A recent edition as part of the Flows, Migrations, and Exchanges Series from the University of North Carolina Press, Cattle Colonialism offers accounts of indigenous agency to counter historical narratives of environmental determinism that permeate scholarship on the American West. With this predominantly historiographical goal, the edition provides a comparative analysis of the settlement of both California and Hawaii during the late eighteenth century. Intensifying into the nineteenth century, Cattle Colonialism offers descriptions of indigenous labour related to the rise of capitalism in the American West. To resist histories of both economic structuralism and ecological causality, Fischer offers contingent anecdotes of how Native Americans and Hawaiians applied their understandings of environments, animals, and markets to engage with colonial advances. Using travel narratives, ship logs, novels, and baptismal records, Fischer offers solid arguments to inform both academic discussions of western frontiers and public misconceptions about cowboy identity. Explicit in this study is an attempt to brand the settlement of Hawaii as part of the history of the American West.

Spanish settlers and missionaries in California believed that cattle agriculture was a pathway to introduce civilization to Native Americans. After Franciscans settled large missions in San Diego of 1769 and Alta California in 1776, they quickly established large cattle herds to tie Native American populations to the land. Similar attempts at civilizing through agriculture were applied after British Captain James Cook encountered Hawaiians in 1778. Fischer explores both Cook’s voyages and George Vancouver’s later travels throughout the Pacific through understating a Western yearning to introduce herding to Pacific Islanders. Chapter 1 often describes these initial European arrivals through historiographical discourse. Searching the works of Patricia Seed, Alfred Crosby, and Harriet Ritvo, the first chapter offers a treatise on how forms of indigenous agency can push against patterns of ecological imperialism. For example, the introduction of horses into Hawaii involved difficult issues of both ecology and culture. The Hawaiian landscape (where horses could not be used to their full spatial capacity) and Hawaiian culture (dominated by strict monarchical rules, sandalwood production, and gendered taboos that often resisted imperial husbandry) challenged attempts to civilize.

Chapter 2 focuses on landscapes. However, rather than apply ideas of actor-network theory that have made landscape an agent in current historical discourse, Fischer offers a standard argument against histories, as within Elinor Melville’s work on sheep in Mexico, that argued Spanish missions generated forms of ecological imperialism that destroyed Native American agricultural resistance. Fischer counters through portraying how Native Americans could apply their knowledge of environmental diversity in California to use domesticated herds to their advantage. In the parlance of historiography, Fischer also contends that it was probably not the introduction of domestic animals that led to increased warfare between indigenous groups in California and subsequently increased mission populations. In Chapter 3, Fischer looks at reactions to the introduction of patterns of domestic agriculture in both Hawaii and California of the early nineteenth century. Although initial California settlements often met with violence from indigenous groups who attacked animals, by the late eighteenth century, these initial assaults settled and Native American groups worked to explore spaces where they could use domestic animals to their advantage. Therein, Native Americans in California often quickly became adept at using the lasso and increasingly added beef to their diets. In Hawaii, the centuries-old use of the pig and the centrality of political power in the monarchy complicated the introduction of cattle, which slowed European attempts at interposing Western concepts of civilization. As the nineteenth century progressed, these European introductions increased, often limiting previous Hawaiian taboos against women killing animals.

In Chapter 4, Fischer presents indigenous labour into a western history of primitive accumulation. For the shift from imperial mercantilist rivalries to capitalism, transnational movement was vital for creating long distance credit networks that tied California and Hawaii into a vast globalized China trade. As Fischer contends, networks of trade, labour, and credit were built on the backs of indigenous workers. These new systems initially focused upon fur traders of the Russian, Spanish, and British Empires of the early nineteenth century. As the United States entered this trade in large numbers, commodities of the cattle trade became central to the remaining empires and private enterprises in the region. Emphasis on beef, hides, and tallow linked California to the markets of Hawaii, which created an increasingly interconnected trans-Pacific World. For Fischer, this brief trans-Pacific World became limited after the Mexican Secularization Act of 1833 deconstructed the missions through setting new standards for private property in California, and the Great Māhele of 1849 allowed foreigners to increasingly purchase Hawaiian land. Chapter five especially explores the contingent labour performed by indigenous populations that supported these trade networks. Here and in his conclusion, Fischer offers a public sphere argument regarding the importance of returning Native American cowboys to the central public memory of western settlement. California ranches, whether for missions or later private holdings, were run by vaqueros who kept many indigenous agricultural traditions. In Hawaii, vaqueros often trained Hawaiian cowboys, or paniolos, through trans-Pacific exchanges of knowledge.

Generally, Fischer employs borderland methodology to explore the contested social and cultural spaces of cattle agriculture. In western borderlands, indigenous groups could link with cattle to assert their labour as agency while using international conflicts over agricultural commodities to their advantage. Despite this critical focus on labour, it is often unclear why Fischer was unable to include the work of Andrew Sluyter on the role of African agricultural skills throughout the Spanish Empire. Similarly, problematic, although Fischer emphasizes the importance of species within his discussion of borderlands, he misses an opportunity to explore questions of animal agency. Cattle, pigs, and horses frequently made choices on these western borderlands, selecting when to resist their confines or assist specific human populations. This dismissal of animal agency is not surprising for Cattle Colonialism, as the work culminates with a spirited argument against environmental determinism.