World without horses

[Markdoc]

Re: World without horses

 

One major impact would be on agriculture...no plows. I'd look at the Incas for ideas...but they had beasts of burden as well....

 

No beasts of burdens doesn't mean no plows: plenty of cultures have used human/drawn plows - I have in fact seen then still in use on the Rwandan border. It does mean you need more people - a horse can do the work of about 8 people and an ox of about 14 for that kind of work. That means plowing is only practical in areas rich enough to support large populations and that farming is far more likely to be a community activity. Outside those areas, you're back to the use of planting spades.

 

The knock-on effect I can see is that your civilization is more likely to look like medieval asia or renaissance-era Mexico than medieval Europe in terms of population distribution. Many, if not most, activities will be less efficient without animals, land transport will be a bit slower and as a result, population densities will be higher, and new territory will be broken in more slowly (because a single family could not simply take off and stake a new claim easily: breaking in new land would go far easier with a larger group). I'm guessing that socially this would mean kin groups are even more socially prominent than they were in Old Europe.

 

In cities and heavily populated areas, simple technology could replace a lot of that though - windmills, water mills, aqueducts, canals - the latter two would greatly increase the ease of transport, but are very labour intensive to build an maintain, so only possible for large states.

 

What might be helpful is if we knew more about the geography and culture you have planned.

 

In my current game, the players are in a setting where there are no large animals. There are large riding birds, but they are not suitable as plow animals or for carrying heavy loads. That has some consequences for my game: the upland areas are thinly settled, because the lack of plow beasts makes them uneconomic. Most trade moves by ship (possible because the setting is an archipelago of islands of various sides) and the population is more urban than rural - any really fertile land has a fortified town or city plonked down nearby to guard and exploit it. The result is a series of kingdoms that have quite high population densities, but still have open areas nearby.

 

I still have "knights" but they fight on foot in phalanxes, or from ships, not on horseback. As a result the "knightly weapons" are the spear, the longbow and the two handled axe or greatsword.

 

There are various other changes, but those are the major ones.

 

cheers, Mark

[sinanju]

Re: World without horses

 

Generally speaking, a human and a horse over a long distance race...

The human will win every time.

 

Here's why:

1. Humans are natural long distance runners. We're capable of sweating and cooling our bodies better than any other animal on the planet. We also have an extremely efficient running gait.

 

My understanding is that a human will beat a horse in a VERY short sprint--before the horse can get up to full speed. We're smaller, with less inertia to overcome. But once that's out of the way, horses are faster than humans. Period.

 

Plus, we're not the only efficient long distance runners. Consider wolves. While it may be true that a human can run down a deer or a gazelle*, that's as much a factor of our intelligence as anything else. They sprint; predators sprint. If the prey is fast enough, the predator quickly gives up the chase. We, on the other hand, can track the animal and keep chasing it at a slower pace until it exhausts itself. Of course, we'll most likely have passed up many other, easier targets in doing so. And we're probably carrying food and water while we perform this interesting but mostly pointless exercise. Throwing spears, shooting arrows (or guns), or setting traps are much more effective techniques.

 

There was professor at my college way back in the day who tested this. He discovered that yes, it was possible to track and wear down a deer (or gazelle or whatever it was). It was even possible to kill it with your bare hands, though not without risk. It was not, however, possible to pierce its skin with your nails or teeth. If you managed to catch and kill such a critter while running around naked, unless you could find or make some kind of blade...you're still hosed.

 

2. Horses need long periods of rest, not only because of #1, but they also eat a lot more than humans do. This is because horses only eat grass/hay/grain, which is not as calorie-loaded as meat/cheese/bread that humans will eat on a long distance travel, plus we're simply less massive.

3. Humans can travel over any terrain, horses can't, they have to constantly go around obstacles, whereas humans simply go through them, assuming you're not on a road of course.

 

So, therefore, the most effective long distance travel is not by horse, but by foot. Horses are great because they are faster than humans in short sprints, thus making them great for hit-and-run tactics of ancient cavalry or charging into a line of men, simply due to the horses mass, it will break the line. Also, horses are certainly more comfortable than traveling by foot in that you're not going through the brush, climbing over rocks, walking through streams and just generally getting filthy and sweaty.

 

You forget the most important thing: when you ride a horse, the HORSE gets tired, instead of you. (Well, I understand that riding all day is no picnic, but it's a lot less tiring than walking the whole way yourself.)

[Lethosos]

Re: World without horses

 

Considering that one of my races in 8Sages is the Horse-kin (and therefore actually lacks the 4-legged variety across the world,) I have struggled with this concept on and off for some time. Now I see I do have options to work with.

 

Thanks for the informative thread--I'll certainly ravage it for details, but I have a better idea for daily life in the Jade Empire now.

[Ockham's Spoon]

Re: World without horses

 

Historically cities and towns tend to be spaced about 1 day's travel apart. If everyone is traveling on foot, that is going to make everything a lot closer together (as Markdoc noted), although waterways could alter that a lot.

