Eleanor Choo
Status/discipline:
PhD, history
Contact Details:
ec789@exeter.ac.uk
Eleanor is an environmental historian with an interest in commodities of empire in the 20th century, especially in cooperative transimperial relationships, frontier studies, and common goods.
Currently, Eleanor’s PhD research, titled Turning Over New Leaves: Telegraphy and the Conservation of Gutta-Percha as Commons dives into the environmental history of submarine telegraph cables and its reliance on gutta-percha – a thermoplastic tree latex native to the Malay Peninsula and islands of Borneo, Singapore, and Sumatra. As the best waterproof insulator material of its time, gutta-percha made submarine telegraphy possible, and from 1850 to 1902, a global submarine telegraphy network enabled same-day cross-ocean/continent communications for the first time. This “Victorian Internet” however, was made possible with the sacrifice of an estimated 88 million gutta-percha trees, which were slow-growing and difficult to transplant. How did cable companies, colonial governments, and the public in both Europe and Southeast Asia respond to this environmental challenge to sustain their new-found addiction to quick communication? This research will explore this question covering the years 1901 to 1939.
Funded by the South, West, and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership (SWWDTP), this research is part of the Collaborative Doctoral Project Sustaining the Nervous System of the World: An Environmental History of Submarine Cable Telegraphy, Circa 1880-1940, aims to 1) help fill a gap in existing historiography about business-led conservation and sustainability strategies in the early to mid-20th century; 2) provide a counterpoint to the dominant existing narratives of imperial competition in the period by showing examples of cooperation in scientific research, conservation, and industry; and 3) explore the knowledge exchanges between Southeast Asia and Europe that fuelled technological innovation; and 5) link the submarine cable network to the founding of what is now called Taman Negara on the Malay Peninsula in 1939 - the first national park in Southeast Asia.
Her broader research interests also encompass joint Japanese-Anglo iron mining frontiers in the Pacific, including in the Malay Peninsula and Northwest Australia. She is the author of a book chapter, titled “A Shared Frontier: Interrelationships of Power Through Iron on the Malay Peninsula (1920-1941)” published by Pace University Press, in which she shows that by establishing themselves in Pacific-Anglo frontiers that were seen as underdeveloped (unproductive according to imperial standards), Japanese entrepreneurs employed a transferable business strategy based on a model of transimperial cooperation.