CONFERENCE PROGRAMME FOR
“WAR HORSES OF THE WORLD”
School of Oriental and African Studies [SOAS]
Khalili Lecture Theatre, SOAS,
Thornhaugh Street, London WC1 0XG
Saturday 3 – Sunday 4 May 2014
This year we turn our attention to War Horses
of the World.
PARTICIPATION: We are concerned to cover the
widest possible range of topics, geographical regions and historical periods.
In particular, we are keen to right the balance between the 'West' and the
'Rest'. For this conference we welcome papers that include mules as well as
horses.
THEMES: The conference will be
cross-disciplinary, and our approach is critical rather than celebratory. We
are particular interested in what happens at interfaces, in areas of in-betweenness
and transition. For instance, the affective relations between fighting people
and their mounts; or what happens when horse cultures meet camel or elephant
cultures in war; or the change from chariot warfare to cavalry and mounted
archers; or horses meeting motorised armoury; or how the horse operates at the
cutting edge of colonialism, fighting the as-yet unhorsed; or where the horse
as embodiment of power meets the subaltern horse; or how 'martial horseness' is
created as socio-cultural practice in given societies.
We have invited contributions in that
spirit.
___________________ SPEAKER SCHEDULE __________________
SATURDAY 3 MAY –10.00am to 5.00pm
10.00am – Introduction and
welcome.
10.15am – Of mules and men: Challenging relationships in WW1
Faith Burden [The Donkey Sanctuary] [Presented by Jenifer Tucker and Sophie Carter]
[Link to abstract] [Download PDF of paper]
10.45am – “Bound together by very close ties of affection:” Human-Equine Bonding in Canada’s Great War
Andrew McEwen [University of Calgary]
[Link to abstract] [Download PDF of paper]
11.45am
– “In autumn our horses are well-fed and ready for action” – the Ch’ing Empire
and its Mongolian cavalry
Veronika
Veit [University of Bonn]
[Link to abstract] [Download
PDF of paper]
12.15pm – Horses as animal property in the countryside of
Anatolia during the first half of the 17th century
Onur Usta [University of Birmingham]
[Link to abstract] [Download
PDF of paper]
2.00pm – Animal power as a
factor in Ottoman military decline, 1683-1918
William G.
Clarence-Smith [SOAS, University of London]
[Link to abstract] [Download
PDF of paper]
2.30pm – “Where Gasoline Can’t Go”: Equine Patriotism and the American Red Star Animal Relief Campaign
during World War I
Janet M. Davis [University of Texas at Austin]
[Link to abstract] [Download
PDF of paper]
3.00pm – Returning the pony to village conflict: Mounted 'dacoits' in the pacification campaign in Burma, 1886-1889
Michael W. Charney [University of Tokyo and SOAS]
[Link to abstract] [Download PDF of paper]
SUNDAY 4 MAY – 10.00am to 5.00pm
10.00am – Slave Horse/War Horse: The Narragansett Pacer in
Colonial and Revolutionary Rhode Island
Charlotte Carrington, Roger Williams University
[Link to abstract] [Download
PDF of paper]
10.30am – The influence of eastern blood on
English cavalry horses during the course of the seventeenth century
Peter Edwards [University of Roehampton]
[Link to abstract] [Download
PDF of paper]
11.30am – The Politics of Reproduction: Horse Breeding and State
Studs in Prussia, circa 1750-1890
Tatsuya Mitsuda [Keio University,
Japan]
[Link to abstract] [Download PDF of paper]
12.00pm – The
story of Comanche: Horsepower, heroism and the conquest of the American West
Karen
Jones [University of Kent ]
[Link to abstract] [Download
PDF of paper]
LUNCH BREAK – VISIT TO NEARBY BRITISH MUSEUM
TO VIEW WAR-HORSE ARTEFACTS
3.00pm – Cavalry in civil
conflict: The Mounted Branch of
London’s Metropolitan Police
Ed Emery [SOAS]
[Link to abstract] [Download PDF of paper]
3.30pm – Memories of Japanese Military Horses of
World War II
Aaron
Skabelund [Brigham Young University]
[Link to abstract] [Download
PDF of paper]
4.00pm – “I see them galloping!”: War, affect
and performing horses in Matthew Lewis's Timour the Tartar
Monica
Mattfeld [University of Kent]
[Link to abstract] [Download PDF of paper]
4.30pm
– Close
______________________________________________________________
ABSTRACTS
IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER OF AUTHORS