 

People tend to make the best of what they have. Horses were a good solution to a lot a pre-industrial bottlenecks as it were, which is why they were so prevalent. But as others have noted, large empires that did not have horses came up with other solutions (efficiency and infrastructure would almost certainly play a large role). The ancient Greeks invented the steam-engine (or the idea, I don't think it was ever built), but never did anything with it because they didn't see it as a better solution to getting work done than just having slaves (besides which a slave looks a lot better in that toga). So in my mind the real question is what solutions does that society without horses come to? Magic could provide a lot of answers, but it depends on how powerful and prevalent it is, and it is probably not the most interesting solution.

[Vondy]

Re: World without horses

 

If humans were better than horses we would not have replaced humans with horses for distance related tasks.

[Escafarc]

Re: World without horses

 

There of course would be no Mexican Donkey pron.

[Markdoc]

Re: World without horses

 

There of course would be no Mexican Donkey pron.

 

Sure there would be - didn't you read Ovid? You'd just have to make your donkeys magically.

 

cheers, Mark

[Vondy]

Re: World without horses

 

You could also have a world where steam power, clockwork technology, or airships emerged earlier than in the real world. The romans theoretically had the conceptual framework for a steam engine, but parochial reliance on their slave-labor culture kept it from becoming a reality. Or so the popular view goes.

[dmjalund]

Re: World without horses

 

A Steampunk AT-AT!

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: World without horses

 

Nah. Heiro of Alexandria's toy wasn't a steam engine. For a Watts-style steam engine that recovers the latent heat of vapourisation, you need a condensor. Hiero's gadget just exploits the elasticity of air (using steam as a working fluid). I'd call it an atmospheric engine, and point to any number of devices of its sort being used for ventilating mines and running (proto)industrial fabric dryers.

 

Condensors in particular, but the whole folderol of the Watts prototype in general, represent a far more complex level of materials technology than was available to the Romans. Heck, the Roman era pretty clearly saw the introduction of the water mill on a large scale. As for the bit about slaves and industry. I mean, really, just because you have slaves doesn't mean that you don't want them to be more productive! Buckets are labour-saving compared with carrying water around in your hands, and Roman landowners had no problem with providing their slaves with buckets. I just don't see why steam engines (much used on West Indies plantations) would have been any different.

Or the windmills that made the Cyprus slave-run sugar plantations of the 10th Century possible, or...

[The Weapon]

Re: World without horses

 

Nah. Heiro of Alexandria's toy wasn't a steam engine. For a Watts-style steam engine that recovers the latent heat of vapourisation, you need a condensor. Hiero's gadget just exploits the elasticity of air (using steam as a working fluid). I'd call it an atmospheric engine, and point to any number of devices of its sort being used for ventilating mines and running (proto)industrial fabric dryers.

 

Condensors in particular, but the whole folderol of the Watts prototype in general, represent a far more complex level of materials technology than was available to the Romans. Heck, the Roman era pretty clearly saw the introduction of the water mill on a large scale. As for the bit about slaves and industry. I mean, really, just because you have slaves doesn't mean that you don't want them to be more productive! Buckets are labour-saving compared with carrying water around in your hands, and Roman landowners had no problem with providing their slaves with buckets. I just don't see why steam engines (much used on West Indies plantations) would have been any different.

Or the windmills that made the Cyprus slave-run sugar plantations of the 10th Century possible, or...

 

The development of the steam engine (which was very far from being just Watt and Boulton) depended on an atmosphere of entrepreneurship and scientific knowledge that Rome just didn't cultivate. Being good at science simply wasn't respected or rewarded in the way it was in Britain during and before the industrial revolution. What was respected and rewarded was beating people up and political maneuvering. If the freedmen and higher up slaves who actually ran most of the economy could have gotten more independence and respect Rome could have had an industrial revolution, maybe. Without this, I just don't see it happening.

[Markdoc]

Re: World without horses

 

The development of the steam engine (which was very far from being just Watt and Boulton) depended on an atmosphere of entrepreneurship and scientific knowledge that Rome just didn't cultivate. Being good at science simply wasn't respected or rewarded in the way it was in Britain during and before the industrial revolution. What was respected and rewarded was beating people up and political maneuvering. If the freedmen and higher up slaves who actually ran most of the economy could have gotten more independence and respect Rome could have had an industrial revolution' date=' maybe. Without this, I just don't see it happening.[/quote']

 

Medieval italy didn't have an atmosphere of entrepreneurship and scientific knowledge either, nor did Tang Era China (rather the opposite): but it didn't stop either of them from hosting technological and cultural revolutions: there are many factors at play, and multiple routes to getting to a technological change. Indeed, from reinforced concrete structures, through mass-production techniques, and advanced engineering, Rome was none too shabby at developing and putting technological advances into practice: it's one of the things that let them dominate the Mediterranean basin.

 

I doubt that Rome could in fact have had a steam-driven industrial revolution, but not because of abstract economic theory - it's more that mining, metallurgy and chemistry - all the technical factors that needed to come together to make it work - were insufficiently advanced. You would have needed multiple advances to make practical steam engines possible, not just a single breakthrough.

