Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai‘i by John Ryan Fischer (review)

john ryan fischer’s cattle colonialism is a comparative history of Californian and Hawaiian colonial conquests. At the root of this colonization, Fischer argues, were cattle. Spanish missionaries and British explorers first deposited cattle in California in 1769 and then Hawai‘i in 1793 as “tokens in the game of imperial rivalry” (4). The book traces the development of Native Americans and Native Hawaiians within the cattle industry from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. The cattle industry was central enough to Pacific Ocean trade that it caused what Fischer identifies as a transition into a capitalistic market. The book’s six concise chapters are divided into roughly two sections each: one dedicated to California and the other to Hawai‘i. Fischer relies primarily on introductory and concluding paragraphs to compare and contrast the two, a smart approach to avoid regional confusion.

Over the course of a century, Indian neophytes developed a unique cowboy or vaquero identity, whose labor was central to the Spanish mission system. The secularization of the missions after 1833 subordinated Indian vaqueros whose livelihoods were lost to the increasingly powerful rancheros. Initially left to roam free on the islands, Native Hawaiians successfully captured, processed, and sold cattle’s hide and tallow for the booming Pacific Ocean trade. Native Hawaiians developed a distinctive paniolo identity, Hawaiian for cowboy, which imported some vaquero practices. By the mid-nineteenth century, land reforms in both California and Hawai‘i resulted in the dramatic capitalization of lands. For hundreds of years, the royal family and their ruling elite had allotted land and cattle to the paniolo, but during the privatization and Americanization of Hawaiian lands the paniolo were largely excluded.

Cattle Colonialism sits within a rich field of scholarship that has emphasized the significance of domesticated animals as tools of imperialism. These works include V. D. Anderson’s Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America and Elinor Melville’s A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico. Therefore, Fischer’s argument that cattle were central to the expansion of the Spanish, British, and American empires is already an understood and accepted theory within the field. However, Fischer’s comparative focus on Hawai‘i and California is new to the historiography, which has paid less attention to the role of animals in the development of the Pacific world.

Fischer’s understanding of empire stands on the foundation of books like Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange. Fischer does, however, critique Crosby’s declensionist outlook of Indigenous populations post-European contact. Instead, Fischer emphasizes a story that highlights Indigenous adaptability, a central theme throughout the book. Fischer concludes that the “mere introduction of bovine species did not make that conquest a fait accompli” (201). Fischer argues that cattle provided Indigenous peoples a source of opportunity in labor, trade, and movement. It was human-created racism and imperialism, not cattle, that subordinated the Indigenous people of Hawai‘i and California by the late nineteenth century.

A better title for this book may have been Livestock Colonialism, however lacking in clever alliteration. The European introduction of domesticated animals alongside cattle, such as the horse, also played a central role in the colonization of Hawai‘i and California. Fischer does not fully convince his reader that cows, above all other animal and agricultural products, were “at the heart of these transformations” (220). Notably, horses appear on the pages of this book almost as often as cattle, although one could argue it was the cattle industry that employed many of these horses. Fischer emphasizes sources referring to cattle while downplaying the centrality of other agricultural and livestock products in the development of Pacific Ocean trade.

Of interest to Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association readers is Fischer’s close attention to the development of Indian vaquero and Hawaiian paniolo identities. Despite his heavy reliance on European travel...