Charlton Yingling and Andrew Kettle show how our cattle-centric culture is a relatively recent development. And, in this, they offer hope: for if our culture's red meat hunger hasn't always been with us, change is possible. Their truly original book illustrates the urgency of seeing cattle as agents, not objects, when exploring historical records and addressing staggering ethical problems. These are among the reasons The Once and Future Cow is a tour de force, both timely and bold, arresting and illuminating.

Carol J. Adams, author, The Sexual Politics of Meat

The Once and Future Cow makes a powerful argument that European settlement across the Atlantic, including efforts to control and profit from animal agents with consciousness, laid the foundations for the modern world's exploitative industrial beef economy that threatens the global environment. Kettler and Yingling ground big picture ethical arguments in a more specific and vital history of cattle economies of the Atlantic World, and especially the British Caribbean, where they developed alongside the institution of slavery.

John Ryan Fisher, University of Wisconsin, USA

Kettler and Yingling's incisive historical investigations open up a series of unexpected connections between the consumption of beef and dairy today - the globally ubiquitous cheeseburger, say - and colonial violence, slavery, and the introduction of cattle in the Caribbean and through the Americas as part of the settler-colonial enterprise. A remarkable feature of the book is the authors' ability to treat the cow as an intelligent animal with consciousness, agency, and even a capacity for resisting human designs. Truely a thoughtful, multispecies history of modern consumption and modernity.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago, USA