Here's a claim you encounter from time to time: The invention of the horse collar eliminated slavery in medieval and early modern Europe. The continent still had plenty of peonage servitude, of course; the serfs in Tsarist Russia, for example, were hardly a beacon of freedom unto the world. Still, where direct slavery persisted in the Ottoman lands and sub-Saharan Africa, and would roar back in the European possessions of the New World, something in Europe caused slavery to fade. And from the fading, there would build the abolitionist movement that would eventually turn the West against even the idea of slavery.
That something, the argument goes, was the horse collar—the technology that took the weight a horse could pull and removed it from the fragile neck, distributing it instead across the shoulders. Say, roughly speaking, that a horse without a collar could apply the mechanical force of three men but ate the equivalent of what four men would consume. Under those conditions, human slavery makes a certain economic sense, and horses are reserved for the wealthy, particularly when they go to war. The horse collar, however, changes the equation. Now a powerful draft horse, bred with large shoulder bones, can apply the pulling force of five men, while still consuming only four men's worth of food. Suddenly, slavery no longer has an economic attraction.
It's not a particularly robust argument, and the underlying data seems a little dubious. For that matter, the horse-collar-eliminated-slavery notion looks like a classic example of reductionism—a kind of kindred thought to Marxism, as though economics alone influences us, and Europe's cultural ideas, from Christian theology to Renaissance humanism to advancing liberalism, had no impact. The argument mostly attracts those who feel drawn to technological accounts of history: the story of humankind as essentially a story of invention.
Still, thinking a little about horse collars might serve another purpose, for it does remind us how much of human history is involved with horses and how recent was the era in which horses dominated our shared lives. No horses, no freedom may be a doubtful proposition, but No horses, no modern times is as sturdy as any such grand historical claim can be.
Or so, at least, suggests Ulrich Raulff in a bizarre, wonderful, infuriating, and charming new volume called Farewell to the Horse: A Cultural History. Like a small handful of peculiar rambles—from Thomas Browne's 1658 Urn Burial to Ezra Pound's 1934 ABC of Reading—Raulff's Farewell to the Horse may be a test of our bookishness and intellectual wonder. To read it is to watch a beautifully educated mind zipping across the historical and literary landscape to establish the oddest and most interesting connections, like arcs of lightning branching out in flashes.
An archivist and a former editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Raulff focuses (insofar as that verb can be applied to anything in the book) on what he calls the long 19th century: the century-plus of world dominance by the West, from the Napoleonic Wars through the First World War. This was, in one sense, the era of the greatest use of horses. By the 1890s, New York City held around 130,000 horses, producing over a thousand tons of manure and over 70 thousand gallons of urine a day. Great Britain possessed one horse for every ten people, across the nation. The horse had become the greatest engine of farm and military work, even while, through cabs and delivery wagons, horses had become the most comprehensive instrument for the unifying of urban life.
And yet, on the horizon beyond of all those Victorian horses, there were puffs of smoke from the steam-engine railroads—signs and signals of the coming end. While Farewell to the Horse has much to say about the six millennia that saw the domestication of horses and the rise of civilization, Raulff's fascination is with the decline of horses: the 19th-century peak of use a kind of last grand outbreak before the finish line. Horses today, he argues, have essentially disappeared into the sentimentality of cultural symbolism and Hollywood Westerns. Looking at riding schools, racetracks, gymkhanas, and bluegrass Kentucky farms, he wryly concludes that horses mostly survive as "a recreational item, a mode of therapy, a status symbol, and a source of pastoral support for female puberty."
And yet, even while they have faded from the modern landscape, they "enjoyed a colossal literary and iconographic career," and the impact of horses is written across the novels, paintings, and even music of the great era of modernity. It's a telling moment—sexually, literarily, and culturally—in the seduction of Emma Bovary when she notices how much better the rakish Rodolphe Boulanger sits a horse than her clumsy husband Charles. Writers from Trollope to Tolstoy were accomplished horsemen, and they did not think it strange or unusual. The horse was as ubiquitous and as symbolic as any other constant in their lives.
Just as ubiquitous and symbolic were horses at war. The Civil War was the most bloody conflict in American history, but nearly three times more horses were killed than soldiers. Looking at the First World War, Raulff notes that by the end "the life expectancy of an artillery horse on the front was ten days." Even the Second World War still relied on horses to a larger extent than we tend to remember. The archetypal image of the Nazis' technological onslaught is a scene of modern German motorized tanks opposed by old-fashioned Polish lancers on horseback. But the truth that is none of the sides at the beginning of the war were fully mechanized, and behind the Blitzkrieg were wagon trains still being hauled by horses. The Germans had nearly two million horses killed in the supposedly modern, supposedly post-horse Second World War.
Raulff imagines himself to have an organizational principle in Farewell to the Horse. He seeks first to understand the ordinary use of horses in the era, looking at everything from domestic accounts to soldiers' experiences. He then turns to the 19th century's intellectual grasp of horses, from Darwinian science to the appearance of the studbooks' closely studied genealogies. Next he examines the artistic use of horses as symbols for sex and death, pleasure and horror. And finally he takes up the question of what the domestication of horses taught us about mastery, servitude, modernization, and the human capacity for care.
But as he works through his material, making marvelous and aggravating connections across genres, these organizational categories become something akin to bins in a children's room: One bin may be intended for toys, another for art supplies, another for games, but in the speed of picking up, a lot of stuff gets thrown into the nearest container, regardless of labeling. Hundreds of topics engage Raulff's mind in Farewell to the Horse, and they come where they will. Anti-Semitism? Sure. Horses on theaters' stages? All right. The etymology of the word for horse in various European languages? But of course. The differences between English and French painting? Certainly. Photography, poetry, philosophy, economics: If the horse is as central to the triumph of modernity as Ulrich Raulff supposes, then the horse should be visible somewhere in every field of modern endeavor during the long 19th century. And as he looks, so he finds.
As well he ought. The associations made by Farewell to the Horse are more convincing in total than individually. Taking Raulff's points one by one, many have a certain arbitrary feeling about them, straining a little to reach their connection. But by the end, the sum has reached the necessary mass to become undeniable. No horse, no modernity is exactly right. The weight of modern times was yet another burden we used the horse collar to make those long-suffering beasts of burden haul forward.