This paper follows in the footsteps of the three live elephants that came to Britain in 1675, 1683 and 1720, before charting the changing cultural taxonomy of the elephant from the second half of the eighteenth century. The shifting understandings of what constituted an elephant's anatomy and character are significant to interpreting divergent and overlapping taxonomies in the long eighteenth century. In a period when different classification systems were rigorously debated, this paper proposes an understanding of the elephant that is not essentialist but rather understands 'species' as cultural, historically made and transformed.

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