Anthropology and History

This paper explores themes of morality and capitalist exploitation within the context of the East African ivory trade. Through an interdisciplinary lens that incorporates object-based and archival analysis, this paper traces how morality-tinged, Western-driven narratives concerning the ivory trade mobilize asymmetrical relationships of capitalist exchange in both the past and present. In the late 19th century, the Abolitionist movement conflated the East African ivory and slave trades by narrating the forced
coercion of Africans made to carry ivory tusks in the interior only to be sold into slavery upon reaching the coast. This discursively erased histories of active African engagement with mercantile capitalism as well as emerging labor culture among professional porters of the caravan trade. The vilification of “Arab” slave traders through stories of extreme cruelty within the ivory trade was used to justify formal British colonialism in the region, which led to more expansive capitalist integration and extraction. In contemporary narratives, Western conservation activists blame African corruption, Islamic extremism and Asian consumption for rampant elephant and rhino poaching across East Africa, making way for neoliberal appropriation of East African heritage. In both cases, moral (and Orientalist) arguments advocating liberation, heritage preservation and economic development veil processes by which unequal exchange is facilitated and maintained.

The economic prosperity of two nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century New England towns rested on factories that manufactured piano keys, billiard balls, combs, and other items made of ivory imported from East Africa. Yet while towns like Ivoryton and Deep River, Connecticut, thrived, the African ivory trade left in its wake massive human exploitation and ecological devastation. At the same time, dynamic East African engagement with capitalism and imperialism took place within these trade histories.

Drawing from extensive archival and field research in New England, Great Britain, and Tanzania, Alexandra Kelly investigates the complex global legacies of the historical ivory trade. She not only explains the complexities of this trade but also analyzes Anglo-American narratives about Africa, questioning why elephants and ivory feature so centrally in those representations. From elephant conservation efforts to the cultural heritage industries in New England and East Africa, her study reveals the ongoing global repercussions of the ivory craze and will be of interest to anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and conservationists.