Research Note on the Atlantic Slave Trade Database Project
Date: Wed, 13 Apr 1994 14:58:29 EDT
From: "John Saillant, IEAHCNET"
Research Note on the Atlantic Slave Trade Database Project
[This note comes courtesy of the following two IEAHCNET
subscribers--JS]
Stephen D. Behrendt, Drake University, sb4331r@acad.drake.edu
David Eltis, Queen's University, eltisd@qucdn.queensu.ca
In 1993 the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research
at Harvard University received a grant from the National Endowment
for the Humanities to create a consolidated database on the Atlantic
slave trade. The aim of the project is to computerize voyage data
on most of the slave voyages that sailed from Africa to the Americas
from the sixteenth century to the 1860's. The core data will consist
of over 200 fields of information, including fields for the names
of vessels, captains and shipowners, regions and dates of trade
in Europe, Africa and the Americas, and the number, age and gender
of slaves confined on the Middle Passage. When the project is completed
in three to five years, data on the Atlantic slave trade will be
available through computer networking services such as Internet.
The first stage of the project established fields of information and
integrated numerous computerized data-sets of Atlantic slave voyages
that historians have compiled over the past twenty-five years.
These sets include: Herbert S. Klein on the slave trades to Havana
(1790-1820), Rio de Janeiro (1795-1811) and Virginia (1727-1769), and
the Angola slave trade (1723-1771); Svend E. Green-Pedersen on the
Danish slave trade (1698-1789); David Eltis on the Atlantic slave
trade (1811-1867); and Johannes Postma on the Dutch slave trade
(1675-1802).
The second stage of the project will computerize published and
unpublished sets of slave voyage data compiled by Jean Mettas
(French slave trade), Jay Coughtry (Rhode Island slave trade),
James Rawley and Joseph Inikori (British slave trades), and then
will integrate several new British slave trade data-sets
created by Stephen D. Behrendt, David Eltis and David Richardson.
Well over half of all transatlantic slave voyages--including the
majority of British, French and Dutch slave voyages--soon will be
recorded in machine-readable format.
The major tasks in the project are the matching of fields of
information created from widely different sources often for
different purposes, and the elimination of duplicate voyages.
When completed, the core set of more than 20,000 transatlantic
slave voyages will constitute the largest data source for the
long-distance movement of peoples before the twentieth century.
Refined demographic data on the volume of the trade (and thus of
pre-colonial African populations) and the spatial distribution
of African peoples throughout the Atlantic world will allow scholars
to assess more accurately questions of African state formation,
agricultural and ecological change, African cultural survivals,
and the development of the Atlantic economies. Sub-sets of
information on vessel tonnage, slave age/gender ratios, and
crew/slave mortality will permit a more thorough analysis of shipping
productivity, patterns of family structures, and disease transmission
in the Atlantic world.
The database has been organized so that additional information on slave
voyages can be added easily to the set and so that related information,
such as African climatic patterns, slave phenotypes, slave rebellions,
or slave prices, can be linked to the main data-set through a
common variable such as the vessel name or the voyage identification
number. Building related files will broaden the scope of analysis
from the slave voyage to the impact of the transatlantic slave trade
in the creation of the modern world. Indeed, it eventually may
be possible to relate individual Africans or groups of Africans to
the vessel from which they disembarked in the Americas, as has
been done with other migrant groups.
The project organizers welcome additional data on transatlantic
slave voyages to include in the consolidated data-set.
