dr Sadiah Qureshi.

• Hannah Atkinson, Suzanne Bardgett, Adam Budd, Margot Finn, Christopher Kissane, Sadiah Qureshi, Jonathan Saha, John Siblon and Sujit Sivasundaram, Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History: A Report and Resource for Change (2018).

I am a member of the Social History Society BME Historians Network, and co-chair of the University of Durham's BAME Network. I also sit on the panel for the Joint BME Events and Activities Small Grants.

• Social History Society BME Historians Network
• Durham University BAME Network
• Joint BME Events and Activities Small Grant

• Animal History
• British India
• Colonial Myanmar
• Imperial Masculinities
• Legal History
• Peasant Insurgency
• Postcolonial Theory
• Racial Capitalism

Authored book

• Saha, J. (2021). Colonizing Animals: Interspecies Empire in Myanmar. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108990240
• Saha, J. (2013). Law, Disorder and the Colonial State: Corruption in Burma c.1900. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137306999

Chapter in book

• Saha, J. (2024). A Historiography of Great Animal Massacres. In M. J. Glover, & L. Mitchell (Eds.), Animals as Experiencing Entities: Theories and Historical Narratives (163-177). Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46456-0_7
• Saha, J. (2024). “The Royal Sacred Hairy Family of Burmah”: Human Difference and Biocultural Empire in the Nineteenth Century. In A. Burton, R. Mawani, & S. Frost (Eds.), Biocultural Empire: New Histories of Imperial Lifeworlds (135-156). Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350454231.ch-5
• Saha, J. (2024). Global Capital, Local Animal: Some Notes on the Elephant Trade in Colonial Southeast Asia. In C. Andratschke, C. Marlene Hoes, & A. Krieger (Eds.), Colonial Dimensions of the Global Wildlife Trade (70-91). https://doi.org/10.11588/arthistoricum.1415
• Saha, J. (2024). Reading colonial masculinity through a marriage in Burma. In M. Houlbrook, K. Jones, & B. Mechen (Eds.), Men and masculinities in modern Britain: A history for the present (67-87). Manchester University Press. https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526174703.00007
• Saha, J. (2021). Paperwork as Commodity, Corruption as Accumulation: Land Records and Licences in Colonial Myanmar, c.1900. In R. Kroeze, P. Dalmau, & F. Monier (Eds.), Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era (293-315). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0255-9_11
• Saha, J. (2020). E is for Elephant. In A. Burton, & R. Mawani (Eds.), Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times (55-61). Duke Unversity Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012818-006
• Saha, J. (2019). State Medicine or Medical State? A Prison Epidemic in Colonial Burma, 1881. In R. Deb Roy, & G. Atwell (Eds.), Locating the Medical (103-125). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199486717.003.0005
• Saha, J. (2018). Do Elephants Have Souls? Animal Subjectivities and Colonial Encounters. In S. Legg, & D. Heath (Eds.), South Asian Governmentalities (159-177). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108571982.007
• Saha, J. (2015). Devious Documents: Corruption and Paperwork in Colonial Burma, c. 1900. In E. Manktelow, & W. Jackson (Eds.), Subverting Empire: Deviance and Disorder in the British Colonial World (167-184). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465870_9
• Saha, J. (2015). Dis-oriented in a Post-imperial World. In A. Burton, & D. Kennedy (Eds.), How Empire Shaped Us (195-204). Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474223010.ch-017

Journal Article

• Saha, J. (2023). Communal Geographies and Peasant Insurgency in Colonial Myanmar. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 46(6), 1240-1256. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2024.2303213
• Saha, J. (2022). Accumulations and Cascades: Burmese Elephants and the Ecological Impact of British Imperialism. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 32, 177-197. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0080440122000044
• Saha, J. (2022). Racial Capitalism and Peasant Insurgency in Colonial Myanmar. History Workshop Journal, 94(Autumn 2022), 42 - 60. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbac023
• Saha, J. (2022). On Accumulation and Empire. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 50(3), 417-442. https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2022.2057745
• Saha, J. (2017). Colonizing Elephants: Animal Agency, Undead Capital and Imperial Science in British Burma. BJHS Themes, 2017(2), 169-189. https://doi.org/10.1017/bjt.2017.6
• Saha, J. (2017). Whiteness, Masculinity and the Ambivalent Embodiment of ‘British Justice’ in Colonial Burma. Cultural and Social History, 14(4), 527-542. https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2017.1329125
• Saha, J. (2016). Is it in India? Colonial Burma as a ‘problem’ in South Asian history. South Asian History and Culture, 7(1), 23-29. https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2015.1109310
• Saha, J. (2016). Milk to Mandalay: Dairy Consumption, Animal History and the Political Geography of Colonial Burma. Journal of Historical Geography, 54, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2016.05.016
• Saha, J. (2016). Murder at London Zoo: Late Colonial Sympathy in Interwar Britain. American Historical Review, 121(5), 1468-1491. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.5.1468
• Saha, J. (2015). Among the Beasts of Burma: Animals and the Politics of Colonial Sensibilities, c. 1840-1940. Journal of Social History, 48(4), 910-932. https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shv003
• Potter, S. J., & Saha, J. (2015). Global History, Imperial History and Connected Histories of Empire. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 16(1), https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2015.0009
• Saha, J. (2013). Madness and the Making of a Colonial Order in Burma. Modern Asian Studies, 47(2), 406-435. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x11000400
• Saha, J. (2013). Colonization, Criminalization and Complicity: Policing Gambling in Burma c 1880–1920. South East Asia Research, 21(4), 655-672. https://doi.org/10.5367/sear.2013.0174
• Saha, J. (2012). ‘Uncivilized Practitioners’: Medical Subordinates, Medico-Legal Evidence and Misconduct in Colonial Burma, 1875–1907. South East Asia Research, 20(3), 423-443. https://doi.org/10.5367/sear.2012.0113
• Saha, J. (2012). A Mockery of Justice? Colonial Law, the Everyday State and Village Politics in the Burma Delta, c.1890-1910. Past & Present: A Journal of Historical Studies, 217(1), 187-212. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gts019
• Saha, J. (2011). Histories of Everyday Violence In British India. History Compass, 9(11), 844-853. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00806.x
• Saha, J. (2010). The Male State: Colonialism, Corruption and Rape Investigations in the Irrawaddy Delta c.1900. Indian Economic and Social History Review, 47(3), 343-376. https://doi.org/10.1177/001946461004700303