Seow, VictorLazarus, Oliver2026-07-0720262026-05-142026Lazarus, Oliver. 2026. Domesticating Empire: American Power and the Industrialization of Life. Doctoral Dissertation, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.32697966https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42744147The animal agriculture industry is the largest user of land in the world, with roughly 100 billion farmed animals occupying or consuming the resources of nearly 40 percent of the world's habitable land. Domesticating Empire asks how this came to be. Centering an often-overlooked actor, the American state, this dissertation argues that the state-led scientific management of domestic animal life was at once a central pillar of modern U.S. state formation and a globalizing force behind one of the largest drivers of environmental change on the planet. The dissertation begins with the animal disease crises of the 1870s and 1880s, when epizootics threatened one of the nation's largest industries, meatpacking, and prompted the closure of European markets to American animal products. In response, the federal government established the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) within the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1884. The BAI became the first permanent federal regulatory agency, and the first led by a scientist, empowered to seize and destroy private property in the name of national economic health. From this foundation, the USDA and the land-grant system built a research and regulatory infrastructure of unprecedented scope. This system simultaneously made possible the explosive growth of American animal agriculture and generated techniques of governance that crossed species lines, shaping federal interventions in human health, food safety, and economic regulation. Out of this infrastructure emerged a distinctly American system of animal agriculture, forged at the intersection of state power and private capital. It rested on a continental territorial base secured through settler colonialism, an unparalleled federal science–regulatory complex, the industrial logics of Chicago meatpacking, and a consumer culture that naturalized cheap meat as a democratic entitlement. While celebrated as a triumph of private enterprise, this system depended fundamentally on public science and unprecedented federal regulatory power. This work was global from its outset, oriented toward securing foreign markets for American animal products and projecting an American model of pastoral governance overseas. The dissertation traces this work from the agricultural colonization of the Philippines after 1898, where American officials sought to control landscapes and populations through the mobilization of particular forms of animal life, to Cold War technical assistance programs that disseminated American breeds, forage crops, and veterinary regimes from Iran to Brazil. In each setting, American models of animal governance became materially inscribed into landscapes, institutions, and animal bodies in ways that long outlasted the formal programs that introduced them. Drawing on archival research at the National Archives, presidential libraries, and collections in the Philippines, alongside fieldwork and interviews in the Philippines and Brazil, Domesticating Empire positions domestic animals, and the institutions and environments needed to support them, as key vectors of American power at home and abroad. The governance of animals, the dissertation argues, has been inseparable from that of humans—shaping the capacities of the modern U.S. state, underwriting projects of territorial expansion and overseas rule, and reordering land use and resource extraction on a planetary scale. This system continues to pit certain forms of domestic animal life against certain human lives, especially those marginalized or dispossessed, fueling conflicts over land and resources in an increasingly turbulent world.application/pdfenAnimal agricultureEnvironmental historyHistory of capitalismState formationU.S. empireUnited States Department of AgricultureAmerican historyScience historyHistoryThesis or Dissertation2026-07-070000-0002-1075-571X