Book review: Timothy C Winegard’s The Horse clocks in at an impressive 461 closely written pages that span the history of the horse from the dawn of time to the present day. Although the book is a social history, it’s no lightweight romp through the ages. The amount of research undertaken is nothing short of staggering. The selected bibliography alone is 25 pages. Then there’s the extensive notes and footnotes.
“The domestication of the horse,” writes Winegard, “redesigned our shared history, redefined what it meant to be human and irrevocably transformed the world.” He links horses to three key areas in the history of humanity: agricultural revolution, warfare and territorial expansion, and the global transmission of disease.
“Possessing a rare combination of size, speed, strength and stamina, the horse became the pinnacle weapon of war, a political leviathan, a prime economic mover, an agricultural powerhouse, and a universal, multipurpose machine,” Winegard posits as to why he’s chosen the horse as a fulcrum on which to rest a history of humanity.
From an agricultural perspective, horses were integral to the three great agrarian revolutions: the Neolithic, the medieval and finally the third. The last is irrevocably linked to the industrial revolution and the wide-ranging effect that had on agriculture in terms of the advent of farming by machine and the introduction of hybridisation, fertilisers and pesticides, which saw smallholdings and individually owned farms become massive food-producing factories. This “explosive agrarian transformation also led to unbridled – and unprecedented, by comparison – population growth. The number of people on the planet jumped from 1.9 billion in 1920 to 7.8 billion in 2020″ and they needed to be fed. This third agricultural revolution would mark the beginning of the end for the horse as an animal of work, though obviously they have survived as beasts of pleasurable pursuits.
In terms of warfare, across the pages of The Horse, empires, epochs and dynasties rise and fall once the domestication of the horse begins on the steppes and plains of central Asia. These include various Chinese dynasties who viewed the native equines of the steppes as “heavenly horses” which they coveted, raided and incorporated into their cavalries. They include Alexander the Great’s vast Hellenistic empire – the military might of which was renowned for its dependency on horsepower – and the three broadly successive eras of the Mongol Empire under the rule of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan.
The Mongols, a nomadic people who lived and died on their horsemanship, created a much vaster world as they travelled far and wide, plundering, sacking, conquering and opening up what would eventually become trade routes across the Asian continent. Goods, information and ultimately disease reached from one side of this vast land mass to the other, and into Europe – disease that “marched forward on the backs and in the packs of Mongol warriors and traders peddling all sorts of goods … The legendary Silk Road … [became] … a lethal highway to hell, with transmission hurried by the economic and military engines of horses, donkeys, mules, camels and ships.”
By the time the Spanish crossed the oceans to the Americas on what would become known as the Colombian Exchange, horsepower was de rigueur, and they took their horses with them on their ships.
Equine attrition was unsurprisingly high on these voyages, but enough survived to aid and abet the Conquistadors on their deadly mission to crush the indigenous peoples of these new lands and would eventually form the basis of repopulating the Americas with horses.
The success of these conquests wasn’t entirely down to horsepower, however: good old disease continuing to be a major player as “foreign pathogens shuddered through virgin continents, laying waste to indigenous populations until they teetered on the precipice of extermination … Time and again, European triumphs, including those of Columbus, Cortés and Pizarro, rode the coat-tails of infection, not the other way round. Their horse-shuttled militaries simply mopped up after the stealthy invasion of disease.”
Horses would retain their currency as instruments of war well into the 20th century, with the German military especially still using them extensively in both wars in spite of their propaganda suggesting that their armies were highly mechanised. The degree of equine suffering due to catastrophic injury and starvation was horrific across both of the world wars and the fact that this is relatively recent history makes the final pages a particularly harrowing read.
The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity, by Timothy C Winegard (Text, $45), is out now.
