Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (review)

Charles Elton, one of the founders of the discipline of ecology, once noted that when an ecologist exclaims "there goes a badger," he has in mind some reflective idea of the animal's place in the community to which it belongs, just as if he had said, "there goes the vicar." What Ann Norton Greene has done in this book is say "there goes a horse" and has then shown us the horse's place in broader society. She presents nineteenth century North America not simply as a society that used horses but rather as a society of horses and humans living and working together.

Any ecologist would also point out the other ingredient in understanding an organism's place in society — be it the vicar, a badger, or a horse — is understanding its competition. In this case the horse's competition has been seen conventionally as the machine. Greene demonstrates, however, that this was not the case in the nineteenth century. It was undoubtedly the Age of Machines but it was also the Age of Manure. The average horse produced 20 to 50 pounds of manure and a gallon of urine daily. So, by the end of the nineteenth century, the 131,000 horses in New York City, for example, were producing 1,300 to 3,300 tons of manure a day or 5/12 tons per square mile. Greene's focus is on draft horses' traction power in cities like New York, and on farms and factories, in which horses were ubiquitous (a small point that might rankle, however, is the sweeping use of "America," in the title, to mean regions of the United States — the Northeast and Midwest).

The book does not locate itself in "animal studies" but rather in the nexus between energy studies and classic social history, drawing on work from environmental history and the history of science. The author shows that, in a sense, energy history is environmental history, as developments transformed the socio-physical landscape. The key to the argument is that technology does not exist in isolation but as part of the "wider community," each influencing the development of the other. Much of the focus is on the history of social choices about economic growth. Greene deftly argues that such choices were not simply rational selections by a coldly logical Homo economicus. Instead, they were vested in very emotional ideas of national pride. She contends that the deployment of horses had to fit "into a pattern of beliefs about technological change... tying energy consumption to national prosperity and progress." (9) Greene shows that the very model of American life, "the energy landscape of horse power," became a template for "American expectations about energy abundance."(82) Thus the draft horse performed not only physical labour but also "cultural work." (39) In this way, Greene delineates the replacement of horses by mechanical power as a non-linear, uneven process and teases out the complexities of change. By the end of the century, she notes, "Americans pondered the meaning of the horse" as they "sought to become self-consciously modern." (243)

Agency has not been a key feature in most historical analyses of animals. Robin Law, for example, who wrote a pioneering study of horses in West Africa, was at pains to point out that he had no particular enthusiasm for horses per se and did not treat them as subjects in their own right — Robin Law, The Horse in West African History: The Role of the Horse in the Societies of Pre-Colonial Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1980). Equally, McShane and Tarr have sculpted an excellent biography of the urban horse but their focus was not on the horse as an animal possessed of agency. Instead, they discuss the horse as a "living machine" in an urbanizing society. A similar approach is observable in Africa, in the work of Humphrey Fisher, James Webb, and Martin Legassick. For Greene the horses' agency lies in the "substance of their existence," "the physical power they...