Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires

Hardcover

424 pages

David Chaffetz is an independent scholar with a lifelong passion for Middle Eastern and Inner Asian history. His 1981 book, several times republished, A Journey through Afghanistan, earned praise from Owen Lattimore, the then doyen of Inner Asian studies in America and the UK. He is a regular contributor to the Asian Review of Books, and has written for the South China Morning Post and the Nikkei Asian Review. His most recent book, Three Asian Divas, describes the important role of elite women entertainers in the transmission of traditional Asian culture.

A graduate of Harvard University, Chaffetz had the privilege of studying with two great scholars of Inner Asia, Richard Frye and Joseph Fletcher. At Columbia University he was editor of the Columbia Journal of International Affairs and a student of the noted Central Asian specialist, Edward Allworth. In the forty years since, he has extensively traveled in Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, China, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and Russia in Asia. Chaffetz reads and performs research in over 10 languages, including Persian, Turkish and Russian.

He is a member of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asian Society, the Explorers' Club of New York and the Gremio Literario (Literary Society) of Lisbon. He divides his time between Lisbon and Paris.

No animal is so entangled in human history as the horse. The thread starts in prehistory, with a slight, shy animal, hunted for food. Domesticating the horse allowed early humans to settle the vast Eurasian steppe; later, their horses enabled new forms of warfare, encouraged long-distance trade routes, and ended up acquiring deep cultural and religious significance.Over time, horses came to power mighty empires in Iran, Afghanistan, China, India, and, later, Russia. Genghis Khan and the thirteenth-century Mongols offer the most famous example, but from ancient Assyria and Persia, to the seventeenth-century Mughals, to the high noon of colonialism in the early twentieth century, horse breeding was indispensable to conquest and statecraft.

A scholar of Asian history David Chaffetz tells the story of how the horse made rulers, raiders, and traders interchangeable, providing a novel explanation for the turbulent history of the “Silk Road,” which might be better called the Horse Road. Drawing on recent research in fields including genetics and forensic archeology, Chaffetz presents a lively history of the great horse empires that shaped civilization.