Creatures of Empire

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Abstract
This study presents colonial American history as the story of three-way interactions among Indians, English colonists, and livestock. By situating domestic animals at the heart of the colonizing process in 17th-century New England and the Chesapeake region, the book restores contingency to a narrative too often dominated by human actors alone. Livestock were a central factor in the cultural clash between colonists and Indians as well as a driving force in expansion west. By bringing livestock across the Atlantic, colonists assumed that they provided the means to realize America's potential, a goal that Indians, lacking domestic animals, had failed to accomplish. They also assumed that Native Americans who learned to keep livestock would advance along the path toward civility and Christianity. But colonists failed to anticipate that their animals would generate friction with Indians as native peoples constantly encountered free-ranging livestock often trespassing in their cornfields. Moreover, concerned about feeding their growing populations and committed to a style of animal husbandry that required far more space than they had expected, colonists eventually saw no alternative but to displace Indians and appropriate their land. This created tensions that reached boiling point with King Philip's War and Bacon's Rebellion, and it established a pattern that would repeat time and again over the next two centuries.

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