I just wrote out an entire reply to this question, and just before I pressed post I saw that you’d hit literally every single point I was trying to mention, even using nearly the same year examples. Well played, sir, well played.

Do keep in mind that horses are difficult animals to feed compared to most livestock. And even more difficult to breed if they don't live in a large group, and you don't understand the process of artificially inseminating them. Horses are finicky about that. Just owning a stallion and mare is usually not good enough.

In areas with a lot of suitable pasture horses can be common, while in densely populated areas with no natural grass they are a luxury imported from abroad, difficult to keep alive over the winter.

Research on age and gender distributions of horse bones collections in the Roman empire and China shows that these cultures mostly imported their horses and breeding was relatively rare. Steppe peoples on the other hand ate and sold young stallions in great quantities.

In the relatively wet plains of Northern and Eastern Europe plowing with horses was common in the middle ages. In the drier landscapes of the mediteranean oxes were used for that purpose.

What culture, time, and place? The answer depends on these factors.

Completely depends on time period and which culture and society you’re looking at. In antiquity, cavalry forces in Europe and the Middle East mainly consisted of nobles because they were the only ones that could afford their own horse. At the same time, there were nomadic tribes in the steppes where everyone had a horse because it was easier to raise animals than farm the land there.

So yeah it just depends on when and where.

It's important to remember that the economic forces that have made car ownership so widespread in the present did not exist in most of history, and an entirely different set of forces governed the likelihood of horse ownership or access. Be careful about generalizing too much from the present.

Edit: not that you were explicitly doing this in your post, of course. But I've found that some people tend to assume that, since cars "replaced" horses, then there were as many horses roaming the streets back then as there are cars today.

Draft teams were probably more common than you imagine as they were needed to move freight and overland and do farm work.

Yes most medieval villeins had an oxen if they could afford it. There are documents that explain villages would rent out an oxen to plow their fields through barter( or labor) from a person that had one. There's even documents of how a whole village shared the same oxen. Horses weren't used predominantly in ploughing until the late 18th century I believe. Villains/serfs belonged to the lord and lived on the lords land. He owed labor and rent, paid usually in working his masters field a certain amount of days. You then have free tenants who could move about as they like and didn't have to work the lords lands. There are stories of free peasants selling themselves back into serfdom to survive tough winters/failed harvests. At the top of the peasants were yeoman who could own land and probably employed multiple free peasants to help during harvest. They werent subject to the lord, but still would be subject to the lord that represented the crown in the area. They are obviously the most likely to afford their own oxen.

You will have to vastly narrow down you’re question to get any real answer. The answer will be dramatically different depending on time period, location, culture etc.

Ancient Egyptian peasant? No horse. Roman pleb from 100AD? Still no horse. Mongolian in 1250? Weird if you don’t have a horse. Native American pre 1492? What’s a horse? American settler in 1820? You might have a horse.

Also are we counting Donkeys and Mules as horses? Horses are very good for getting around quickly but not the best working the fields pulling plows, etc. Farmers generally used Mules, Donkeys, Oxen.

Extremly ammbiguous question but:

So until around the 14-1500's ranching and mass animal availability wasnt very big. There are lots of specific regional exceptions but on average they wernt that common. Plains tribes often had more animals due to being easier then farming in grasslands and more central to culture and life.

In say europe though a family might have had a single horse or cow or otherwise to do labour but it would primarily have been that a beast of burden. Often times families would share communal animals.

After the renisance ranching became more common and beasts of burden became incressingly cheaper and more available. By the time of american colonisation it was much more likely for every farm to have at least one beast of burden and by the 1800's there were more horses then farmworkers. Nearing the 1900's new technology saw horse population explode shortly before tractors started to replace them.

>Southern provinces in China still speak different languages (e.g. Cantonese) influenced by the indigenous languages of non-Sinitic ethnic groups.

This is interesting because I've usually heard the reverse that Mandarin varieties were influenced in pronunciation and vocabulary by non-Sinitic groups due to Mandarin being originally distributed along the northern and southwestern frontiers.

Do you have some examples of the non-Sinitic influence on southern families of Chinese languages? I'm particularly interested what influences are on Min since it is considered to have developed separately from Old Chinese unlike Mandarin, Yue, or Wu which are considered to descend from Middle.

I'm Chinese myself, and I just want to say, what a great write-up. Really appreciate all the nuggets you manage to fit in, but truly, Chinese history is vast and quite full of asterisks just like the rest of world history. Like the Sixteen Kingdoms period which is poorly named and only fifteen of which were founded by non-Sinitic peoples, or the fact that both the Great Wall and the Grand Canal were not built built but ordered to be 'connected' during their respective periods. Nonetheless, this is a great primer for anyone interested in learning more about Chinese history.

What a great summary! I know very little about Chinese history and this post really have some great information. Thanks for going to the trouble of writing it.

Thanks for this brief summary.

Thanks a lot for this writeup!

Any recommendations for a shorter book (under 150 pages)? I read infrequently and I just started a Ron Chernow book (almost 1000 pages) that will take me forever. It would be great to have something I could burn through quickly. Thanks!

+1 for Heather, tons of fun to read as well. I really enjoyed *The Fall of the Roman Empire."

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The History of the Crusades podcast is pretty decent. Not as good as either Mike Duncan's stuff or HoB, but it has been very consistent and has already covered a ton of time. By now the narrative has shifted from the Middle East to the Reconquista period in the Iberian Peninsula and the Patreon extra episodes are currently on the Hussite Crusade.

Any book recs for the Texas Revolution?

it ended at different times in different places

Those would be the aforementioned gorgets, so not only practical, but also historical. The relative benefits to a standard are gonna be a less impeded range of motion and less chance of unprotected gaps.

So, I saw in movies depictions, they sometimes use plate for the part shown in those pictures (e.g. game of thrones, most might have been leather, but the kings guard were clearly wearing steel)

Would that be practical?

Neck protection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(mail_collar)

A gorget and/or bevor would be comparable pieces of plate armor.

I’m sorry what’s “standard”? Like as an armor part

Here's a classical style bust of justinian

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3AByzantine_Emperor_Bust_%28Possibly_Justinian_I%29.jpg