Horses

Horses matter in two sharply different institutional settings: as a substitute for steam in a railway project blocked by the Habsburg government, and as the military technology that helped Oyo expand and dominate a major source of slave exports. In both cases, their significance lies less in the animal itself than in the political and economic systems that put it to work.

Transport and blocked industrial development

When Emperor Francis I refused to grant a concession for a steam railway, the first railway in the empire had to use horse-drawn carriages. Its route between Linz on the Danube and Budweis in Bohemia was built with gradients and corners that made later conversion to steam engines impossible. The line therefore remained horse-powered until the 1860s.

The episode illustrates the costs of a political decision that restrained new industry and machinery. Banker Salomon Rothschild saw opportunities in railway development, encouraged by his brother Nathan’s enthusiasm for George Stephenson’s locomotive, The Rocket. Yet Francis again refused the scheme. The horse railway was not simply an early stage on an inevitable path to steam: its design reflected the limits imposed by a government that feared the political consequences of industrial change.

Cavalry and Oyo’s expansion

In the middle of the seventeenth century, Oyo’s growing power was tied to rising slave exports from the coast. Its military expansion relied on horses imported from the north and the formation of a powerful cavalry, which could defeat opposing armies. As Oyo moved south, it crushed intervening polities and sold many of their inhabitants into slavery.

Between 1690 and 1740, Oyo established a monopoly in the interior of the region later known as the Slave Coast. The book estimates that its conquests accounted for 80 to 90 percent of the enslaved people sold on that coast. Horses thus appear here not as a means of commerce or travel but as part of a military transformation that connected cavalry, territorial expansion, and the forced export of people.

Significance across the cases

The contrast is consequential. In the Habsburg case, horses prolonged the operation of a railway whose design had been shaped by resistance to steam technology. In Oyo, imported horses helped create a cavalry that strengthened a state’s capacity to conquer and control territory. The same animal is associated, in one setting, with constrained industrial change and, in the other, with the military power behind an expanding extractive economy.