Since around the turn of the new millennium, an explosion of science, archaeology and historical research have come together to establish the centrality of the steppe in world history: the place whence hail both Indo-Europeans and the wheel, a region that spawned empire after empire, from the Xiongnu to the Mongols. That “the region lying between east and west … was the axis on which the globe spun” (as Peter Frankopan put it in The Silk Roads: A New History of the World a decade ago) no longer seems a contentious statement.
But making head or tail of the muddle of the many ethnicities, peoples, languages and polities can be difficult. In his new book Raiders, Rulers, and Traders, David Chaffetz provides a historical throughline to make sense of it all. Unlike most other approaches to the subject, Chaffetz explains that geography, or at least not geography alone, was not destiny: the key was, quite literally, “horse power”.
The “Silk Road” should really be called the “Horse Road”.
Chaffetz is convincing. Although this ground has been gone over before (albeit not all in one place), he excels in connecting the dots. It was of course the geography—or rather the ecology—of the steppe that allowed horses to thrive; indeed, land that was good for agriculture was, on the whole, not good for horses (different minerals, for one thing), so the sedentary societies could never maintain sufficient stock of suitable horses themselves and needed to secure an ongoing supply from their civilizational competitors.
Life on the steppe meant both that horses were always in shape for war and that essentially the entire population (even women) could be mobilized: there was hardly a distinction between the general population and the military. Steppe societies could therefore muster huge armies at almost a moment’s notice. Once steppe leaders settled down to rule sedentary empires, the feedback loop between everyday reliance on the horse and military readiness withered, leaving them vulnerable to the next wave of raiders and invaders. This cycle, says Chaffetz, was broken only by the Qing Dynasty (also of steppe origin), when the Qianlong Emperor managed to finally integrate the steppe peoples into the empire.
Much follows from this. Horses were both a source of wealth, and a driver of trade. The “Silk Road”, he says, should really be called the “Horse Road”, since it was underpinned by Chinese demand for horses. The Portuguese may have gone to India for spices, but what made Goa rich was its control of the horse trade. The need for horses could bleed a kingdom dry. Most notably, perhaps, horses were one of the best vehicles for social mobility:
In the 1570s, a young Jurchen named Nurhaci helped out his father and grandfather on their horse-trading expeditions to China, where, in reward for bringing the finest horses, they received honorary Chinese titles.
Nurhaci, patriarch of the line that became the Qing dynasty, was hardly the only horse trainer, trader or warrior whose expertise was the step from which to launch a grab for the top job.
Horses were “a strategic asset, as consequential in its day as petroleum was to the twentieth century”, and like petroleum, horses were transportable. If kingdoms and empires outside the steppe could secure a supply for long enough, they—the Mughals, Sikhs, Qing—could also project power over long distances.
Chaffetz is as much at home in art and poetry as he is in history.
Chaffetz runs through the biology and ecology, the development of the symbiotic (and social) relationship between humans and horses, and the techniques and technology of riding. He notes that horse-drawn chariots came before riding, at least in warfare:
One might have expected that a practice involving more hardware would follow one that uses less, and that steppe peoples would have ridden their horses into war before the invention of the chariot. Yet up until the first millennium BCE, they did not fight on horseback.
The reasons for “putting the cart before the horse” are both technological (the development of “tack”: various bits and pieces needed to control the horse) and biological (horses still too small to support a mounted warrior could still pull a chariot).
But Chaffetz is as much at home in art and poetry as he is in history. Horses and horsemanship have inspired epics and masterpieces in ink, paint and ceramics. Greek, Chinese, Persian, Mongol, Turkish and Sanskrit words are deployed and explained, as are the horse-related words from the steppe that have found their way into many of the surrounding languages.
This is a beautiful book, clear and engagingly-written. Each point along the way is signposted with a judiciously-selected example or anecdote. Chaffetz delights in terms such as “tack”, “sorrel”, “piebald”, “hand”—thankfully all explained for those of us who have forgotten exactly what they mean—a predilection which, along with the many references to classic writers, myths and stories, results in prose with an old-fashioned comfort to it.
Although it now seems almost de rigueur for histories to seek contemporary relevance in their subject, Chaffetz has refrained from adding “and the emergence of the modern world” or similar wording to the title. By the 20th century, indeed,
the age of horse power itself had ended, and petroleum, not grasslands, became the strategic resource that both enabled empires and was indispensable to their defense … The horse trade had united the peoples of Eurasia in a vast market for livestock. Herders and aristocrats from one end of Asia to the other had shared the cult of the horse. Now the flow of caravans crisscrossing the steppes ceased. Central Asia, once a wealthy emporium, became one of the most isolated and impoverished regions on earth.
Understanding may well be its own reward. And yet, history has found it hard to shake manichean distinctions, in this case between sedentary and nomad societies. This is no longer as “us vs them” or “civilization vs barbarians” as used to be, but there remains a certain oil and water character to the narratives. Every story has two sides, and in focusing on the horse, Chaffetz manages to tell both of them at once. The borders between the two were porous; influence flowed in both directions; while each had a tendency to define itself in opposition to the other, there was collaboration as well as conflict.
And nothing, he reminds us, is forever. Horses are now for the most part hobbies, reminders of the past, and yet
the children of the twentieth century struggle to imagine a transition away from petroleum, whose dominance looks to last for no more than 150 years.