New England Horses,
Sugar & Slavery in the 18th Century

Charlotte Carrington-Farmer, Professor of History, Roger Williams Univ.

Wednesday, April 8, 2026 at 7:00 pm
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Charlotte Carrington-Farmer

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Dr. Charlotte Carrington-Farmer is a Professor of History, and she specialises in early American History. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 2010, and she has a keen research interest in dissent in seventeenth-century New England. Her book, Roger Williams and His World, (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2024), sets Roger Williams in his wider Atlantic world context. She has published book chapters on two seventeenth-century dissenters, see: “Thomas Morton” in: Atlantic Lives: Biographies that Cross the Ocean (Leiden and Boson: Brill, 2014) and “Roger Williams and the Architecture of Religious Liberty,” in Law and Religion and the Liberal State (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2020.) Building on her interest in Roger Williams, she has published an article on his wife, Mary Williams, entitled: “More than Roger’s Wife: Mary Williams and the Founding of Providence.” The New England Quarterly,vol. 97, no. 3, Sept. 2024: 308-44.

Carrington-Farmer also has an active research interest in non-human animal history, specifically equine history. Her research examines the breeding and export of horses from New England to the West Indies in the eighteenth century, and its intersection with enslaved lives and labour. She has published a chapter entitled: “Trading Horses in the Eighteenth Century: Rhode Island and the Atlantic World,” in Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld, eds., Equine Cultures: Horses, Human Society, and the Discourse of Modernity, 1700-Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), which won the Association of College and Research Libraries “Outstanding Academic Title” award in 2019. She has published an article entitled: “The Rise and Fall of the Narragansett Pacer,” Rhode Island History, Winter/Spring 2018, vol. 76, no. 1: 1-38. The article was accompanied by a travelling exhibition on the Narragansett Pacer horse through Rhode Island Historical Society. Her most recent research in the field of equine history centres on mules, see: “Shipping Mules in the Eighteenth-Century: New England’s Equine Exports to the West Indies,” in Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber, Lou Roper, Agnès Delahaye, and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, eds., Agents of Empires: Companies, Commerce, and Colonies 1500-1800, (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2024.) Dr. Carrington-Farmer has a forthcoming chapter surveying equines in Atlantic history with Oxford University Press: “Horses in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Trevor Burnard, ed., Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2025.) Her book manuscript in progress, which received a New England Regional Fellowship Consortium research grant, is tentatively titled: Equine Atlantic: New England’s Eighteenth-Century Horse Trade to the West Indies.

Dr. Carrington-Farmer has reviewed books for the Journal of American History, The New England Quarterly, Connecticut History Review, History: Reviews of New Books, Equine History Collective, and The American Historical Review. She has written pieces for The Junto, The Spectacle of Toleration, and Newport Historical Society blogs, and recorded podcasts for the Knowing Animals series. Carrington-Farmer was a featured historian in several episodes of the multi-award-winning documentary series, Slatersville: America’s First Mill Village, which premiered on Rhode Island PBS in 2022.

New England horses, sugar & slavery in the 18th Century formed something of an equine empire, with horses dominating every aspect of the early modern Atlantic world in a way that is almost inconceivable today. Horses were central to trade, labor, war, mobility, structures of power, and empire building. The breeding of riding and draft horses for exportation to the West Indies was an integral part of New England’s economy throughout the long eighteenth century. New England’s landscape was naturally well-suited to raising horses, and the region was perfectly poised geographically with pre-existing provisioning connections. Whilst local markets were significant to the industry, the primary driver was the sugar plantations in the West Indies. By the turn of the eighteenth century, horses were at forefront of the trading markets which dominated the busy aquatic highway between New England and the West Indies. In the West Indies, equines were not only essential for riding, travel, and fertilizing the fields, but most importantly as draft animals on sugar plantations. New England’s horse trade was part of the competing chain of supply and demand for animal labor, and rival empires fiercely guarded the equines that powered their sugar mills and profits. For New Englanders, shipping equine cargo was a risky business, but a profitable one.