Creatures of Empire elucidates livestock's role in the colonization of the Chesapeake and New England in the seventeenth century. Through close examination of these two English outposts in the Atlantic World, the book expands on notions first sketched out in the 1980s by environmental historians Alfred Crosby and William Cronon as well as historical geographer Terry Jordan. While those scholars pointed to the significance of domestic animals in ecological transformations, Creatures of Empire focuses on exactly how livestock proved crucial to colonial conquest. Domestic animals inadvertently thrust English settlers into ever-closer contact with native peoples and became instruments of colonization.
With taut and lively prose, the monograph first examines how Indians and English settlers imagined their relationships with animals in general and livestock in particular. Natives struggled to understand that animals could be property. Under pressure, however, they tried integrating livestock into their daily lives as a new sort of game animal. In turn, the English not only imagined livestock as property but also envisioned human dominion over beasts of all sorts. Anderson carefully situates her analysis of Indian attitudes in ethnohistorical methods. To describe the colonists’ outlook on animals, she turns to diffuse traditions in English animal folklore of the period and Christian beliefs held by English men and women.
That English settlers sought to remake the New World into something resembling England through that dominion proved crucial. The book's next section examines how English livestock worked hand in hand with English settlers in the colonization process. In fact, settlers believed that by replicating the “functional and sentimental relationships” shared by the English and their animals in a new environment, they could replicate their home civilization (105).
Creatures of Empire simultaneously notes the transformation of the relationships shared by English colonists with their livestock in colonial contexts. On the widely separated farms of the Chesapeake, those relationships were not transferred wholesale. Free-range husbandry replaced a landscape of carefully fenced pastures, and many domestic animals became semiferal. In New England, transformations in English-animal relationships were less apparent. Nonetheless, communities there pooled their meager resources, hiring herd keepers in seasons when other work proved more pressing. New Englanders, settling together rather than in separate farming operations, created rules and laws that simultaneously regulated settlements and animal husbandry as both human and livestock populations increased over the decades. In describing both case studies, Anderson turns not only to husbandry manuals from England, but also the letters, journals, and legal documents produced by New World settlers.
In its final two chapters, Creatures of Empire turns to the ways in which livestock figured in Indian-white relations. Through the 1650s, natives attempted to tolerate English livestock in the Chesapeake and in New England. Colonists’ animals—especially pigs—often destroyed the carefully tended fields of Indian women. Semiferal livestock sometimes upset ecological balances and threatened game populations upon which Indians had long depended. But forced to deal with the incursion of these new animals, natives worked for compromise rather than conflict. For their part, English settlers reacted to livestock-spawned difficulties with Indian neighbors by pursuing a wide range of options—making legal claims, offering financial restitution, and, periodically, resorting to violence. But for the first part of the century, colonists—like Indians—generally preferred “peaceful solutions over confrontation” (199).
By the 1660s, mostly peaceful relations devolved into armed conflict. Livestock continued to figure prominently in this development. Domestic animals became a powerful tool for displacing native peoples. As a wide-ranging extension of English civility, livestock spatially challenged boundaries between competing forms of land use. They also fostered ecological change that undermined Indian lifestyles. Antagonized, natives responded by killing colonial livestock whenever threatened. In fact, frustrations over animal trespass fed into open conflict between settlers and Indians in both the Chesapeake and New England in 1675. Despite Indian attempts to accommodate English livestock, English settlers ultimately proved unable to accommodate Indian frustrations sparked by domestic animals. Here Anderson mines already excavated sources for fresh insights on the centrality of livestock in these conflicts.
While few works focus so tightly—or so usefully—on livestock in the colonial experience in the English Atlantic, the book's claim that domestic animals “seldom figure at all in the narrative of colonization” seems slightly overstated (1). Furthermore, differences between native peoples in the Chesapeake and New England sometimes fade away in the book's efforts to understand livestock's role in Indian-white relations in both locations. Yet neither flaw proves fatal. As a refreshing addition to literatures on the ecological transformations that were part and parcel of European expansion, Creatures of Empire sheds new light on a little-understood facet of English colonization in the Atlantic World. It will be a prized reference for scholars of early America, the environment, colonialism, and the English Atlantic for years to come.
