Ann Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America.

Swart, Sandra

Ann Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2008)

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, lames Webb, and Martin Legassick. For Greene the horses' agency lies in the "substance of their existence," "the physical power they produced, and the role of that power in shaping material and social arrangements." (xi) She is at pains to ensure humans are not granted diachronic status at the expense of relegating horses to synchronic entities. Instead, she shows how they were creatures with histories of their own, changing (and being changed) over time to suit evolving niches in human societies. Reshaping horses was, of course, a very ancient practice but was now infused with the nineteenth century's spirit of improvement. In discussing horses as organic beings, she challenges the "conventional nature-technology divide."(7) She explores ideas about the intelligence of horses, finding them "just smart enough to be a perfect worker" who can "follow directions without taking too much initiative."(22) She dissects the effect of the horse's fast-working but ineffective digestive system and the concomitant impact on their effective use by humans. The viscerality of their lives is captured in vignettes, like that of the horses suffering the great epizootic of 1872, standing in their stalls "shivering, coughing, runny-nosed, streaming-eyed, and weak."(167)

The key argument is that horses were not peripheral in the industrial economy: they defined it. To make this argument, Greene has had to defamiliarize history and depose the nostalgic notion of horses, long set up as the symbols of the pre-industrial period. Instead, Greene finds a surprising correlation between expanding industry and an increasing need for horses. A cursory review would lead one to expect an inverse relationship, as machines replaced horses and moved "horse power" to the periphery of the industrializing state. She demonstrates that sheer numbers of horses increased and that more power was derived from horses than from any other source. Thus the horse was not immediately replaced by the steam engine, and steam power actually created many new jobs for horses. Census returns showed the horse population increased 12 per cent between 1840 and 1850, and an astonishing 51 per cent in the subsequent decade. (72) Roads, canals, and ferries all increased the nation's dependence on horses. The railways needed horses in their construction and in moving passengers and freight between railheads. Yet, the move to the periphery of importance occurred nevertheless. Greene demonstrates how developments in the late nineteenth century undercut the power of horses as a technology. "Contradictions would mount between the different roles of the horse--prime mover, worker, status symbol, and sentient being--and erode the momentum of urban horse technology by the first decade of the twentieth century." (240)

Harnessing Power appears at a time when the conversation between historians over the shifting role of horses is both lively and international. In a seminal work, Peter Edwards, in Horse and Man in Early Modern England (London: Hambledon Continuum 2007), offers the best synopsis of the early English arena of the inter-species relationship that transformed the history of transportation, commerce, leisure, warfare, agriculture, art, and diplomacy. For a ground-breaking wider European perspective, see Karen Raber and Treva J. Tucker, eds., The Culture of the Horse: Status, Discipline, and Identity in the Early Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005). In North America, several publications offer recent, careful, and nuanced studies. See Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2007); and Margaret Derry, Horses in Society: A Story of Animal Breeding and Marketing Culture, 1800-1920 (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press 2006). For a history of horses in southeast Asia and southern Africa, see Greg Bankoff and Sandra Swart, Breeds of Empire: The 'Invention' of the Horse in the Philippines and Southern Africa, 1500-1950 (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press 2007). Frustratingly, however, Horses at Work offers neither a bibliography nor a literature review. This is a shortcoming, as the book needs grounding in a stimulating new literature on horses in human society, and one misses the sense of a conversation among scholars. But even listening to just Greene's voice is fascinating. The book is written in a gentle, intelligent tone buttressed by robust argument and evidence. Her points are thus made with both elegance and a lot of muscle--much like the draft horses themselves.

SANDRA SWART

Stellenbosch University