In the nineteenth century, the colonial territories of California
and Hawai'i underwent important cultural, economic, and ecological
transformations influenced by an unlikely factor: cows. The
creation of native cattle cultures, represented by the Indian
vaquero and the Hawaiian paniolo, demonstrates that California
Indians and native Hawaiians adapted in ways that allowed them to
harvest the opportunities for wealth that these unfamiliar
biological resources presented. But the imposition of new property
laws limited these indigenous responses, and Pacific cattle
frontiers ultimately became the driving force behind Euro-American
political and commercial domination, under which native residents
lost land and sovereignty and faced demographic collapse.
Environmental historians have too often overlooked California and
Hawai'i, despite the roles the regions played in the colonial
ranching frontiers of the Pacific World. In
Cattle
Colonialism, John Ryan Fischer significantly enlarges the scope
of the American West by examining the trans-Pacific transformations
these animals wrought on local landscapes and native economies.