Slave Horse: The Narragansett Pacer

This project uses horses and the horse trade as a lens to explore a range of connections among people, colonies, and nations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Part of a larger book project on horses throughout the Atlantic World, it focuses specifically on the Narragansett Pacer, a mixture of Dutch, Irish, and English breeds that was bred in Rhode Island for a wider global market. As such, it was entwined with slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. The first truly “American” horse, the Pacer was extinct by the nineteenth century.