Globalisation's early gift was the horse: How the animal shaped history

By Howard Chua-Eoan

This year has seen a heightening of the semiconductor wars between the US and China, stoking superpower tensions and raising visions of a global economy decoupled into opposing spheres.

Does history provide clues to how this might all play out?

Let me take you on a ride to revisit a millennia-old innovation that dictated the conduct of war, the shape of trade and the very concept of mobility and speed. A commodity that required expert handling, it was the basis of much political and military power — and the quest for supplies led to violent takedowns of would-be monopolies.

That would be the horse.

The animal has been part of Western imagination since Paleolithic humans painted the Lascaux caves around 20,000 years ago. But consider this: Those depictions were of wild horses, descendants of a species that had evolved and was already extinct in North America. They were swift and powerful, as terrifying as the mammoth and the rhinoceros that co-starred on the cave walls. No one knew how — or dared — to ride horses then.

The key breakthroughs — getting on horseback and using the steeds to ferry vehicles like war chariots — probably took place around the Ural mountains and Central Asia about 4,200 years ago. Harnessing the beast’s speed, the innovators migrated into other regions of Eurasia — taking equine breeding and technology with them. Cultures everywhere adapted or died. Kingdoms were lost and won for love or lack of horses. Quickly enough, everyone from the pharaohs of Egypt to Alexander the Great (and his legendary steed Bucephalus) were waging swift and cruel war on horseback. The threat of the horse-powered Egyptian cavalry is so great that only God has the power to drown it — and save the fleeing Israelites — by unparting the waters of the Red Sea.

And so, the horse became more than a horse, of course: It was a disrupter of the status quo, the cutting edge of military technology, mover and shaker of empires. It also became the animal spirit of trade. That’s because some places were more equal than others for horse-breeding. The Indian subcontinent was too hot and humid. The soil of ancient China didn’t have enough selenium to cultivate the strong-boned military steeds required to fight wars. As a consequence, those civilizations traded for the horses they needed. The Chinese offered silk in exchange — and by doing so, helped create a demand for the textile as the luxury spread further west.

In the second century BCE, when the people of the Ferghana Valley — in what is now eastern Uzbekistan — imposed a limit on how many horses the Chinese could purchase, Emperor Wudi of the Han dynasty sent armies to punish that distant region, which was ruled by descendants of Alexander the Great’s soldiers. After a couple of tries, he got the trade back to his terms.

In that way, the horse was at the basis of the luxury commerce (not just silk but spices and delicate Indian cotton fabric) that linked one end of Eurasia to the other. The British Museum has a spectacular “Silk Roads” show — which runs until Feb. 25 — that provides material evidence of this compulsion to connect across vast terrain. There are two remarkable items. The first is a replica of a glass bauble from 6th century Iran that somehow made it to the court of Japan’s Emperor Shomu, a journey of thousands of miles through deserts and mountains or perilous seas. (The original remains in an 8th century storehouse in the city of Nara). From roughly the same period, a copper alloy Buddha from the Swat Valley in what is now Pakistan found its way to a small island just outside Stockholm.

While the glass bowl in Japan and the Buddha in Sweden may be considered exotica, the historian James Belich says, the “luxury trade was a proxy for interaction” — just as it is today, for example, with the huge presence of Hermes, Gucci and other fashion houses in China.

A further explosion of horse-borne military expansion propelled the Mongols into the center of history. The riches of the vast domains of Genghis Khan and his descendants would inspire Western Europeans to sail the ocean blue on their own quest for empires.

That’s how horses finally made their way back to North America — with Spanish conquistadors who used them to defeat the Aztec and Inca empires. The Europeans tried to secure the military edge by limiting the number of mares they brought over so the indigenous peoples couldn’t steal them and breed horses to match the invader. But, just as the secrets of Chinese silk technology eventually filtered westward, Native Americans got their horses. That is reflected in the legacy of the Comanche, Arapaho and the other mighty fighters of the Plains whose might challenged the westward push of the US. Indeed, federal troops slaughtered horses to eliminate the potential of indigenous uprisings.

Horses were a globalizing force for thousands of years — for both good and ill. That’s easy to forget in our machine age, when all of human history seems to be dancing precariously on the head of a microchip. It wasn’t that long ago that horses were still crucial to the way nations functioned. In 1914, when the Great War broke out, the British Army fielded hundreds of thousands of horses in the western theater not just as cavalry mounts but to haul weapons, ammunition and supplies. Equine utility persisted in other parts of the world, at least for a while. In Manila, in the early 1960s, my ride home from second-grade classes was sometimes on a calesa — a type of horse-drawn buggy that provided cheap transport in the older parts of the Philippine capital.

We still talk of horsepower (equivalent to 735.5 watts in the metric system) but nowadays, there are no real horses attached to them. New technology can swiftly supplant the old — and often you can’t or refuse to go back. While not entirely put out to pasture, horses have become more symbolic than utilitarian, more quaint than strategic. In some cases, they’ve become luxuries (hood ornaments or thoroughbred racers). But they still retain some terrifying power. After all, the apocalypse is embodied in four fearsome figures mounted on horses. The last steed is a pale one: “And his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”