Noble brutes: how Eastern horses transformed English culture

Mike Huggins, University of Cumbria, reviews the book 'Noble brutes: how Eastern horses transformed English culture' by Donna Landry (John Hopkins University Press, 2009).

Horses were central to early modern culture, but today's relative marginalization of equine matters means that the contribution of horses to past life tends to be largely ignored. Donna Landry brings horse culture back into firm focus, arguing that the early modern period of British mercantile and proto-imperial expansion, and the growing cultural dominance of Englishness within Britain, saw a parallel growth in a new hybrid British horse culture that helped to shape national life, and may also have contributed to changing wider attitudes to animal cruelty.
The roots of this new horse culture lay in the early eighteenth century, when British adventurers, merchants, traders and diplomats visited Syria, Arabia and other middle-eastern countries, and were often filled with what Gerald MacLean has termed 'imperial envy'. They were impressed with Ottoman wealth, luxury and splendour but also with their riding, horse care, rearing and breeding, and the ways in which horses responded with loyalty and obedience to such treatment. The best pure-bred native 'Turkish' or Ottoman, or North African, Barbary or 'Barb' stallions were exotic luxury goods the British craved, and were sometimes keen to send back to Britain, by fair or illegal means. More than two hundred Oriental horses were imported into the British Isles between c.1650 and c. 1750, though some were imperial gifts or spoils of war. These horses were soon termed 'Arabians', and their Ottoman origins were rapidly written out. According to later British horseracing legend it was such Arabian stallions that, covering 'foundation mares' in Yorkshire, themselves the unacknowledged distant descendants of horses from overseas, became the founders of the quickly Anglicised 'thoroughbred' or 'blood' horse, still contesting modern flat racing. Little is known about the breeding and origins of many of these horses, but some had a particular influence, through selective breeding, on subsequent stock, Indeed, according to the most recent DNA evidence, about 95 per cent of modern thoroughbreds owe their male lines to an Arabian acquired by the British consul in Aleppo, Syria in 1704 and sent back to his merchant brother Richard Darley.
Thoroughbreds were soon appropriated as British, simultaneously beautiful and useful, extolled as having speed, endurance, agility, spirit and sensitivity. The title of the book, the almost oxymoronic 'noble brutes', reflects what became this new eighteenth-century way of looking at the best-bred horses in Britain. Previously, as Landry's first chapter shows, equestrian approaches in Great Britain were relatively brutal, and owed more to Continental models. Equestrian skills were as central to upper-class life in Britain as they were in the East, and, tacitly appropriating Eastern models, such horses were increasingly represented not as brutes needing humans to control them through the infliction of pain, but as thinking, remembering, noble creatures, whose training was increasingly through affection not punishment. Landed, 'gentlemanly' turfites, keen for racing success, stressed and recorded their horse's superior pedigree just as they did their own. Huntsmen found the new hunters more effective.
Landry takes this narrative and builds on it, to provide a complex, important and challenging perspective on the Enlightenment, exploring East-West relations and the long-debated roots of British and English national identity through a new and very different lens, re-emphasising the impact of Ottoman culture on British society at a time when transport and much work and leisure was dominated by the horse. Landry is well placed to interrogate such themes, having published inter alia on equestrian matters, riding, the countryside and hunting. The breadth of Landry's reading is certainly impressive, and, as one might expect from an professor of English Literature, she offers rich, nuanced and sensitive re-readings of discursive texts such as Swift's Gulliver's Travels, with its satirizing of the equine obsession of the 1720s, centred on his descriptions of the civilized, rational Houyhnhnm. But she is equally insightful in discussing the then new genre of the equine portrait as exploited by such painters as Sawrey Gilpin, John Wooton or George Stubbs, whose portrait of Whistlejacket is discussed at some length, though sadly illustrations in the book are quite few. She ranges widely, in analysing such topics as contradictions in equine ideology in the East...