 

cheers, Mark

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: World without horses

 

The development of the steam engine (which was very far from being just Watt and Boulton) depended on an atmosphere of entrepreneurship and scientific knowledge that Rome just didn't cultivate. Being good at science simply wasn't respected or rewarded in the way it was in Britain during and before the industrial revolution. What was respected and rewarded was beating people up and political maneuvering. If the freedmen and higher up slaves who actually ran most of the economy could have gotten more independence and respect Rome could have had an industrial revolution' date=' maybe. Without this, I just don't see it happening.[/quote']

 

Poppycock. Watt, son of a Glasgow customs inspector with connections of his own, came up with the idea of a condensor by attending lectures by heat theorists at the University of Glasgow. But, as the patent law handed down from James I says, you can't patent a law of nature. So Watt came up with a cock-and-bull story about "inventing" the steam engine that somehow worked. Of course, he couldn't actually build a steam engine, since technically that required bored cylinders. With his patent in danger of expiration, Watt hooked up with a prominent Whig named Matthew Bulton, who had used his connections with the Duke of Lancaster (Manchester? The guy with the multilevel canal-served coal mine on the Liverpool-Manchester Canal, anyways) to build up a nice business producing domestic knockoffs of foreign luxury goods under tariff protections. Bulton's contacts, which had much more to do with land speculation along the route of the aforementioned canal than with his "manufacturing" business, got the patent extended. He also hooked Watt up with Sheffield cannon maker James Wilkinson, who belonged to a national network of religious Whigs that we now know as Quakers. More connections.

Anyway, Watt managed to get a few steam engines installed, but for the most part, he just did consulting engineering work with local miners (and some outliers such as the Carron Works near Glasgow, which bought a steam engine to pump water back up to the top of their watermills). With patent in hand, Watt could sue anyone who built a practical steam engine, and with his political connections, he would win the suits.

Science!

Meanwhile, "the father of hydraulic engineering," Joseph Bramah, was running around London with a "fire engine" consisting of a steam engine pump on a wagon with a condensor. He, of course, did not get sued by Watt because he had connections of his own. But you've never heard of Joseph Bramah, because he does not appear in Samuel Smiles' Lives of the Engineers, a book that tells us about how science and innovation and engineering was respected and rewarded in Britain because of its progressive love of freedom and like that.

 

Why not? Because Bramah was an Tory, while Smiley was a Reformer. (Those are, by the way, completely unhelpful labels. If we really want to get at what was going on, though, we'd have to talk about the way that religion organised politics in Nineteenth Century Britain, and I doubt that anyone here is up for that.) Smiley was creating an idea of his era as one in which engineers, who necessarily agreed with his politics and religion, succeeded in creating the industrial wealth of modern Britain, solely because of, and to the extent that, his political views were followed.

 

In short, you're getting your ideas about science and engineering in Nineteenth Century Britain from the Rachel Maddow of the 1870s.

 

And now we can move on to Rome. The empire where an automated reaper was being used to harvest wheat in Gaul, two thousand years before McCormick and where local carpenters and, increasingly, blacksmiths, made the already-five-thousand-year-old "Yale Patent Lock."

 

So here is a not entirely irrelevant question: how McCormick come to patent his reaper, and Linus Yale his lock? The answer, of course, was that their connections allowed them to get away with it. British inventors, in particular, came to realise that it was futile to challenge an American patent troll in an American court when they could just do a little work under the table and find an operator who would take a few crumbs from the table in return for making the problem go away --and if the crumbs were enough to make that operator the richest man on Earth, well, one can always find a professional writer to, somehow, turn it all into a palatable story. On the one hand, we have a tediously familiar story of people ginning up counter-to-fact stories that vindicate their political positions while giving protection to "malefactors of great wealth." (People who are also hard workers and good businesspeople and natural diplomats and productive engineers and even good and wise, because life is just never that simple.)

 

On the other hand, we have the story of actual innovations. In the course of the later Roman Empire, two of the preeminent long-distance traded staples were olive oil and wine. In 100AD, these goods were shipped in a specialised pot called an amphora, which first appeared about 3500BC and continued in use as the main shipping container until just about the time of the end of the Roman Empire. The disadvantages of a ceramic shipping container are obvious enough, and they were replaced by barrels about 600AD.

 

Now, there's a reason why "Cooper" is one of the most common English names. Making barrels is skilled work, and requires careful selection of good staves. That's why it took so long for this superior shipping container to replace the amphora. That replacement took place, as far as we currently know, in the course of the history of the Roman Empire. It took literally centuries for a proper infrastructure of barrel making to emerge in the Empire, and it is unlikely that the final triumph of barrel over amphora is only coincidentally related to the end of the Empire. That said, although two of the greatest historians of modern times are working on exactly this subject, it is apparently slow going. Barrelmaking was an epochal innovation, but because it happened everywhere, over a long time, we barely have a description of its triumph.

 

This is how, in my view, technical innovation should be understood: not as an economic exogeneity, but as an endogenous outcome. (Or, to put it another way, demand side, not supply side: "necessity is the mother of invention.") Attempts to make it about cultural moments are probably as much in general propaganda as Smiles' attempt to appropriate the (supposed) Industrial Revolution for English Nonconformism was in particular.