In Clay McShane and Joel Tarr’s 2007 monograph The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century,[1] the authors explore the role that horses played in Eastern and Southern American cities. Though they acknowledge the uniqueness of horses, whose domestic and social nature made them fit for a variety of purposes, they claim that the nineteenth century primarily viewed horses as a mechanized and economic tool for city life. Meant as an overview to show the crucial position that horsepower played in city life, McShane and Tarr demonstrate how, over the course of the this period, the presence of horses dominated cities and from breeding until body disposal, were vital to the American economy.
As an environmental history, this book works particularly well. It definitely shows how interactions, accommodations and negotiations with an animal shaped city life rather than like previous histories, allowing readers to assume that horses were merely passive. As non-human actors, the readers see that horses and mules frequently determine how much they will work, what they will do, and how they were active consumers of human goods and services. They also show that how disease, when of the equine variety, can massively disrupt economic markets. They also demonstrate how non-living agents, like climate, impact what kind of work can be done and what sort of tools will thrive or fail in that environment. However, as an environmental history it is not particularly analytical and in many ways the thesis is very obvious-natural actors like horses are important to human history.
More interesting are McShane and Tarr’s claims that their text is a history of technology. In many ways they succeed. They show how beginning with breeding, many horses are created in artificial hybrids, albeit with a poor understanding of genetics, to be from birth the strongest and most aesthetically pleasing possible. They also show that the production of horses became a major export for the United States, like any other industrial good. They illustrate how fueling, maintenance, and storage of horses (nutrition, health and stabling) were a significant investment for owners who in turn expected to be compensated with output. Likewise, the prevalence of urban horses gave thousands of jobs to city dwellers who worked as farriers, veterinarians, and producers of horse related goods like bridles and feed. They also claim that much like a metal scrap yard, even the waste and bodies parts of dead horses were picked up by enterprising individuals and sold as horsemeat and fertilizer among other things. Their discussion of how horses were used in transportation and in powering machines, leading literally to the term ‘horsepower’ also shows that horses served a technological function. In their conclusion, they even compare the prevalence of courses to cars, the major technological transport of today.
However, much of their book while well-written and extremely interesting does much to discredit their own thesis. They show horses to be very individualistic, whose work output could not be generally quantified since each was different. They also gave examples of drivers such as carters and teamsters who held beauty pageants and decked their steeds in ribbons, recognizing the ‘kindred’ nature that they shared with horses. The growth of veterinary science and the ASPCA also seem to contradict claims that horses were merely seen as machinery. Though likely nineteenth century urbanities recognized that the best way for work output was with healthy animals who were treated well, there were no similar resources for machines. Additionally, though they offer a disclaimer, they do not address the function that horses held in Western cities where smaller human populations and more open space made the role of horses in some cities vastly different than the East Coast.
Though this is an excellent book that succeeds in demonstrating the importance of horses to city life, it does have some failings. As an environmental or economic history, showing how horses directly contributed to American industry, it works extremely well. Additionally, they make several very convincing claims addressing horses as machine-like technological tools. However, based just on the evidence that they present, this seems to be a slight over simplification. Horses, while viewed as economic tools, whose strength was applied in technological ways, were never totally mechanized. This begs a series of questions. Do all non-human agents manipulated by humans fit under the category of technology? Additionally, was it necessary to attempt to categorize horses as machines for them to be convincing technological resources?
[1] McShane, Clay, and Joel A. Tarr. The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Print.
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