______________________________________________________________
[Top]
Of mules and men: challenging relationships in WW1
Faith
Burden [The Donkey Sanctuary]
ABSTRACT: Together with the millions of
horses employed by Allied troops in WW1 were mules. As horse losses mounted
many mules were purchased, frequently from far away, arriving by ship to end up
in the mud-filled trenches with handlers often ill-equipped to
care for them. The introduction of British troops to mules must have been a
challenge, as mules were not widely appreciated or used in the UK. A mule is not a
horse, and to work successfully with them required a different attitude. A
less developed flight response made them hard to drive on, and
impossible cavalry mounts; a highly developed fight response made them quick
and dangerous adversaries when faced with ill treatment. It was oft stated that there
were two types of mule men; those that learnt to work considerately with them
and those that ended up in the field hospital!
Understanding of the mule and its unique attributes and
character developed and they became firm favourites with many troops who relied
upon them to carry their most precious cargo in their calm and enduring way.
The relationship between this unique equine and their handlers in WW1 will be
examined through the eyes of mule and man.
CV: Faith Burden is Head of
Research at The Donkey Sanctuary – the world’s largest charity dedicated to
working with donkeys and mules both in the UK and internationally. Faith has
published extensively on the care and welfare of donkeys and their hybrids and
oversees Donkey Sanctuary supported and funded research programmes to improve
our knowledge of all things ‘long ears’. She has a personal passion for mules with
a lifelong admiration of these unique equid hybrids and is lucky enough to
share her life with two mules that constantly provide inspiration and daily
insight in to the human-animal bond.
E-mail: [email protected]
___________________________________________________
[Top]
Slave Horse/War Horse: The Narragansett Pacer in Colonial and Revolutionary Rhode Island
Charlotte Carrington [Roger Williams University]
ABSTRACT: This paper will examine how horses and the horse trade fit within the story of warfare in seventeenth and eighteenth-century America. This paper, which is part of a wider book project on horses throughout the Atlantic World, will focus specifically on the Narragansett Pacers. Horses started to appear in New England in 1629, when Francis Higginson shipped approximately 25 mares and stallions from Leicestershire, England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. From this stock, the first horses made their way to Rhode Island less than a decade later. The Narragansett Pacer was a mixture of the Dutch, Irish, and English breeds. The Pacer was a fairly small horse, and its easy gate led to it being used both for long distance travel and racing. Furthermore, the Pacer was the first “truly” American breed of horse. The horses were raised on plantations in Rhode Island, and often cared for by slaves. In addition, the account books and letters of Brown family of Providence reveal that the Pacer was at the heart of the transatlantic slave trade. Pacers were exported to Cuba, Barbados and the West Indies. From such promising beginnings, the Pacer was extinct by the next century. The paper will examine the where the Pacer fits within the story of Colonial Wars between European Empires and the build up to the American Revolution. Rumours abound not only that George Washington rode Pacers, but also that Paul Revere did too on his famed midnight ride. Whilst considering these celebrated and revered roles, the paper will consider why and how the Pacers continued to be shipped primarily to Surinam as revolution and war brewed in America.
CV: Charlotte Carrington is an Assistant Professor of History at Roger
Williams University in Bristol, RI, USA, and she specialises in early American
History. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge (Trinity Hall)
in 2010. Her dissertation was entitled ‘Dissent and Identity in
Seventeenth-Century New England,’ and is now a book project entitled 'Vice
in the Land of Canaan: Crime and Dissent in "Puritan" New England.'
