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Book Review
| The Royal Hunt in Eurasian History. By THOMAS T. ALLSEN. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. 416 pp. $55.00 (cloth).
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Thomas Allsen's The Royal Hunt in Eurasian History is an ambitious and frequently insightful work of world history. It explores how "the hunt," whether "out" in nature or in controlled spaces such as paradises or hunting parks, served to legitimize political authority in the premodern world, to demonstrate rulers' symbolic power over animals—and, by extension, over their human subjects. Equipped with a Braudelian spirit of expansive inquiry over time and space, the author aims to examine the "predominantly political activity" of royal hunting in a vast geographical space "over the long term" (p. 8). Allsen takes on the formidable task of tracing the development of the royal hunt out of the protein pursuit of hunter-gatherer societies to its place among the political and cultural trappings of Eurasian rulers across thousands of years, from the ancient beginnings of "civilization" in his "core area" to a few fleeting references to its use by nineteenth-century imperialists. |
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Allsen identifies the core area of the royal hunt—where it developed and flourished in an extensive network of trade in animals, knowledge, and human capital—as Iran, northern India, and Turkestan, though he recognizes that the phenomenon spread to the far fringes of the Eurasian landmass. The best parts of the book are about the complicated interrelationships between human societies and nature, particularly animals. The hunting or hunted animals of the study's analysis are not powerless objects of human manipulation, but indispensable symbols of human political societies; it is their imagined threat, and "conquering," that serves as a primary mode of legitimacy in the premodern world. As the author smartly notes, nature is seen as under the attack of culture and "civilization" in the modern world. In Allsen's premodern world, however, the contrary is true, as human culture is imagined as unstable, under constant threat from the encroaching and powerful forces of nature. |
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