Llamas beyond the Andes: Untold Histories of Camelids in the Modern World

More than half a century after the publication of Alfred Crosby's seminal book about the environmental dimension of the Americas’ colonization, the Columbian Exchange and its enduring echoes and ramifications continue to plague the imagination of scholarly and popular audiences. Marcia Stephenson's Llamas beyond the Andes is a much-overdue reconsideration of the centrifugal processes unleashed by the early modern ecological transformation of the world. Centered on llamas and alpacas, the largest domesticated animals of the Americas before colonization, Stephenson's book provides a more-than-human account of capitalism, development, ecological imperialism, and the enduring endeavor of colonial powers to assign value, transform spaces, and reproduce their desires through commodification, sciences, and other forms of interventions on organisms and places. In an age when most scholarship claims global reach, Llamas beyond the Andes exhibits a breadth and depth of archival research that brings the reader through distant and seemingly disconnected places such as...