“In The Perfection of Nature, Cooley opens a rich archive of sources that speak to topical questions around animal difference, race, colonial history, and indigenous knowledge. She delivers a carefully researched study that provides fascinating new insights into the history of breeding and human intervention, inviting us to think about human-nature relationships and the genealogy of current discussions. Highly recommended!”

Isis

"How can one breed animals to create a better nature? The Perfection of Nature offers a prodigiously rich narrative of the sixteenth-century infatuation with this deceptively simple question. In a stunningly insightful volume, Cooley offers a comprehensive overview of how farmers, breeders and natural philosophers across the Atlantic attempted to improve upon the natural world that surrounded them, with varying degrees of success and often unintended results. The Perfection of Nature is a major accomplishment that offers an inspiring, thought-provoking, and refreshingly original account of how the European encounter with the America reshaped the animal world and the way humans think both about animals and themselves. This is history of science, animal studies, environmental history and Atlantic history of the best kind."

Dániel Margócsy, University of Cambridge

"In this important contribution to the prehistory of modern race thinking, Cooley traces ideas and practices relating to the breeding of animals in early modern Italy, Spain, and pre-Spanish and Spanish America. Using archival, manuscript, and visual sources, she untangles changing understandings of inheritance, lineage, and difference as they related to the dogs, horses, camelids, and, occasionally, humans of the Old and New Worlds."

Katharine Park, Harvard University

“This is a terrific book on an important and timely topic: as humans study the reproduction of characteristics in animals and plants, how do they apply what they learn to the reproduction of characteristics in humans? Cooley’s fascinating exploration maps breeding knowledge and practices in sixteenth century Europe and the Americas onto a new discourse of race. Her travels take us across boundaries of geography and species, from Italy to Mexico, from maize to camelids, horses, and humans, in order to teach us how agriculture has informed (in)humanity.”

David Nirenberg, Institute for Advanced Study, University of Chicago