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Book Review
| Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. America. By Virginia DeJohn Anderson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xi + 322 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $37.50.
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| Readers interested in the broad sweep of environmental history will take their satisfaction from what is written between the lines of this book, rather than from the main narrative. The story Virginia DeJohn Anderson tells, and tells very ably, concerns the relations between Native Americans and English settlers in New England and the Chesapeake Bay region. She describes the important role disputes over domestic livestock played in the framing, and then worsening, of relations between these groups from the late sixteenth century down to the outbreak of King Philip's War in New England in 1675–1676, and parallel conflicts at the same time in Virginia. |
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The narrative rests on historical accounts detailing settler complaints about Native Americans killing or appropriating their cows and pigs, and Native American complaints that the settlers assumed that any domestic livestock they ran across was unquestionably their property. Underlying these disputes was an Enlightenment philosophical debate over the role of livestock ownership in defining the boundary between civil society and savagery, and speculation that the Native Americans would become civilized if they could be transformed into responsible herders and farmers. |
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From an environmental point of view, these debates are of less interest than the evidence that the settlers failed to keep their animals confined with the result that mushrooming populations of feral livestock, including many animals born in the bush and thus of uncertain ownership, came to dominate the woods and marshes. (A parallel story from the southwest may be found in Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico, Cambridge, 1994). These animals could have a devastating impact on the natural landscape. |
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Over time, livestock not only infiltrated places where Indians dwelled but also changed them. By grazing selectively on certain plants, domestic animals eventually altered the composition of meadows and forests, compacting the soil in areas where they congregated in significant numbers. Livestock shipped from abroad deposited the seeds of European weeds as well as grasses with their dung. Colonists who cleared woodlands to improve grazing for sheep hastened soil erosion that in turn altered stream patterns through sedimentation. Some indigenous creatures, such as wolves, squirrels, and crows, may have proliferated due to the steady diet of English livestock or grains. Others, including deer, suffered from changes in their habitat and either declined in numbers or moved away, or both (p. 185). |
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Though statements like this are tantalizing, the author does not dwell on them because the long-term effects on the environment of changing patterns of human-animal relations are not germane to her principal theme. Nevertheless, her excellent footnotes will provide good bibliographical guidance to the reader who wishes to follow these matters further. |
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In sum, this is an excellent historical study that illuminates the role of domestic animals in colonial times and provides sometimes surprising insights into the village-level tensions between English settlers and Native Americans. However, it has not been written with a view to the student of environmental history as the ultimate reader. |
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Richard W. Bulliet is professor of history at Columbia University. His book The Camel and the Wheel (Columbia, 1975) describes the impact over 5,000 years of camel domestication. His history of human-animal relations, Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers will be published in 2005 by Columbia University Press. |
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