Summary of Proceedings regarding the improvement of the breed of horses in Guzerat &c.

£15,000 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books

A rare pair of manuscripts revealing the attempts made to revive horse breeding in Gujarat, especially in the Kathiawar peninsula, and the Deccan, namely in Pune (Poonah) and along the Bhima River, in the 1820s and 1830s. The main manuscript gives a continuous history of British interests in Indian Horse breeding from 1813 through to 1826, in both Gujarat and the Deccan, before proceeding into fair copies of letters sent from and to Captain H. Jameson of the 3rd Regiment of Light Cavalry between 1827 and 1828 after he was made Superintendent to oversee the breeding of horses in India, and other extracts from various involved officers. This manuscript was owned (and possibly compiled) by Colonel John Bower of the Madras Army, brother of Admiral James Paterson Bower (1806–1889), who was stationed in Cape Town by 1838 for the purpose of purchasing and supplying horses to India for cavalry regiments and for breeding. Together the manuscripts provide an exceptionally detailed picture of the state of horse breeding, and horse culture at large, in decline in northern India in the early nineteenth century following the Second and Third Anglo-Maratha Wars and, perhaps more importantly, the famine of 1812 which decimated livestock across the northern regions of India. In Kathiawar, for example, it is revealed that before the famine the peninsula had exported around 1200 horses, yet by 1822 that number was down to 400. Blame is also laid on the subsequent efforts to make up for the defi

• Binding: Hardcover

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