ANDREW SLUYTER. Black Ranching Frontiers

When I glanced at the title of this book, I assumed that Andrew Sluyter's goal was to apply the black rice thesis to cattle. That thesis, which was the subject of an AHR Exchange (February 2010), posits that rice farmers from Africa introduced technology crucial for the development of rice plantations in the Americas. So was African knowledge important in New World cattle herding? Sluyter answers yes, but he does so with great nuance. In this remarkable book, he pushes the historiography past cultural and environmental determinism, which has too often been one of its hallmarks. With a range of sources and in readable prose, he shows how people from multiple places—Africa, Europe, and the Americas—adapted existing knowledge to particular environments, learned from one another, and invented new ways of doing things, producing cattle herding cultures that differed from colony to colony. His is a “place-based” approach that requires a deep understanding of long-forgotten actors, especially Africans, and of the particularities of the ecologies in which they found themselves.

Archaeology · Economics · Economy · Ethnology · Geography · Herding · Historiography · Subject (documents) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies