Date: Thu, 14 Apr 1994 18:35:45 -0600
From: [email protected] (Hernan Astudillo R.)
Subject: New Database on Slave Trade
> Sender: Latin American History discussion list <[email protected]>
> From: Phil Mueller <[email protected]>
> Subject:      New Database on Slave Trade
>
>  From: "John Saillant, IEAHCNET" <SAILLANT%[email protected]>
>  Subject:      New Database on Slave Trade
>
>  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, [email protected]
>  David Eltis, Queen's University, [email protected]
>
>  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  unpublished sets of slave voyage data compiled by Jean Mettas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.
>
>

--                      |
Hernan Astudillo R.     | "Computers are useless. They can only give you
[email protected]    |  answers."            -- Pablo Picasso
College of Computing, Georgia Tech, Atlanta GA 30332 / (404) 853-9390

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