Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 2 (2005), p. 266

Title and subtitle describe its topic but do not convey the richness of this book’s argument, moving between the Chesapeake and New England, white settlers and native Americans, ideas and action, land and people across the seventeenth century. Anderson uses two insights to study the importance of livestock in the American colonies from the early days of settlement to the 1680s: Alfred Crosby’s, in Ecological imperialism, that European colonies succeeded by establishing familiar agricultural ecosystems, and William Cronon’s, in Changes in the land, that the European settlers and indigenous inhabitants of New England held very different ideas about property. Her accounts of livestock management and livestock law will interest agricultural historians but they should pay more attention to her discussions of ideas about animals and property in the different cultures of the colonies.

She presents her case in three sections. Two chapters on ‘Thinking about animals’ describe the views native Americans brought to their encounters with cows, pigs, and sheep and the settlers to their sightings of moose, deer, and skunk, and puts them in the larger context of concepts of animals, people, property, and the world. Three more on ‘Settling with animals’ tell how the Europeans imagined they would manage their stock and how they actually did it in Chesapeake and the New England colonies. A final two, ‘Contending with animals’, deal with the clashes livestock caused between Europeans andnative peoples, with emphasis on the later years when white settlers enlisted livestock to dispossess their neighbours.

In outline Anderson tells a familiar story in the history of European settler colonies: dreams founded on ignorance, destroyed by the realities of the land and theindigenous peoples, followed by settler adaptation, usually without admitting things went wrong and almost always at the expense of the indigenous peoples. The details, though, carry readers into new territory, and the book’s strength lies in a close study of the interaction between ideas and action by examining incidents, laws, and processes. She probes court cases of Algonquin encounters with cows, pigs in native American cornfields, and disputes over fence laws, among other things, to see what livestock meant to different people and how experience changed their ideas. She shows, for instance, how much the settlers saw livestock management not only as a sign of civilization but a civilizing influence. They urged their neighbours to raise cows, on the theory that this would raise their culture, and when they refused, or adopted stockraising to their culture rather than their culture to stockraising, decided the native Americans indeed had little civilization. They were dismayed when conditions in the Chesapeake and NewEngland brought a decline from stewardship of closely-managed animals to asserting legal title over loosely-ranging stock and from raising cattle to depending on less prestigious pigs. In explaining this last she not only gives full weight to differences in climate and settlement patterns between the areas and the common shortage of labour but compares the social value of the various kinds of stock – cattle, horses, sheep, goats, and pigs. Describing trespassing stock she notes not only that pigs caused the most problems (Cronon mentioned that) but that native American women, who were in charge of their families’ fields, suffered the most from these depredations.

Anderson steers between micro-history and the broad overview, recounting incidents without losing sight of the large picture, and she manages the difficult feat ofwriting an entire book on livestock as creatures of empire without making them its sole agents. This is a rich account, developing an important facet of agricultural history. It will be of particular interest to historians of European settler colonies as an example of how to attack some interesting questions and as data for a comparative study – which someone ought to do.