Charlotte is particularly interested in Thomas Morton, who founded the
Ma-re Mount settlement (modern-day Quincy, MA), and she has written a biography
of Morton for a book entitled Atlantic Lives: Biographies that Cross
the Ocean (Brill, 2013). Her new research project considers horses in
the Atlantic World and has the provisional title of: ‘Slave Horse:
The Narragansett Pacer in Rhode Island and the Atlantic World.’
E-mail: [email protected]
___________________________________________________
[Top]
Animal power as a factor in Ottoman
military decline, 1683-1918
William G. Clarence-Smith [SOAS, University of
London]
ABSTRACT: Historians have neglected
access to animals as a factor in Ottoman military decline. Small Hungarian
horses fell to Austria in 1699, and Crimean ones to Russia in 1783, while
Romania became independent in 1878. Small Syrian-Iraqi Arab horses were
sensitive to cold. Many large Türkmen horses were lost to Persia, although
eastern Anatolia had some. Carthorses were absent. The Ottomans gradually lost
control of Christian mule-breeders, in the Peloponnese in 1832, in Cyprus in
1878, and the in the Balkan massif from 1881 to 1913. Muslim mule-breeding was
forbidden by hadiths, and Muslims flouting these hadiths were largely under
Persian rule. Light cavalry was significant to the end of World War I. Small
horses bore mounted infantry, together with mules, large riding donkeys, and
camels. Heavy cavalry was in terminal decline, but large agile horses drew
mobile rapid-firing field artillery. Deployment of heavy guns was hampered by
reliance on water buffaloes and oxen. Mountain batteries of dismantled ‘screw
guns’, from the 1860s, relied on mules. The Ottoman baggage train failed to
standardise around the mule, and railways only mitigated the challenge. The
Ottomans faced further difficulties in providing fodder and veterinary care.
CV: William Gervase Clarence-Smith
is Professor of the Economic History of Asia and Africa at SOAS, University of
London, and chief editor of the Journal of Global History (LSE and
Cambridge University Press). He has published on the history of horses, mules,
donkeys, camels, elephants, and bovids around the world, as traded commodities,
military beasts, sporting champions, sources of symbolic power, origins of food
and raw materials, transport animals, movers of agricultural and
proto-industrial machinery, and bearers of disease. He is currently undertaking
research for a global history of mules since circa 1400.
E-mail: [email protected]
___________________________________________________
[Top]
“Where Gasoline Can’t Go”: Equine patriotism and the American
Red Star Animal Relief Campaign during World War I
Janet M. Davis [University of Texas at Austin]
ABSTRACT: In 1916, the American Humane Association launched the Red Star Animal Relief to provide food and veterinary care for millions of Allied horses called into military service during World War I. American animal welfare publications regaled readers with stories of heroic horses who successfully navigated impenetrable mud, rock, and bombed out craters: “where gasoline can’t go”. Some accounts focused on individual equine bravery; for example, a former German circus horse rescued a paralyzed French soldier by gently picking him up by his waist belt and carrying him safely to Allied lines. Collectively, these stories made an urgent plea for the continued value of the horse in a motorized world that threatened to render horsepower obsolete. Although World War I prompted a temporary rise in horse sales, overall prices dropped precipitously during the 1910s and beyond: hard-hit owners opted to slaughter excess horses instead of paying for their expensive upkeep. Overall, this paper will explore the ways in which American animal welfare groups propagandized equine military service into a patriotic call for equine rights, deploying the language of marginalized ethnic and racial groups who used their military service to validate their demands for the rights of full citizenship.
CV: Professor Davis is Associate Professor of American Studies, History, and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of The Gospel of Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America, (Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2015). She is also the author of The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top (2002), and the editor of Circus Queen and Tinker Bell: The Life of Tiny Kline (2008), by Tiny Kline. Professor Davis works regularly as a consultant for museum exhibitions and documentary films. She has received fellowships from FLAS VI in Hindi, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, and the University of Texas at Austin.
