Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 1 (2007), p. 146

Few animals have shaped European and North American history as much as the horse. Horses have catered to almost every human need, including labour, transportation, warfare, sport, companionship and food. Despite their importance, historians have only recently returned to grappling critically with the role horses have played in modern history. As someone who follows the history of agriculture, I have patiently waited for a grand synthesis of recent work that places horse breeding and training in the context of developments in agriculture, political economy, and warfare. Although Margaret E.Derry’s Horses in society is not that grand synthesis, it is a valuable contribution to the growing body of equine scholarship. Horses in society is especially useful in its thorough presentation of new sources, such as contemporary horse breeding journals and government records.

Derry writes that the goal of her book is to investigate the relationship of horse breeding and technological development. Although she doesn’t explicitly state which technological development she intends to investigate, one gets the idea that she is mostly interested in the unintuitive observation that the number of horses increased after the railroad was first introduced and didn’t decrease again until after the First World War. Margaret Derry then spins this observation into a detailed history of the relationship between breeding theories and practices, the international trading of horse flesh, and the development of national transportation infrastructures. The scope of Derry’s project is large, including an investigation into a number of different types of horses (sport and utility horses, for instance) as well as three major markets (US, Canada, and Great Britain – although other European countries are covered when appropriate), and she tells her story with little conceptual distance from her sources (only occasionally does she step back to put her claims into a cultural context). The large scope and the number of detailed observations makes following her argument difficult at times, although there are many reasons to persevere. I especially appreciated the chapters on the role of the horse in military engagement. This is a subject that has only been satisfactorily addressed by recent scholarship for the early modern period. Derry’s work on this topic gives historians a valuable resource on the role of remounts in the Crimean, American Civil, Boer, First, and Second World Wars as well as an important reminder of how humans have forced other beasts to bear the burden of international strife.

The book is at its strongest when describing changes in equine breeding practices as depicted in the primary sources. I found it a bit frustrating when Derry did reach to other domains, such as the history of technology and the history of biology, to place these sources in greater context. For instance, historians of technology will most likely wish that Derry had discussed in greater detail exactly which technologies were important to changing horse breeding, although it appears she is mostly interested in a broad trend of mechanization that marked the nineteenth and early twentieth century, especially as manifested in developments in transportation (read railroads) and labour (read tractors). Also, historians of biology may become a bit frustrated with her discussion of heredity and the horse, especially since her main concern is how horse breeding wasn’t influenced by genetic theories. There is very little discussion, however, of recent work that documents how horse breeding conceptually and institutionally contributed to the rise of classical genetics. Greater attention to the secondary sources in these two cases would have added sophistication to her discussions.

Although this is not the major synthetic book on horses in agriculture that I initially hoped it would be, it is an important and informative book nonetheless. If someone does eventually write the large-scale overview of the relationship between political economy and horse breeding, they will have to use Margaret Derry’s Horses in society as one of the major secondary sources.