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.

This article examines the Royal Navy's implementation between 1690 and 1710 of new and publicly controversial policies, grounded in quantitative technologies, to manage the multitude of English seamen. These policies and their promotion can be profitably interpreted using the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics. Naval biopolitics meant mobilizing and promoting political arithmetic in the service of the fiscal-naval state. Thus, naval biopolitics was both a new model of statecraft and a form of state publicity, that is, a genre of works that strove to influence government policy and public opinion by promoting projects that a polemicist argued the state could and should undertake to better govern its subjects. The directives, legislation, and pamphlet literature of naval biopolitics projected a fiscal-naval state capable of counting, tracking, and mobilizing the national stock of seamen onto its ships in a predictable, salubrious, and, most crucially, orderly fashion. However, English naval biopolitics endured much longer as a genre of state propaganda than as a method of mobilizing the population of seamen onto ships.

Edward Doyley led English Jamaica for most of its first decade. Sent as part of a military force intent on conquering the island, he rose to a position of command in the army as a result of his survival and seniority. Eventually he took charge of the navy and civilian affairs as well. Wielding theoretically vast powers he lacked official authorization from any central authority for much of his tenure. His correspondence requesting support for the island reveals the needs of a newly conquered colony, enumerating the requirements that an expanding imperial center must fill as England moved more decisively toward engagement in the wider world. Scholarly debates over state building that emphasize military and naval expansion as a driving force, and debates about state formation focusing on negotiations between central and local authorities, speak to the experience of early Jamaica. Doyley's circumstances place him in a position between the two ideal situations described in that literature.