:Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America.

Abstract

The story of European imperialism in the Americas has been analyzed politically, economically, and religiously, but ecologically only in recent decades. It turns out that the invaders were successful not so much because they were monarchists or capitalists or Catholics or Protestants but because they were transmitters, sometimes unconsciously, of certain kinds of organisms. Virginia DeJohn Anderson's book is a bushel basket of examples, along with informed analyses of the examples. Her analyses are based on careful readings of the early histories of the English colonies in New England and the Chesapeake Bay region. These were scenes in the seventeenth century of the arrival of not one set of colonists, she says, but of two, the English and their livestock. Omission of the second makes understanding of the relations between the first and the incumbent humans, the Native Americans or Indians, impossible. The English, who had lived with domesticated animals for millennia, looked upon them as an essential ingredient of and a signification of Christian civilization. Fully qualified human beings, the newcomers thought, had many kinds of servant animals: cattle, swine, horses, sheep, goats. The Indians of the North American Atlantic coast had only one, the dog. The Europeans initially thought that the Indians could learn to live like proper Englishmen if they adopted European animals, especially the slow and unhysterical cow. The Indians took a long time even to comprehend and accept the concept of domestication, much less to become herdsmen, which caused trouble from the start. Kill a deer for food and everyone is happy. Kill a cow and criminal accusations will follow.