E-mail: [email protected]
___________________________________________________
[Top]
The influence of eastern blood on English cavalry horses
during the course of the seventeenth century
Peter Edwards [University of Roehampton]
ABSTRACT: In the early sixteenth century military commanders, deploying squadrons of heavily armoured men-at-arms, regarded Neapolitan coursers as the cavalry mount par excellence on account of their strength and courage. By 1600, however, changes in military tactics, which increasingly emphasized firepower at the expense of the cavalry’s role as a battering ram, made such horses obsolete. Troopers, performing the caracole, became mounted pistoleers. When, as a result of Gustavus Adolphus’s reforms in the early seventeenth century, the mounted arm once more propelled itself at pace at the enemy, its members rode into battle on lighter, quicker and more nimble horses. Many of them possessed north African or Turcoman blood, either directly (Barbs) or indirectly (Spanish ginetes). When Prince Rupert led the defeated royalists out of Bristol on 11 September 1645 he was riding on a ‘spectacular’ black Arabian. He was privileged because Arabians rarely appeared in élite stables before the Restoration. By the time that England was fighting Louis XIV’s armies at the turn of the seventeenth century, however, they had become more numerous. In England the fashion for ‘eastern’ horses for hunting, racing and general riding ensured that the country possessed adequate stocks of suitable cavalry mounts when needed.
CV: Pete Edwards is Professor of Early Modern British Social History
at the University of Roehampton and has written extensively on the
multi-functional role of horses in pre-modern society. His publications include
The Horse Trade of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge U.P.,
Cambridge: 1988/reprinted 2004); Horse and Man in Early Modern England (Hambledon-Continuum,
London: 2007) and with Dr Elspeth Graham (eds.) The Horse as Cultural Icon:
the Real and the Symbolic Horse in the Early Modern World (Brill: Leiden:
2011). He is currently co-editing with Dr Graham a collection of essays on
William Cavendish.
E-mail: [email protected]
___________________________________________________
[Top]
Cavalry
in civil conflict: The Mounted Branch
of London’s Metropolitan Police
Ed Emery [SOAS]
ABSTRACT: Horses are not a universal choice for urban policing. They were pioneered in London in the late 1700s, and subsequently the Metropolitan Mounted Branch has become as a model of practice worldwide. Under the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher mounted police were used extensively in pitched battles with trade unionists (notably the Battle of Orgreave, June 1984), to break the power of the unions. Subsequently control of the streets of London became a major issue: the Poll Tax riot (March 1990), the G20 proest 1 April 2009); the Tottenham Riots (August 2011); and the mass students’ Anti-Fees demonstration of 9 December 2010. The latter case highlighted the tensions in balancing democratic expression with control of the streets. Charging horses were used, but were used badly. This paper examines the situation on the ground in terms of civil liberties, changing social subjects, and vulnerabilities of demonstrators and police horses alike.
CV: Ed Emery organises the Hydra Donkey Conference, and the Camel Conference @ SOAS, both biennial. He is working on a PhD on Arabic and Jewish dance-song poetry of al-Andalus 1100-1350
E-mail: [email protected]
___________________________________________________
[Top]
The story of Comanche: Horsepower, heroism and the conquest
of the American West
Karen Jones [University of Kent ]
ABSTRACT: Marked by the Census Bureau’s closure of the frontier
and the symbolic end of American Indian resistance at Wounded Knee, the early
1890s marked a critical moment in the history of the American West. It also saw
the death of one of the region’s most famous horses, Comanche, who succumbed to
colic in 1891 aged 29. This project uses Comanche as a locus around which to
examine the history of ‘warhorses’ in the martial culture of the American West.
Not only does his lifespan (1862-1891) usefully coincide with the critical
years of westward conquest, but his equine biography also serves as testament
to the multiple uses of horses in the US military machine. A ‘four-legged’
soldier of the 7th Cavalry, Comanche served as a piece of organic technology
and became an equine celebrity as the only ‘living survivor’ of the Battle of
the Little Bighorn (1876). Beyond his individual story lies a broader
‘cross-species’ history of human-animal interaction that this paper seeks to
document. A transporter of people and supplies, a carrier of empire and
nationalism, and a performing animal embedded in a culture of frontier
mythmaking, Comanche speaks to an important (but overlooked) history of
‘warhorses’ in the American West.
