Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America by Virginia DeJohnAndersonReview by: Peter C. MancallSocial History, Vol. 31, No. 2 (May, 2006), pp. 248-250Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4287344 .

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248 Social History VOL. 31 : NO. 2

Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (2004), xi+322 (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, L2I.50/$37.50).

Historians have long known that studying attitudes towards animals can provide insight into human societies. This has been established by European historians such as Keith Thomas, Harriet Ritvo and Kathleen Kete.' Scholars of the Americas have tended to pay close attention to the often deleterious effect that the introduction of European livestock had in the western

hemisphere. This theme has been put forward most powerfully by Alfred Crosby and, in more specific contexts, by William Cronon and Elinor Melville.2 Taken together, these works show how humans have integrated animals into their economies, often with surprising consequences.

Unlike these other historians, Virginia DeJohn Anderson's wonderful book considers how domesticated livestock shaped the co-evolution of colonial and indigenous communities. She is interested here both in the practical effects of the transportation of domesticated livestock -

particularly cattle, pigs and sheep - and in the ways that American communities understood these animals and their relations with them. Taking New England and the Chesapeake as her focus, she goes beyond the 'Columbian Exchange' model. As Crosby correctly argued, the

appearance of Old World animals in the western hemisphere produced unintended environmental changes which took place because transported species succeeded so well in their new environment. Had cattle and sheep perished in the Americas, the history of the

hemisphere would look very different.

DeJohn, by contrast, is less concerned with telling an environmental story - though her book includes valuable evidence crucial for such a history - than with placing animals centre

stage in the unfolding drama of conquest and colonization. As she puts it, her book 'argues that the animals not only produced changes in the land but also in the hearts and minds and behaviour of the peoples who dealt with them' (5). Throughout the work, her argument reflects her deep knowledge both of colonial and English sources (the kinds of materials that Thomas mined so effectively in his study of the British 'sensibility') and indigenous responses and attitudes towards animals that were new to them, at least for the seventeenth-century groups who felt the first blow of conquest. Before Europeans arrived, mid-Atlantic coast natives' primary relationship with animals was of hunter to hunted, though many had domesticated dogs. But never before had they witnessed humans living in close proximity to animals, one of the defining features of the English colonial experience: close to colonists, but not always with them. As Anderson informs us time and again, the initial English practice of husbandry was to allow their animals to browse freely and fence in the crops that

they knew the livestock would consume. This practice angered natives, who found their unfenced fields invaded by hungry cows and pigs. Anderson believes that trespassing animals

played a central role in the growing tension between colonists and natives. This argument reminds us that the worst violence in eastern North America took place not when the

'K. Thomas, Man and the Natural World (Cambridge, 1986); W. Cronon, Changes in the (Oxford, 1983); H. Ritvo, The Animal Estate Land (New York, 1983); and E. Melville, A Plague (Cambridge, MA., 1987); and K. Kete, The Beast of Sheep (Cambridge, 1994). in the Boudoir (Berkeley, 1994).

2A. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange (Green- wood, CT, 1972) and Ecological Imperialism

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English first met Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples, but instead in the I670s, the period when livestock depredations (among other conflict-inducing phenomena) were much more

devastating. Among this book's many strengths is Anderson's ability to explain the cosmological

significance of animals to these different peoples. As she explains, natives had much anxiety when they first encountered Old World livestock, but they quickly found ways to incorporate them into their view of the world. She is even better at explaining the core attitudes

underlying colonial views of these animals, especially when she analyses English views of

property. The English were keen to impose a new order on the American landscape, and

an 'essential part of their strategy was the assertion of dominion over animals, a relationship that the English considered both natural and divinely sanctioned, and all but unknown in

America before their arrival' (45). The colonists' goals were ambitious, to say the least; they wanted to re-create England. That meant creating in this new environment 'the complex web

of functional and sentimental relationships that bound humans and domestic creatures

together' (o05). Much of the work focuses on cattle and, to a lesser extent, swine. This gives Anderson's

book a very different feel from works such as Cronon's or Calvin Martin's Keepers of the Game, which paid much attention to the evolution and meaning of the fur trade.3 Yet although she concentrates her energies on domesticated livestock, she is also sensitive to the fact that many of these imported animals became feral under the free-ranging conditions common in the

English settlements. When animals started to behave like, well, animals, the English had to

readjust their understanding of them, another example of the unintended consequences of colonization. Still, the English found a way to succeed, especially when they began to ship beef and pork to colonists in the West Indies by the I640s.

Anderson analyses both changes in the land and over time. Hence she pays attention not

only to the overall effects of the introduction of livestock but also to the role that these beasts

played in the so-called 'praying Indian' villages of southern New England from the early i65os to the mid-I670s. One of the most arresting images in the book is a picture of a Natick Indian cattle brand, a visual sign of some natives' conversion not only to English ideas about animal

husbandry but about property as well. Before Europeans arrived, indigenous groups staked claims to hunting territories, but never to a specific category of beast, let alone an individual

representative of a species. Yet the story of these converted natives has no happy ending; their communities were mostly destroyed in the conflict known as Metacom's or King Philip's War in the mid-i67os. Adopting English culture was no buffer against the brutality unleashed then. If livestock were, as she argues, 'agents of empire' which 'occupied land in advance of English settlers' (2II) and displaced native inhabitants, in the end more familiar forms of violence

proved even more effective. Coupled with the devastations caused by epidemics, European livestock did destabilize indigenous communities, a point that no one who reads this book will ever contest again. But colonists should not be relieved of the burden of the past: without them and the animals they held so dear, native peoples of eastern North America would have survived in much larger numbers.

