It is 38 years since Michael Thompson, in an inaugural lecture, made a plea for the consideration of horses in the Victorian city. Considering the horse's crucial role in nineteenth-century cities it is surprising that the subject has received so little research – no more than a few case studies – and no overview; it is all but invisible in the relevant volumes of Georges Duby's Histoire de la France urbaine (1983) and The Cambridge Urban History of Britain (2000). McShane and Tarr's book, mercifully free of academic argot, a pleasure to read and full of enjoyable and surprising revelations, is welcome. And, if you'll forgive the metaphor, it covers the ground well.

The most obvious comment to British readers is that this is about horses in the American city: but London, Paris, Toronto and Montreal are glimpsed in passing, and the wide-ranging Introduction (in some ways the best part of the book) does draw on European, especially British, works on the economic and social history of horses and their interdependency with humankind. The authors organize their material into eight topics: markets, regulation, urban transit, leisure, stables and built environment, nutrition, disease and mortality and the decline and persistence of the urban horse. The central theme is horses as ‘living machines’: horse power in cities before the internal combustion engine and in places where the only alternative, steam, was either too costly or simply inefficient and impracticable. The longest chapter is on the subject likely to be most familiar to urban historians, that is horse-drawn transport, the means by which cities suburbanized. It is an excellent digest and pays due attention to conflicts over the social use of the streets and opposition to streetcars which combined a ‘modern’ technology with an ancient source of power qua machine. The chapters on nutrition and health are synthesized with equal authority and rich detail; ill health among horses, especially in the major epizootics, stresses dramatically that the authors' starting point, the total symbiosis between humans and horses, embraced more than economic considerations. Medical and veterinary science gradually revealed that horses and humans threatened each other's health. Urban working horses persisted into the twentieth century (and there are still some 250 police horses in Britain) but the rapid transition to electric transit went hand in hand with more healthy and modern cities.

Despite the book's wide range and vigour, I have two main misgivings. First, it is too short: time and again the authors open up a topic and close it just when you are getting interested. This may, of course, be a measure of the authors' success but their excellent detailed summaries are not always accompanied by critique. Secondly, the discourse sometimes moves uneasily between the general and the particular. Evidence from this or that city is deemed sufficient to support general statements about horses in American cities, or sometimes (it seems) cities in general. To expect more than occasional context from other countries – mostly in Europe – would be unreasonable but this greedy reviewer wanted more systematic analysis to allow comparisons across American cities. The authors know well enough that New York and Boston (the ubiquitous exemplars, with Pittsburgh) did not represent the nation, despite the ex-cathedra reassurance that ‘there is no reason to believe the pattern was much different elsewhere’ (p. 37). Were there differences between cities? If so, why? And in what sense is the statement that ‘society became more dependent on the horse’ [in an unspecified part of the nineteenth century] true? A selection of well-chosen photographs adds understanding and appeal, but it is a shame that they are not reproduced on appropriate paper. The best image, of an elaborate frame house being moved along an unidentified street (for the record it is San Francisco in 1908 by Sumner W. Matteson), appears on the dust wrapper only and will be discarded by most academic libraries before the book is shelved. One more gripe for the publishers, though they are in crowded bad company. Is it too much to ask for a consolidated bibliography of the kind without which a Ph.D. dissertation would be referred?