CV: Karen Jones is senior lecturer in American and Environmental History at the University of Kent with research specialisms in Animal Studies and the American West. She is particularly interested in transnational movements of animals and cultures of nature. Her publications include Wolf Mountains: A History of Wolves Along the Great Divide, The Invention of the Park, and The American West Competing Visions. She is currently completing a monograph for the University Press of Colorado on hunting, storytelling and empire on the frontier. In 2012 Karen received a research fellowship from the Autry Museum of Western Heritage to work on Warhorses in the West.
E-mail: [email protected]
___________________________________________________
[Top]
“I see them galloping!”: War, affect and performing horses in Matthew Lewis's Timour the Tartar
Monica Mattfeld [University of Kent]
ABSTRACT: In 1811 Covent Garden had ‘the most profitable season in its history’ with the introduction of a unique theatrical extravaganza that told an oriental tale of forbidden love, epic battles and exotic kingdoms. Matthew Lewis’s Timour the Tartar was a surprising departure for the patent theatre, usually known for staging more legitimate forms of entertainment, and a departure that cemented the burgeoning cooperation between the historically antagonistic major and minor theatres. Acted by the equestrian troop from Astley’s Amphitheatre, Timour was an influential forerunner in the veritable ‘Hippo-mania’ that gripped Londoners in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and was formative not only for its direct engagement with current world affairs but also for the play’s inclusion of some remarkably talented equine thespians.
An examination of this hippodrama introduces some of the intricacies of horse-human performances on the Romantic London stage while raising questions about the representation of military horse-human relationships during the Napoleonic wars. In this paper I question how the presence of acting animals in Timour influenced the performance of martial masculinity, how the often affective relationship between rider and military charger was constructed and what was meant by the many interpretations of Timour that saw the play as a ‘most awful, but at the same time insidious attack on the reputation of BUONAPARTE’.
CV: Monica Mattfeld is an Associate Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Kent. Her teaching and research interests include eighteenth-century literature; animal studies; caricature; and illegitimate theatre. She has published on performing animals, expressions of national identity on the eighteenth-century stage, and on the equestrian embodiment of Hobbesian political theory. Monica is currently working on a book project that examines performing horses, hippodramas and empire on the Romantic London stage.
Forthcoming monographs: Hippodrama, Gender and Nation in Romantic-Period London and Performing Horse-Men: Eighteenth-Century Horsemanship and English Masculinity.
E-mail: [email protected]
___________________________________________________
[Top]
“Bound together by very close ties of affection”: Human-equine
bonding in Canada’s Great War
Andrew McEwen [University of Calgary]
ABSTRACT: The Human-Animal Bond (HAB) is a powerful coping mechanism for traumatized humans. Though difficult to quantify, the act of caring for an animal has tremendous physical and psychological benefits that help reduce anxiety in both humans and animals. The HAB is so effective that it is currently under experimentation to help combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan cope with stress and readjust to civilian society.
Though not employed in such an official capacity, the HAB was pervasive in the Great War. Horses and mules were truly ubiquitous; the Canadian Corps utilized almost 24,000 horses on the Western Front, a ratio of roughly one animal per four men. Many soldiers conveyed the immense importance of bonding with horses in the war – whether wagon drivers, officers and their mounts, or veterinary officers and their patients. They all convey a deep sense of attachment with their equine charges, as well as a sentiment that their horses helped them endure psychological trauma in the trenches. As one private remarked, his horse “took care of me” through the horrors of the front lines. This paper will ultimately demonstrate that the HAB was a key coping mechanism for Canadian soldiers in the Great War.
