ABSTRACT
While scholars have long studied the movement of peoples and slave-produced crops across the Atlantic World, there remains another forced migrant that continues to receive little or indeed no direct attention: animals, and, in particular, horses, who are used in this chapter as a lens to re-analyse the Transatlantic slave trade, as well as the historical triangulation among Europe, Africa, and the Americas more generally. Employing a wide range of secondary and primary sources such as travel accounts, slave interviews, folklore, and visual materials, this chapter purports to foreground how, across the Atlantic World, different peoples and groups (slaves and masters, colonizers and colonized people, Native American peoples and European “conquistadors”) developed similar perceptions, beliefs, practices, and values regarding horses. Three patterns are identified and studied in detail: (1) the horse as an agent of power, (2) the horse as a symbol of both power and prestige, and (3) metaphorical representations of the horse in a spiritual light.
