Agricultural History Review, Volume 65 Part 1 (2017), p. 159

As an attempt at producing a syncretic history of the role of horses in human history, Peter Mitchell’s Horse nations is a credible and comprehensive effort. Attempts to produce syncretic histories rest upon the strength of their unifying themes and the depth of the secondary source material they employ. Mitchell’s theme revolves around human societies where horses provided a paradigm-shift in capability, making those societies either better able to manage hunting and gathering, or indeed, to manage aggression over their neighbours. Taken at a meta-level, this thesis has much to recommend it. Just as ‘automobility’ has fundamentally shifted not only the ability of individuals to do more and fit more into their lives but also the ability of collectivities to do the same, so too, the impact of horses on human societies can be judged to be similar, if at different speeds and with different direct impacts.

Mitchell’s book covers a wide range of societies in the ‘Old’ and ‘New Worlds’. Yet, as Mitchell asserts, the book focuses upon those ‘Horse nations’ who embraced the horse in the several-hundred-year period between when horses came into their lives and the time when they were ‘conquered’ or assimilated into mainstream New World European society. This is a time of much interest in the histories of colonization and imperialism as it represents a period when the hegemonic application of European power was not yet possible in these remote places, leading to what Richard White termed the ‘middle ground’ in his book of the same name (CUP, 1991). Here, the incoming European commercial explorers were forced to adopt local practices and understandings as they were unable to enforce European belief systems such as Christianity upon the local peoples. In the resulting mix of power and practice, horses no doubt had an empowering influence on native peoples, and, particularly in the discussion of South and North American horse nations, Mitchell explores this in some detail.

Mitchell employs the work and ideas of the newer environmental historians, including White and William Cronon, for the ideas he uses to organize his efforts. Thus, we see horses as part of the environment and, at the same time, as a technology for breaching environmental limits, such as the carrying capacity of land through expanded hunting grounds, or greater domestic mobility. The focus is on horses, which ‘transform older ways of life, creating and building new modes of existence and new ways of understanding’ (p. 3), as a disruptive technology. And, similarly, much of his focus is on the ‘New World’ after the re-introduction of horses to those continents in the period of the ‘Columbian Exchange’, which ‘involved the transport and dispersal of hundreds of species of animals, plants and microbes’ (p. 3).

When I teach ‘Horses and History’ I normally theme the various clusters of human–horse activity into technological phases, saying that the history of human–horse relations should be seen as a history of technology (in the most open sense of the word, as in technologies of organizing society, etc.) Whether figuring out how to ride what would then have been a domesticated food animal and the social consequences this innovation raised, or the invention of the stirrup, which allowed a new type of hunting (spear-based) and military activity, the technological innovations which revolve around horses also revolutionized human activity. The impact on human societies varied, but they shared the consequences of horses as enablers of new activity which increased access to food and wealth. And, of course, no one human group held an exclusive grip on these technologies for long, making, in this case, human history a matter of ebb and flow across a number of facets of equine-enabled activities.

Reliant as it is on ‘the combined resources of history, anthropology, and archaeology’ (p. 3), this collection of Horse nations is understandably somewhat varied in terms of detail and the evocation of human life enabled by the possession and use of horses. After all, if there is little archaeological record, there is little that can be said about many of the peoples in this story and their lifestyles/inter-societal relations. Mitchell nevertheless demonstrates his key point – that peoples who welcomed horses into their lives, both personally and collectively, built societies in which horses became central not only to the organization of their societies, but also to what could be done and what could be aspired to, especially in terms of improving marginal limits on society, such as nutrition, the acquisition of wealth and the arrangement of hierarchy.

In summary, this is a very useful account of our best knowledge about the impact of horses on human societies. In my teaching, I will certainly include it as a core reference volume and would highly recommend that others do so as well.