CV: Andrew McEwen is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Calgary. He completed his BA at Queen’s University and his Masters at the University of Waterloo. He has been published in The Canadian Army Journal, Canadian Military History, and has a chapter in a forthcoming volume on animals in history. His dissertation will focus on the Canadian Army Veterinary Corps in the First World War, and on the role of horses in Canadian society from 1896-1921.
E-mail: [email protected]
___________________________________________________
[Top]
The politics of reproduction: Horse breeding and state studs
in Prussia, circa 1750-1890
Tatsuya
Mitsuda [Keio University, Japan]
ABSTRACT: For the prosecution of war, horses
were indispensable in Europe until at least the First World War. To this end,
individual states during the nineteenth century pursued equine policies that
would not only guarantee a stable flow of high quality remounts but also strove to
create a system of studs in which breeding would be placed on an independent
footing. Despite some research that has revealed how European states invested
in these studs following the French Revolution (most notably in France where
histories into equine reproduction have flowed under the direction of Daniel
Roche), relatively little is known about the situation elsewhere in Europe.
Focusing on the militaristic state that was Prussia, this paper will show how a
state stud system emerged in response to competing models taking shape in
France and Britain. The kind of interests which informed decisions about the
types of horses selected as well as the aesthetics and science that played a
role in defining what constituted ‘quality’ will be some of the central
questions posed. Ultimately, the paper shows how competing military,
agricultural and industrial interests created tensions in demand for lighter
breeds on the one hand and heavier breeds on the other.
CV: Tatsuya Mitsuda is Assistant
Professor at Keio University, Japan. He was educated at Keio, Bonn, and
Cambridge Universities. His research interests broadly cover the social and
cultural history of food and animals in Europe and Japan. He received his
Cambridge PhD in 2007, bearing the title: “The Horse in European History, circa
1550-1900”.
E-mail: [email protected]
___________________________________________________
[Top]
Memories of Japanese military horses of World War II
Aaron Skabelund [Brigham Young University]
ABSTRACT: During the Asia-Pacific War, the
Imperial Japanese Army commandeered an estimated half million horses for
military service. Like other subaltern beings—both human and non-human—far from
the levers of geopolitical and biopolitical power, horses were subjected to and
actively participated in total war. This paper, while providing an overview of
the roles these horses performed, examines how they have been remembered by
focusing on three of the main equine-producing regions on the northern island
of Hokkaido: Hidaka, Tokachi and Kushiro. A growing interest in the war
combined with the efforts of former military and civilian horsemen from the
late 1980s onward led to a proliferation of war horse narratives in various
cultural forms—newspaper and magazine articles, television specials, memoirs
and book chapters, a grade-school textbook story, and monuments constructed
throughout Japan. Actual horses too played a role in the construction of
memories, although they could not ‘speak’ for themselves and though “equine
memories” have largely been co-opted to fit the agendas of human narrators. In
short, this paper analyzes war as more than a human experience and contemplates
the “biopolitics” of remembrance.
CV:
EDUCATION
2004 Ph.D.,
East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University
PUBLICATIONS
2011 Empire of Dogs:
Canines, Japan, and the Making of the Modern Imperial World, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).
2011 “‘By Running…/By
Fighting…/By Dying…’: Remembering, Glorifying, and Forgetting Japanese Olympian
War Dead,” Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics 14, no.
4 (May 2011): 504-511.
Forthcoming
“Dogs at War: Military Dogs in Film,” in Cinematic
Canines: Dogs and Their Work in Narrative Film, ed. Adrienne L. McLean (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, under contract and submitted).
E-mail:
[email protected]
___________________________________________________
[Top]
Horses as animal
property in the countryside of Anatolia
during the
first half of the 17th century
Onur
Usta [University of Birmingham]
ABSTRACT: This paper
is aimed to demonstrate the economic value and position of horses in property
relations between individuals in rural areas in the light of the documents
provided by the Ottoman court records (kadi sijills) based on Urfa,
Gaziantep, and Ankara circa 1620s and 1630s. It seeks to explain how local
villagers and nomads assessed horses as good long-term investment and their
partnership with each other in the purchase of horses. In this context, horses
appear as a commercial property that changed hands frequently. In some
instances, the most generous demand for horses might have come from the Ottoman
Palace. Either for sale or rent, the requesting of horses for campaign use and
general transport needs formed an important dimension of the local economy. Its
impact on the economic growth of particular regions will be examined based on
the data recorded in sales and long-term rental contracts.
