Wed Sep 20 09:13:21 EDT 2006
Published by EH.NET (September 2006)
Margaret E. Derry, _Horses in Society: A Story of Animal Breeding and
Marketing Culture, 1800-1920_. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2006. xvii + 302 pp. $60 (cloth), ISBN: 0-8020-9112-1.
Review for EH.NET by Mansel G. Blackford, Department of History, Ohio
State University.
An adjunct faculty member in history at the University of Guelph and
an associated scholar with the Institute for the History and
Philosophy at the University of Toronto, Margaret Derry has written a
history of horses in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States
emphasizing intersections between ideas and practices in breeding,
markets, and usage during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. She tells her story in the full contexts of intellectual,
cultural, and social changes -- and an important story it is, for
horses were essential to military, urban, and agricultural life into
at least the 1920s. In her first chapter, Derry explains the history
of purebred breeding as a prelude to the rest of her book. Part of a
more general effort to improve farm livestock, purebred breeding in
horses, especially Thoroughbreds in Britain, vacillated between the
conflicting ideas of race constancy and possibilities for race
improvement. "Allegiance to the genealogical purity found in
pedigrees" won out, Derry notes, and this victory, she shows,
influenced much of horse breeding well into the twentieth century (p.
17). A North American demand for pedigreed horses reinforced the
tendency of the British to produce only such animals from the 1870s
and 1880s onward. Following this introductory chapter, Derry divides
her book into four additional sections.
In Part 1, Derry devotes separate chapters to the history of the
breeding and marketing of light horses, heavy horses (draft horses),
and farmers' horses. Derry stresses the importance of breeding
Thoroughbreds in Great Britain -- a cross of imported Arabian
stallions with local mares dating to the early 1600s -- in setting an
emphasis on pedigrees as recorded in stud books. In North America,
however, the breeding of light horses for saddle, driving, and
agricultural use took a somewhat different turn, at least at first --
one placing the general "type" or line of a horse above its actual
breed or pedigree. The Standardbred, the leading light horse in North
America, became known as a breed not on the basis of registered
ancestry but on the basis of its ability to maintain a certain, or
"standard," speed at the trot. Other light horse breeds developed in
similar ways, but a glut of light horses on the market, brought on in
part by technological changes, especially the development of the
automobile, temporarily caused a serious decline in breeding light
horses about the time of World War I. Such was not the case, however,
for heavy horses. Derry shows how urbanization and industrialization
greatly increased the demand for heavy horses (they were used much
less in farming, where light horses predominated). British Shires and
Clydesdales, along with French Percherons, were much in demand in
North America; and Derry shows, in particular, how American
preferences for purebreds led European horse raisers to adopt
purebred breeding practices, sometimes against their wishes -- such
was the power of the American market. General-purpose farm horses,
called "chunks," were less specialized than heavy horses and were in
decline by the 1920s, as automobiles and tractors became increasingly
common.
Part 2 examines the international horse market in three chapters,
focusing especially on the trade in horses for military purposes.
Derry begins with a chapter on the acquisition of remounts for the
British army from the Crimean War through the Boer War. There was no
doubt that the British government needed an efficient system, as
240,000 head died in the latter conflict alone. The British depended
largely on the United States and Canada for remounts, as shown in two
additional chapters. Unlike Germany and France, Britain relied on
private enterprise and markets -- not government-owned breeding
programs -- for remounts. The United States, again in contrast to
Great Britain, developed a government remount program which lasted
until 1949 and which, Derry asserts, had a major impact on America's
postwar pleasure-horse industry by stimulating the production of
Arabians.
Part 3, composed of three chapters, may be of most interest to
business and economic historians. Derry looks in detail at how
national governments sought to regulate the breeding and marketing of
horses, and how those efforts were related to changing scientific
ideas. Beginning with an important British government report in 1890,
authorities sought to define diseases and defects in horses. It was
then a relatively short step to pass legislation aimed at eliminating
them through the regulation of breeding. American states and Canadian
provinces did so through the Progressive era, as did the national
governments of Ireland and Great Britain -- often urged on by
purebred breeders and frequently opposed by framers, who viewed the
legislation as a form of market control. In a final chapter, dubbed
Part 4, Derry looks at a hodge-podge of issues to demonstrate the
pervasiveness of horses in late-nineteenth and
early-twentieth-century trans-Atlantic cultures, topics ranging from
the development of veterinary science to the painting of pictures
about horses.
Derry's account is valuable on several counts. It should be of
considerable interest to scholars. Thoroughly researched in primary
and secondary sources, it explores government-business relations in
three nations, looks at how changes in scientific ideas did (and did
not) affect agricultural practices, and examines the functioning of
international markets. Non-scholars may also find parts of this work
useful; certainly any horse owner should read this account. In
Chapter 8, for example, horse owners will learn with dismay that many
of the same diseases and defects identified in the 1890 British
report remain to plague horses today, everything from the "heaves" to
navicular hoof conditions. Written in accessible prose, this study is
graced by relevant, well-reproduced illustrations. A bibliographic
essay and endnotes lead readers to additional readings.
Mansel G. Blackford works in the field of business history at Ohio
State University. He and his wife own and ride registered paints and
quarter horses.
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