The only constant during these early years of British horse racing was change, a point which this book makes and supports ably. Huggins also gives close attention to changes in the racing game over time, examining the shifts in locations, lengths, and styles of races, and the sorts of horses and the weights they carried.
This book is a many-layered history that crosses class lines: a wide range of people attended, gambled, even owned racehorses, and many of the “lower sort,” as jockeys, trainers, and grooms, were essential cogs in the racing machine.
He engages easily with current scholarship on the commercializing leisure culture of the long eighteenth century, including its importance to local economic life and to the rise of genteel sociability that marks the period. Huggins’s previous work is not just a big part of the historiography, it is the historiography no scholar could be better placed to write the book about how thoroughbred racing began, both as an institution and as a culture. All that being the case, it comes as a bit of a shock to realize that Mike Huggins’s book is the first academic study to take a serious look at British horse racing and its role as an intersection point between sport, politics, class, and sociability. Racing took place in landowners’ fields and in the rising towns of the provinces, for small prizes and heavy purses, and its language found its way into everyday speech.
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This period, after all, saw the rise of the “thoroughbred” horse, the foreign-born, British-bred gold standard for speed and prestige it was the heyday of Newmarket and the Jockey Club, which set the standards for the institution of professional racing. Even those with only a nodding acquaintance with the long eighteenth century know how very big, even pervasive, horse racing was in Britain in those years.
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