Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (review)

Donna Landry has done what Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), a French zoologist and paleontologist, declared he could do: "Tell me the horse of a population. I'll tell you about its customs and institutions." Between 1650 and 1750, more than two hundred horses of Eastern origin—Arabians, North African Barbs, and Turkoman or Turanian horses from Central Asia—were imported to England and crossbred to indigenous breeds. With these animals came Eastern ideas about the horse-human relationship that were quite at odds with prevailing British beliefs. In five essays, Landry analyzes the verbal and visual record in order to bring to light the impacts these exotic creatures and ideas had on English culture during the early modern period.

Narratives that include horses as agents of cultural change remain rare. In most scholarship that includes horses, they, like other nonhuman animals, are studied as modes of transport or sport, as receptacles of symbolic meaning, or as they are exploited or abused. This view is at odds with the lived experience of those who interact with actual horses. In reaching beyond these conventional academic approaches, Landry poses a question that horse people will find entirely sensible: "Might not horses have had some effects on human culture as well as the other way around?" (14).

With this question in mind, Landry deftly intertwines the importation of Eastern horses and Eastern concepts with British social structures. These Eastern horses were characterized as finer and tougher than British horses of the time. They also were recognized as loyal, intelligent, sensitive, and even as "peculiarly rational" (16) and "chivalrous" (120) companions in the stories that travelled from the East with them. As such, they need not be, indeed could not be, dealt with in the old way, and new styles of training, riding, and keeping were needed to accommodate their particular ways of being.

In the first two chapters, Landry argues that the new equestrian cultures of sporting, hunting, and racing fostered a new style of riding, "free forward movement" (3), that reflected English cultural values. Drastically breaking with the precise and rigidly controlled tradition of the dressage school that was in fashion among the courts and with the gentry across greater Europe and the British Isles, this freer style of riding involved trusting the horse at speed and on a loose rein. As a "fully embodied ideology" (4), Landry argues, the "free forward movement" and the particular style of riding that went with it also referenced a loosening of control in a broader political sense and served as a potent metaphor for liberal political values, where it both reflected and fostered England's imperial ambitions and growing mercantile and leisure classes.

Histories often tell of horses as a kind, but rarely outside of equestrian circles do we hear of "this horse." In chapter 3, Landry tracks the manner of acquisition—through war, trade, and diplomatic gifting—of three named Eastern sires with English endeavours, juxtaposing the growing importance of breeding and pedigree in horses and humans to English nationalism. Chapter 4 continues the theme of individual horses by providing a "cultural biography" (108) of the Bloody Shouldered Arabian, a horse whose story reflects his value as a foreign commodity and also recognizes his individual character.

In eighteenth-century discourse, Landry posits, both art and text presented horses as sentient and rational, and "humans and horses became increasingly interchangeable" (126). Chapter 6 addresses how the Eastern tradition of lenient, kind ways of interacting with horses as family members and partners, arguably necessitated by the intelligent sensitivity of the Eastern horses, led to more harmonious relationships with these animals in England. These beliefs also provided a springboard for political critique of the very institutions that brought the horses to British soil. Here, for example, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver, "saturated with Houyhnhnm lore, turns the world upside down in a radical way, and in doing so reveals how animals, servants, colonial subject...