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Fleets of Fodder: The Ecological Orchestration of Agrarian Improvement in New South Wales and the Cape of Good Hope, 1780–1830

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2017

Maura Capps
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Abstract

This article challenges the dominant historical paradigms used to analyze imperial plant and animal transfers by examining the role of fodder crops in early colonial development in New South Wales and the Cape of Good Hope. In Alfred Crosby's enduring formulation of ecological imperialism—that is, the ecological transformation of temperate colonies of settlement by European plants, animals, and pathogens—was a largely independent process. To Crosby's critics, his grand narrative fails to acknowledge the technocratic management of plant and animal transfers on the part of increasingly long-armed colonial states from the mid-nineteenth century. Yet neither approach can adequately explain the period between the decline of Britain's Atlantic empire in the 1780s and the rise of its global empire in the 1830s, a period dominated by an aggressive ethos of agrarian improvement but lacking the institutional teeth of a more evolved imperial state. Traveling fodder crops link these embryonic antipodean colonies to the luminaries of the Agricultural Revolution in Britain. The attempt to transfer fodder-centric mixed husbandry to these colonies points to an emerging coalition of imperial ambition and scientific expertise in the late eighteenth-century British Empire.

Keywords

agricultureimprovementecological imperialismSir Joseph BanksBritish Empiresettler colonialismNew South WalesCape of Good HopeAustraliaSouth Africafodderhusbandry
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 3 , July 2017 , pp. 532 - 556
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2017 

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82 For a much more in depth analysis of archival evidence of this trend, see Capps, “‘All Flesh is Grass,’” 358–75. For discussion of chronic overgrazing in early pastoral industries, see Bolton, Spoils and Spoilers, 85; Beinart, Rise of Conservation, 77–81.

83 Returns of the Colony of New South Wales (Blue Books), 1822–1857, CY 4/251–290, ML.