Anderson's astonishing book illuminates aspects of the colonizing experience that have remained too long unexplored. While some might argue about the relative weight that

3C. Martin, Keepers of the Game (Berkeley, 1979).

Reviews May 2006 249

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250 Social History VOL. 31 : NO. 2

needs to be given to livestock among the forces that undermined indigenous societies, it is crucial - as she argues - to see that natives were not passive victims of a system imposed upon them. Whether they adopted many aspects of English society or only a few, the decision to incorporate Old World animals into their economies was a sign of the agency that they retained despite the loss of population and land. As she puts it so well, 'Indians who learned to live with livestock did so because they wished to remain Indians' (245). Natives met the colonists half way on that point, but this was ultimately not enough. As this book reveals so powerfully, the most ravenous 'creatures of empire' walked on two legs, not four.

Peter C. Mancall

University of Southern California

Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World

(2004), x + 306 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, $39.95).

The title of this book is in some ways misleading. It begins with a synthesis of recent work on the subject of plants and empire which has illuminated the botanical interests of eighteenth- century European travellers and governments. This general picture, however, serves a more

narrowly focused study of a particular issue. Why did knowledge about abortifacients possessed by slave populations of the Caribbean not travel to Europe along with other 'useful knowledge' about the many properties of plants? Schiebinger addresses this question in terms of

agnotology, Robert Proctor's call for methodological attention to the status and role of

suppressed knowledge. What we do not know, what is rejected from systems of knowledge, she insists, can tell us as much about the power relations governing these transfers as what is

included. The book includes a moving account of the effects of the slave trade and the

plantation economy on slave fertility, and a useful chapter on botanical nomenclature as a form of linguistic imperialism.

Schiebinger's agnotological agenda is highly relevant to the history of science in general, and

especially to the complexities of colonial situations. Colonies, which offered sites for the

experimental re-creation of both nature and government, yielded political problems regarding the management of knowledge-claims that were analogous to those faced by women and other

groups excluded from the production of elite knowledge in the metropolis. Schiebinger's topic of choice, the peacock flower, a Caribbean abortifacient used in European gardens only as an

ornamental, provokes reflection on the parallels between the politics of suppression and

control in colonial settings and the politics of exclusion and control in metropolitan ones.

She argues that, as arbiters of what knowledge-claims counted as useful and worthy of

transmission to Europe, European naturalists - male, of the social elite, often with government connections - administered the agnotological process, policing silences about certain uses of

plants. Their status as heroic travellers is interestingly contrasted with the character ascribed to

Caribs or slaves, and Schiebinger offers numerous cases of the colonial adventures of such

'bioprospectors' in pursuit of specimens and local knowledge-claims, considering strategies for, and difficulties of, operating in this 'biocontact zone'.

250 Social History VOL. 31 : NO. 2

needs to be given to livestock among the forces that undermined indigenous societies, it is crucial - as she argues - to see that natives were not passive victims of a system imposed upon them. Whether they adopted many aspects of English society or only a few, the decision to incorporate Old World animals into their economies was a sign of the agency that they retained despite the loss of population and land. As she puts it so well, 'Indians who learned to live with livestock did so because they wished to remain Indians' (245). Natives met the colonists half way on that point, but this was ultimately not enough. As this book reveals so powerfully, the most ravenous 'creatures of empire' walked on two legs, not four.

Peter C. Mancall

University of Southern California

Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World

(2004), x + 306 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, $39.95).

The title of this book is in some ways misleading. It begins with a synthesis of recent work on the subject of plants and empire which has illuminated the botanical interests of eighteenth- century European travellers and governments. This general picture, however, serves a more

narrowly focused study of a particular issue. Why did knowledge about abortifacients possessed by slave populations of the Caribbean not travel to Europe along with other 'useful knowledge' about the many properties of plants? Schiebinger addresses this question in terms of

agnotology, Robert Proctor's call for methodological attention to the status and role of

suppressed knowledge. What we do not know, what is rejected from systems of knowledge, she insists, can tell us as much about the power relations governing these transfers as what is

included. The book includes a moving account of the effects of the slave trade and the

plantation economy on slave fertility, and a useful chapter on botanical nomenclature as a form of linguistic imperialism.

Schiebinger's agnotological agenda is highly relevant to the history of science in general, and

especially to the complexities of colonial situations. Colonies, which offered sites for the

experimental re-creation of both nature and government, yielded political problems regarding the management of knowledge-claims that were analogous to those faced by women and other

groups excluded from the production of elite knowledge in the metropolis. Schiebinger's topic of choice, the peacock flower, a Caribbean abortifacient used in European gardens only as an

ornamental, provokes reflection on the parallels between the politics of suppression and

control in colonial settings and the politics of exclusion and control in metropolitan ones.

She argues that, as arbiters of what knowledge-claims counted as useful and worthy of

transmission to Europe, European naturalists - male, of the social elite, often with government connections - administered the agnotological process, policing silences about certain uses of

plants. Their status as heroic travellers is interestingly contrasted with the character ascribed to

Caribs or slaves, and Schiebinger offers numerous cases of the colonial adventures of such

'bioprospectors' in pursuit of specimens and local knowledge-claims, considering strategies for, and difficulties of, operating in this 'biocontact zone'.

This content downloaded from 185.44.77.28 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 21:15:09 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions