This book explains the role of blacks in establishing cattle ranching in a range of places throughout the Americas. It demonstrates that Africans played significant creative roles in establishing production systems so fundamental to the environmental and social relations of the colonies that their consequences persist to the present. This book focuses on a sequence of cases, each concerned with a particular ranching frontier and its connections to other places. An Atlantic actor-network approach is used to contribute to the collective effort to understand more thoroughly the processes that con ... More

This book explains the role of blacks in establishing cattle ranching in a range of places throughout the Americas. It demonstrates that Africans played significant creative roles in establishing production systems so fundamental to the environmental and social relations of the colonies that their consequences persist to the present. This book focuses on a sequence of cases, each concerned with a particular ranching frontier and its connections to other places. An Atlantic actor-network approach is used to contribute to the collective effort to understand more thoroughly the processes that connected places in Africa, Europe, and America. New Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries focused on the lowlands along the Gulf of Mexico where cattle ranching first became established. The book also describes a case study of the emergence of cattle ranching in eighteenth-century Louisiana. The book examines the role of blacks in the open-range cattle herding of Barbuda, one of the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean, from the seventeenth century onward. The hybridization of materials and ideas that arrived via shifting networks and repeated infusions of ideas and materials is an ongoing process across the Atlantic and within the Americas, and actors of African, European, native, Creole, and mixed origins. Their legacy echoes down to the present, both in particular ways in specific places and in general throughout the Americas.