Wild by Nature: North American Animals Confront Colonization by Andrea L. Smalley (review)

Environmental history is an eclectic subfield, one that multiple eminent practitioners have characterized as a "big tent" embracing multiple sub-subfields that often blur the boundaries separating history from other arenas of scholarly study.¹ Andrea L. Smalley's Wild by Nature offers an excellent example of environmental history's sweeping purview. The book is at once an ecological history, legal history, and history of the economy—with emphasis given to these subgenres roughly in that order. In the increasingly crowded field of early American environmental history, Wild by Nature helps break new ground by shifting the historian's gaze beyond the "static landscape" to focus instead on the "animate environment" (4). To be sure, Smalley is far from the first historian to take "the animal turn" (6) in her approach to early American history. But whereas most previous scholars have focused on introduced domesticated species such as hogs and cattle, Smalley instead devotes her book to indigenous American wildlife. Although wild creatures may, at first blush, seem economically peripheral to the historical narrative of Anglo-American colonialism, Smalley persuasively argues that they are central to understanding a rift at the very heart of this imperial mission: the inherent tension between the goals of extractive colonialism (which drew on wildlife as an exploitable resource) and settler colonialism (predicated upon the eradication of wildlife to create space for agriculture and animal husbandry). Smalley's study of the English (and later American) desire to profit from wild creatures effectively highlights the economic, legal, and cultural interests at stake in this historical competition between contradictory modes of colonialism.

Wild by Nature traces the (relatively) understudied environmental history of the Anglo-American South, presenting a history that simultaneously updates and moves beyond seminal works such as Albert E. Cowdrey's This Land, This South and Timothy Silver's New Face on the Countryside.² She achieves this feat by engaging extensively with environmental studies of other regions of early America, and many of the topics she pursues (for example, the fur trade and riverine property rights) will seem familiar to readers acquainted with this broader historiography. Smalley's southern focus breathes new life into these lines of inquiry, while her close attention to the agency of wildlife allows her to introduce a novel perspective even when traversing well-trodden ground.

The book is arranged thematically, and although its six chapters are united in their analysis of the evolving legal structures of Anglo-American colonialism, each could also survive as a stand-alone study. The book opens with a discussion of early English perceptions of America's faunal abundance, followed by five chapters more narrowly focused on human interactions with individual species or classes of animals: beaver, wolves, fish (freshwater and anadromous), white-tailed deer, and bison. Each subsequent chapter moves the book progressively forward in time (from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth century), with considerable chronological overlap between adjoining chapters. The book's overall narrative arc, in turn, traces three overlapping periods of frontier colonization: an early period in which settlers sought to exploit wildlife for Atlantic markets, often relying on the labor of Indian hunters, and took advantage of the gradual extermination of wild species to expand the Anglo-American agricultural frontier; an intermediary period in which settlers supplanted Indian nations to directly exploit wildlife resources in pursuit of "independent proprietorship"; and, finally, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a new wild-animal frontier characterized by the creation of "bounded pockets of wildness" (4) regulated by the state.

Perhaps the book's greatest insights lie in its analysis of the triangular relationship between wildlife, settlers, and Native Americans. In considering the fur and hide trades, for example, Smalley pushes her analysis beyond the confines of Anglo-American settler societies, past the "wild-animal frontier" (6), to focus on the extractive economic activities of Indian hunters and traders. Here, Smalley locates the core tension within the logic of Anglo...