Engines of Empire

When we thought about horses potentially still being used for what we now use cars, trucks, tractors and motorbikes for (ignoring bicycles and shoes for the time being, since they are not "auto"), did we also think about what horses, suffering and toiling for us, meant for the spread and the distribution of mankind across the surface of our beloved home planet?

(Microsoft Media)

Suffer and toil they certainly did, those horses, for millennia, though sweat they never could as opposed to perseveringly running and hunting homo sapiens driving their more or less distant cousins to systemic collapse so that these could more easily be caught, killed and eaten.

And love we should our home planet since for now, it's the only one we have. All future endeavours and plans are still in their infancy at, say, NASA, and infantile to such an extent in fact that we'll have to wait for them to become a lot more economically viable and practicable. Many theoretic spin-offs will have to wait even longer. And even then we had better not continue to treat our home world as if we had a spare one in the warehouse.

And grateful we should be for what horses have been doing for us - mind you: "have been", not just "had been" since we still use them in parts of our world in manufacturing processes where other resources aren't available, or for entertainment, as at the Melbourne Cup and all those equine events that regularly precede it, and all those other equine events elsewhere.

It was on horseback that the Mongols raided Asian and European cities (think again about being grateful here, though), perhaps for want of anything better to do with themselves and to the obvious detriment of the conquered, though their empire had remained relatively short-lived, existed in a largely fragmented condition mainly in the thirteenth century, only parts of it somewhat longer.

Think about it whichever way you like, which for many probably means in the form of relief that it hadn't lasted any longer. Turning Genghis Khan into a heroic figure is most likely hardly any better than doing so with Napoleon who these days, along with the Khan, might very well end up at the International Court of The Hague for crimes against humanity; never mind the holy look in some historians' faces when the utter the words "Code Napoleon".

Napoleon crossing the Alps
a glorification by
Jacques-Louis David

To remind you of what this means, here's an excerpt taken from Compton's Infopedia about the Code Napoleon: " The premise for the code was the idea that, for the first time in history, a law based purely on common sense should be created, free of all past prejudices and inequities. Under the code all citizens were recognized as equal, and all class privileges were done away with."

This doesn't sound too bad on the surface, except that Napoleon, as in George Orwell's Animal Farm, must have seen himself as more equal than his fellow citizens of post-revolution France, at the very latest from when he began calling himself Napoleon I instead of General Bonaparte, and that this very fact alone was still, or yet again, all too indicative of a class difference.

Nevertheless, both the Khan and Napoleon and their henchmen, without whose support they wouldn't have come very far, had triggered events and developments in Europe that without them - and without horses - wouldn't have taken place.

By the way "henchmen": perhaps not coincidentally, the word goes back to the Old English "henxtman" which is more than likely to have its origin in "hengest" (stallion) and "mann" (man). In German, the linguistic territory that English stems from, the word "hengst" still means "stallion", whereas the latter goes back to Old French "estalon", itself again of Germanic origin. There's a lot of flexibility in language.

Genghis Khan may rightfully be seen by some as a bucolic good-for-nothing with too much criminal energy under his belt and too much time on his hands, and too much support by his equally ne'er-do-well clansmen, and probably too many horses at his disposal. Today he might be the leader of a bikie gang. There are interesting parallels, too, in the comparison of bikie gangs and early monarchies.

Likewise, Napoleon may just as rightfully be seen as a ruthless megalomaniac. They both used horses to build empires at the expense of other people and peoples, while horses were in both cases the underlying engines that made these vast empires possible, bringing every corner of it within reach, since they served and never questioned their masters, simply following their herd instinct.

It was on horseback that Europeans invaded the Americas. Try to imagine the world today without horses, or at least without the ones that unintentionally made exploration and occupation, colonisation and exploitation, so much easier if not causally possible for humans, though the beasts themselves never willingly exerted themselves so vigorously for the ends their masters had in mind; they were ultimately instrumental if without any particular aspiration.

We tend to forget the importance of horses for humanity now, regardless for a moment of whether we were at the receiving end or the victims of conquerors aided by horses, as much as the necessity for our distant ancestors to be hunter-gatherers to begin with well before we could begin to embrace a different lifestyle.

(Microsoft Media)

From looking back to what brought us here, then looking ahead: even when the time has finally arrived for humanity to start the first settlements on the moon and on Mars, it will still take a while until a sizeable number of earthlings can settle there and begin to thrive and prosper the way they used to in their earthbound colonies. On Mars, as opposed to the moon and many colonies of the past, they might be forced to immediately use local resources.

The parallels are certainly there, whether you think about Europeans spreading into the Americas or elsewhere, or the Polynesians populating the scattered islands of the Pacific, or our African ancestors venturing into Europe and Asia. It would appear that the Polynesian advance into the great watery unknown of the Pacific comes closest to mankind's future exploration of space.

Is the fear to run out of resources, the space our sheer number needs to live in, and the fear that too many of us are already taxing our home planet far too much, the ultimate motor for space exploration - as the first landing on the moon was powered by the Cold War? Apart from utter curiosity, there surely is some urgency driving us beyond the confines of our planet.

If you don't believe this author, you may want to think again taken that it was Steven Hawking who mentioned the urgent need to keep exploring space for these very reasons, much more so than for mere curiosity's sake.

One might be left to wonder, though, what the earthlings' approach would be if there were stone-age humanoids or pre-industrial reptilids on Mars....