Book review: The Cambridge companion to horseracing

Mike Huggins, University of Cumbria, reviews the book ' The Cambridge companion to horseracing' edited by Rebecca Cassidy (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Rebecca Cassidy, professor of anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, began her academic career doing fieldwork into the anthropology of the thoroughbred racing industry, and spent much time in Newmarket, England and in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky, USA, two key racing and breeding centres, which provided much material for two subsequent well-received books. More recently she has turned her research attention to sports gambling. So she was well-placed to edit this fascinating collection of essays, which is not only very-competitively priced for a predominantly academic book, but also extremely good value for money.

As she points out in her introduction, representing racing is a ‘fraught and complex endeavour’ (p. 1), and this certainly makes it a challenging task to deal with competently. Racing has an occasionally problematic relationship with betting, crime and dishonesty, experienced at an early internationalisation and commercialisation of breeding and racing, had a long tradition of regal, elitist and conservative influence (yet also far more cross-class involvement than has often been recognised), and finds significant tensions between equine heroism and animal welfare. Cassidy succeeds very well indeed in this ambitious collection, which provides a wide variety of different perspectives not only on racing history but also on the present and possible futures of horseracing. For an academic book to be praised by a reviewer in the UK's flagship racing newspaper as having succeeded ‘admirably’ and having impressive ‘breadth of content’ (Racing Post, June 16, 2013) is a rare accolade.