CV: Onur Usta is a PhD researcher at the
Department of the Centre of Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies in the School
of History and Cultures at University of Birmingham. He studies the social and
economic history of nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes in Anatolia and their
relation with the Ottoman State during the 16th and 17th centuries. He is currently preparing a dissertation
on the pastoral economies in Anatolia from a regional perspective during the
first half of the 17th century.
Publications:
With Dr.
Oktay Özel, “Sedentarization of Turcomans in 16th century Cappadocia, Kayseri, 1484-1584”, in Between Religion and
Language…ed. Evangelia
Balta and Mehmet Ölmez (Istanbul: Eren Yayıncılık, 2011)
“Celaliğin Türkmen Cephesi… (Turcoman Dimension of the Celaliism: Türkmen
Voyvodası and the Turcomans in seventeenth-century Anatolian countryside),” Kebikeç (33)-2012.
E-mail: [email protected]
_____________________________________
[Top]
In autumn our horses are well-fed and ready for action – the Ch’ing Empire and its Mongolian cavalry
Veronika Veit [University of Bonn]
ABSTRACT: In defining the role of his erstwhile Mongolian allies –
later subjects – the K’ang-hsi Emperor used the following words: “Of old, the
Ch’in dynasty heaped up earth and stones and erected the Great Wall. Our
dynasty has extended its mercies to the Khalkha and set them to guard the
northern territories. They will be even stronger and firmer than the Great
Wall.” It was horses that played the major part, ever since the nomadic
steppe-peoples and sedentary China started their sometimes militant, sometimes
peaceful interaction. To the Central-Asian Turks, Mongols, Tungus they lent
speed and mobility, to the Chinese they constituted a necessity on their part
to maintain an efficient cavalry. The last imperial house to rule China, the
Manchurian Ch’ing, were themselves of Central-Asian origin. Well-versed,
therefore, in the traditional steppe art of warfare – ruling from horseback –
they made use of the Mongols as their
allies, without whose supply of horses, of horse-lore or auxiliary cavalry
troops the Manchus would neither have succeeded in conquering China nor would
they have succeeded in maintaining their rule over that territory for nearly
two hundred years. Nevertheless it also came to pass during the Ch’ing period,
that this successful last Central-Asian “Rule from Horseback“ should reach its
end, superseded by new ways of warfare. The superiority of the horse had become
useless: L’ancien homme à cheval était à pied.
CV: Veronika
Veit is Professor of Central Asian Studies at the Rheinische
Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn (now retired). She is co-editor of Zentralasiatische
Studien (International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, Halle –
formerly Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden), and of Aetas Manjurica (in commission
Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden). She has published on Mongolian History, Literature
and Culture (13th to 20th century) and on the History of the Manchurian Ch'ing
Dynasty (1644-1911) - with special focus on steppe politics and culture, and on
the interaction of the steppe-peoples with China, from the times of the
Hsiung-nu to the Mongols in present times. Professor Veit is Professor hon.
causa of the University of Inner Mongolia, Hohhot (PR of China), and Holder
of the Order "Altan Ghadasun" (Golden Polarstar) of the Mongolian
Republic.
E-mail: [email protected]
______________________________________________________________
REGISTRATION:
The cost of registration is £25 per
person, and £10 for students and unwaged.
[If for any reason you cannot afford to
pay, please tell us.]
Admission for SOAS staff and students is
free, but pre-registration is required.
Registration for presenters of papers is
free.
William Gervase
Clarence-Smith [Conference chair]
Ed Emery [Conference
organiser]
All conference enquiries to: [email protected]
______________________________________________________________
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Last updated: 12 August 2017