Breeds of Empire: The "Invention" of the Horse in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa, 1500-1950

Breeds of Empire: The "Invention" of the Horse in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa, 1500-1950. By Greg Bankoff and Sandra Swart. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press, 2007. 272 pp., $25.00, paperback, ISBN 978-87-7694-021-8.

Breeds of Empire is a marvelous book about the horses and people of a region that many readers from western countries know little about. The subject of horses has commanded scholarly attention, but this tends to be from a Euro-North American perspective. In my assessment of British efforts to find remounts for the Boer War, for example, I spoke of Indian cavalry horses, Australian "Walers," and the Cape Horse of South Africa. Breeds of Empire showed me that I had merely seen the tip of an equine iceberg when I approached the history of the horse in Southeast...