David Chaffetz will discuss his new book, Raiders, Rulers, and Traders, and show how the horse explains much of the history of China and Central Asia.

No animal is so entangled in human history as the horse. Over time, horses came to power mighty empires in Iran, Afghanistan, China, India, and, later, Russia. Genghis Khan and the thirteenth-century Mongols offer the most famous example, but from ancient Assyria and Persia, to the seventeenth-century Mughals, to the high noon of colonialism in the early twentieth century, horse breeding was indispensable to conquest and statecraft.

Drawing on recent research in fields including genetics and forensic archeology, Chaffetz presents a lively history of the great horse empires that shaped civilization.

(source: extract from Amazon.com)

The Speaker

David Chaffetz is an independent scholar of Asian history. He is the author of A Journey through Afghanistan and Three Asian Divas, and has written for the Nikkei Asia Review, Chatham House, the Asian Review of Books and Fortune. A former resident of Hong Kong, he divides his time between Paris and Lisbon.

PROGRAMME

Venue: Online talk by Zoom

Admission: $50 for members, $60 for guests /non-members

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