The article traces how wild animals circulated through a dense web of colonial infrastructures — from ports and quarantine stations to steamship routes and zoological collections — and became part of the logistical and scientific apparatus that sustained the global wildlife trade. By following the trajectories of elephants, tigers, and other species across networks of capture, containment, and transport, von Felten-Kury reveals how living creatures were integrated into the economic and epistemic infrastructures of empire.

At the conceptual core of the article lies the notion of environmental infrastructure, which bridges the conventional divide between nature and culture by showing how ecological processes and technological systems co-produced colonial space. In this framework, animals appear not only as commodities or symbols, but as agents whose material presence and mobility shaped the development of imperial logistics, sanitary regimes, and environmental knowledge. Wildlife Corridors thus contributes to a growing historiography that situates the governance of empire and the management of nature within the broader machinery of entrepôt capitalism.

Lars von Felten-Kury is a PhD candidate at the Institute for European Global Studies. His doctoral project examines the transformation of the Straits of Malacca into an infrastructural transit corridor — a “natural highway” — during the peak of European imperialism, roughly from the 1870s to the 1920s. This period saw the region’s dramatic shift from a natural maritime space into one of the world’s busiest shipping channels, driven by the opening of East Asian markets, the Suez Canal, advances in steam navigation, and the growing demand for tropical resources from industrializing societies.

By analyzing the Straits as a system of intertwined environmental and technological processes, the project highlights how the infrastructures, knowledge regimes, and ecological transformations of empire laid the groundwork for today’s global logistics networks — and continue to shape contemporary debates on sustainability, vulnerability, and planetary interdependence.