Creatures of Empire

Virginia DeJohn Anderson. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Anderson’s work is an important contribution to the field of environmental history, one which builds on previous studies by focusing on domestic animals as active agents and direct causes of ecological change. Earlier environmental histories examined how the introduction of European domestic animals into the Americas inflicted a wide variety of changes to the ecosystem. Domestic animals competed with native fauna for food, introduced new pathogens and microorganisms, and hastened the transformation of the land in general. But Anderson moves beyond those indirect changes. Her book is a study of how domestic animals directly affected the lives and actions of both colonists and Indians in colonial British North America. She reframes the story of colonial America by presenting livestock as actors alongside the other two groups.

The role that livestock played was hardly peripheral, either—in the Prologue, she states that:

            “To a remarkable extent, the reactions of Indians and colonists to problems created by livestock became a reliable indicator of the tenor of their relations with each other.”

The key phrase in that quote is “problems created by”. In Anderson’s account, the domestic animals which English colonialists introduced to North America were never completely under the control of the English settlers, nor were Indians ever able to contain the actions of animals within their own sphere of activity.

The reason for this—and probably the key point for Anderson’s entire argument—was that the conditions of settlement in British North America precluded the sort of complete and comprehensive control over domestic animals which English famers were accustomed to and routinely practiced in the mother country. English husbandry was a well-developed practice with a substantive body of tradition and literature, which was tailored to the well-developed, heavily populated, and thoroughly demarcated English landscape. Colonialists brought their assumptions about husbandry to the New World along with their animals, but the reality of establishing new English-style settlements stymied attempts to recreate old ways. There was simply too much work to be done—fields to be cleared, buildings to be erected, market infrastructure to be developed—and too little labor to be devoted to other, less essential tasks. Therefore, the careful practices of ideal husbandry, which necessitated a great deal of personal oversight and management—as well as sizeable fenced fields and barns—failed to take root.

Instead, English settlers soon took to allowing their livestock to take care of themselves—which, in practice, meant allowing them to room in the woods and fields beyond the “improved” lands on their farms.

This brought the animals directly into competition—and conflict—with the Indians who relied on the woods for hunting and fishing. Nor did rooting, loose swine respect the integrity of Indian fields, which—unlike English fields—were unfenced. English assumptions about “improvement” and the proper mode of agriculture simply could not credit Indian land use as legitimate. While Indians practiced a mode of living which was fluid and mobile, English agriculture was based on an ideal of fixed settlement—proper agriculture, in the English mind, was marked by permanent structures such as houses, barns, and outbuildings, as well as fences. Indian fields, which were farmed by women rather than by men, and without the use of beasts of burden, seemed wild, messy, and uncivilized to English observers. And while colonists were willing to concede the legitimacy of Indian agriculture—however second-rate it seemed to be—they did not recognize the use of forest land as legitimate in the slightest. Hunting and fishing were not efficient uses of “unimproved” land so Indian complaints regarding the invasion of those spaces by free-range livestock gained no traction in colonial courts, or elsewhere in the British American imagination.

The other key axis on which conflicting Indian and colonial reactions to livestock hinged on was differing conceptions of “property.” Indian notions of property were temporally limited and contingent—more specifically, Indians understood property in terms of use. Resources were only “owned” when they were used and/or needed. For example, no individual, town or tribe “owned” wild deer; but when a hunter or a group of hunters killed a deer, then they owned that deer. English notions of property, of course, were much different—based on absolute and exclusive notions of ownership which were static and non-negotiable. These conflicting conceptions would create endless conflict as Indian hunters struggled to understand, for example, why it was OK to kill a deer but not a hog which had just rooted up an entire field of maize, beans, and squash.

The English plan to set a “civilizing” example to the Indians by their own allegedly superior modes of agricultural production would founder at least partly due to their failure to control their own domestic animals. Yet eventually, they would learn that those same animals were quite effective as weapons of imperialism, as they could undermine and help destroy the capacity of Indians in their vicinity to successfully maintain their food supply. The English finally understood that while they hadn’t managed to fully control their animals, they could still use them towards the desired end—the removal and dispossession of the indigenous people.