Introduction

The Focus section begins with Catherine Mas’s essay, which relocates the history of American primatology to newly independent Cuba by exploring how the region’s plantation society shaped sugar heiress Rosalía Abreu’s efforts to breed chimpanzees at the turn of the century. Tara Suri turns to late colonial and early postcolonial India’s trade in rhesus monkeys, outlining the stratified political economy that facilitated the entry of monkeys into Western laboratories while keeping “lower”-caste, “tribal,” and Muslim workers out. Examining the French Empire, Marion Thomas considers the racialized circulation of labor and animals between Pasteur Institutes in Guinea and France and its effect on bacteriological politics. Brigid Prial then excavates the speculative logic of collecting at work in US efforts to secure access to postcolonial Zaire’s bonobo population in the 1970s. The final essay, by Shadrach Kerwillain and Gregg Mitman, offers an historical and ethnographic look into Vilab II, a chimpanzee colony established in Liberia by the New York Blood Center in 1974. As it attends to the research facility’s extractive economy of care, the essay simultaneously examines the interspecies alliances that have brought Liberian workers and primates into complex relation.