Notes on Stable Management in India and the Colonies

The British Empire ran on horses. In late 19th-century India, officers, administrators, and volunteers in military service often found themselves responsible for mounts they had no idea how to keep alive. Joshua A. Nunn spent eighteen years learning this knowledge the hard way, and in 1897 he gathered it into this revised guide for the bewildered newcomer. This is not a veterinary textbook or a sporting manual. It is practical wisdom born of tropical experience: how to feed a horse when the climate rots your hay, how to build a stable that breathes in the monsoon, how to groom in heat that would kill a less careful handler. Nunn wrote for people establishing stables for the first time, soldiers who needed reliable mounts and had no stable boy to do the thinking for them. The result is a window into a world where competent horse management was a matter of duty, pride, and practical necessity. For historians of colonial India, equestrian enthusiasts, and anyone curious about the material realities of imperial life, this guide offers something rare: the nitty-gritty of how the British actually got by in India, one sweaty horse at a time.