Anti-fascism is along with anti-militarism, one of the most successful campaigns with which the left in Britain has been associated. The key moments, such as the Battles of Olympia, Cable Street or Lewisham were events at which the activities of the left forced themselves into the news and through which whole generations of activists came into the movement. Seasoned anti-fascists viewed New Labour's victory at the 1997 general election with scepticism. Between 1997 and 2001, the British National Party (BNP) grew noticeably, albeit without achieving the electoral breakthroughs which were to follow later. Between 2001 and 2005, the BNP enjoyed sustained electoral success. In 2009, 2010 and until summer 2011, the United Against Fascism (UAF) and English Defence League (EDL) numbers were usually broadly even. In June 2009, a rival far-right organisation, the EDL, was founded, as a street-fighting Islamophobic group.

How does the horse help us rethink the empire developing in the Iberian world? Horse riding and horse breeding comprised important elements of Spanish governance in Iberia and underwent a dynamic process of transfer, adaptation, and change in the Americas. The framework of ferality illustrates the limits of domestication in diverse colonial environments, where the horse was not only an extension of empire but also a challenge to it. Recovering the full spectrum of human-equine relations confirms the horse’s relevance to this period of change.

Returning to the Iberian Peninsula, this chapter considers how colonial experiences influenced early modern views of horse breeding. King Philip II’s survey of horse breeding in Spain and his efforts to develop a new royal “race” (raza) of horses provide two valuable case studies of contemporary debates about improving horse breeds. Knowledge and expertise gained from active horse breeding often contradicted ideal values of lineage or blood purity. These cases acknowledge limits to the control implied in selectively breeding domesticated animals and demonstrate an early modern understanding of the contructedness of horse breeds. In a larger sense, these findings offer a nuanced reading of how raza and casta in animal husbandry relate to histories of racial terminology and classifications of difference in the Spanish empire.

The iconic image of the knight on horseback represents just one facet of the horse’s imprint on legal, political, and social systems developing in medieval Iberian society. This chapter argues that historical and bodily relations with horses shaped the negotiation of social status and the administration of territory during the dynamic periods of peace, conflict, and negotiation among Iberian kingdoms in the tenth to fifteenth centuries. Defining the set of practices, ideals, and institutional hierarchies making up an Iberian "culture of the horse” brings to light a fundamental tension in which the horse served as both an agent of control and a means to disrupt power relations.

The introduction provides an overview of current theoretical concepts in animal and environmental studies for examining historical equine-human relations and previews the book chapters. The author argues that the embodied experiences of historical horses created real-world entanglements with the political and social structures that aimed to define or control them. This animal imprint, made visible in governance structures, was one way that animals participated in early modern social relations and imperial ecologies, and also gave rise to numerous possibilities for feral or counter-intentional responses within an expanding early modern empire.

As the Spanish empire expanded, the growing abundance of horses elevated an underlying tension between two colonial goals: to populate land with horses bred in new settlements, and to control land in new settlements by regulating the movement, reproduction, and possession of horses in them. The horse population increased due to both evolutionary environmental affinities and the use of traditional husbandry methods, such as loose herd management and protection of the commons, which had some unintended consequences. The responses of Spanish and Indigenous actors to these changes presented opportunities to negotiate the perception of and exercise of Spanish imperial power in a new equine political ecology.

Although Spanish colonizers expected horses to enforce social order, new environments for breeding and keeping horses and colonial interdependence on Indigenous populations also subverted these expectations. Licenses to ride horses offers a widespread example of this new political ecology. Across New Spain and Peru, Indigenous allies gained access to horses according to Spanish customs that rewarded military service to the crown, cases that emphasize the powerful imprint of the horse in Spanish governance. More broadly, the development of Indigenous equestrianisms both within and outside of Spanish spheres of influence demonstrate the complex boundary work involved in navigating a new interspecies landscape and producing new forms of knowledge.

Colonial horse breeding regulations attempted to manage and classify equine difference, but conceded to the numerous challenges in establishing desired physical traits. Likewise, emerging feral horse herds challenged narratives of Spanish domination over colonial environments. Importantly, these feral horses were a direct product of Spanish husbandry methods that used both controlled and uncontrolled breeding. In this sense, both the free-ranging horses and selectively bred colonial horses illustrated the limits of domestication in their diverging from human efforts to intervene and control them.

Horses represented an expensive and logistically challenging aspect of early expeditions, as they had to be brought by boat and then bred in colonial settlements to aid in expansion. This scarcity only elevated the cultural and political significance of horses, evident in the narratives of early Spanish or Indigenous chroniclers and also in strategic efforts to breed horses in colonial settlements, despite the challenging and varied new environments. Beyond the military lore of conquest, horses literally and materially served as the measure for establishing social status, access to political office, and territorial control by colonial representatives, shaping the structure and strategy of colonial expansion in powerful ways.