Wild by Nature

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Description

From the time Europeans first came to the New World until the closing of the frontier, the advantages of abundant wild animals—from beavers and wolves to fish, deer, and bison—seemed as a recurring theme in colonizing discourses. Explorers, travelers, surveyors, naturalists, and other promoters routinely advertised the richness of the American faunal environment and speculated about the ways in which animals may well be made to serve their colonial projects. In practice, then again, American animals proved far less malleable to colonizers’ designs. Their behaviors constrained an English colonial vision of a reinvented and rationalized American landscape.

In Wild by Nature, Andrea L. Smalley argues that Anglo-American authorities’ unceasing efforts to convert indigenous beasts into colonized creatures regularly produced unsettling results that threatened colonizers’ keep watch over over the land and the people. Not simply acted upon by being commodified, harvested, and exterminated, wild animals were active subjects in the colonial story, altering its outcome in unanticipated ways. These creatures became legal actors—subjects of statutes, issues in court cases, and parties to treaties—in a centuries-long colonizing process that was once reenacted on successive wild animal frontiers.

Following a trail of human–animal encounters from the seventeenth-century Chesapeake to the Civil War–era southern plains, Smalley shows how wild beasts and their human pursuers again and again transgressed the lines lawmakers drew to demarcate colonial sovereignty and keep watch over, confounding attempts to enclose both people and animals inside a legal frame. She also explores how, to possess the land, colonizers had to find new how one can contain animals without destroying the wildness that made those creatures valuable to English settler societies in the first place. Offering fresh perspectives on colonial, legal, environmental, and Native American history, Wild by Nature reenvisions the familiar stories of early The usa as animal tales.

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