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The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has information on almost 36,000 slaving voyages
that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The actual number is estimated to have been as high as 12.5 million. The database and the separate estimates interface offer researchers, students and the general public a chance to rediscover the reality of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in world history.
Search the Voyages Database
Look for particular voyages in this database of documented slaving expeditions. Create listings, tables, and maps that draw on the database.
Examine Estimates of the Slave Trade
Slaves on documented voyages represent four-fifths of the number who were actually transported. Use the interactive estimates page to analyze our estimate of the full volume of the slave trade.
Explore the African Names Database
This database identifies 91,491 Africans taken from captured slave ships or from African trading sites. It displays the African name, age, gender, origin, country, and places of embarkation and disembarkation of each individual.
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database is the culmination of several decades of independent and collaborative research by scholars drawing upon data in libraries and archives around the Atlantic world. The Voyages website itself is the product of two years of development by a multi-disciplinary team of historians, librarians, curriculum specialists, cartographers, computer programmers, and web designers, in consultation with scholars of the slave trade from universities in Europe, Africa, South America, and North America. The National Endowment for the Humanities was the principal sponsor of this Emory University Digital Library Research initiative. The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute of Harvard University and the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation of the University of Hull have also supported its development.
African Origins ProjectExplore the site
In January 2009 the directors of the project to create Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database began the African Origins Project, a scholar-public collaborative endeavor to trace the geographic origins of Africans transported in the transatlantic slave trade. African Origins seeks the help of members of the African diaspora, Africans, scholars, and others to identify the likely origins of these liberated Africans and thus begin to trace the migration histories of other Africans transported across the Atlantic during the 19th century suppression of the slave trade. Those with knowledge of African languages, cultural naming practices, and ethnic groups will assist in identifying these Africans’ origins by drawing on their own expertise to identify the likely ethno-linguistic origin of an individual’s name.
The African Origins Project arose directly from the work of G. Ugo Nwokeji and David Eltis, who in 2002 used audio recordings of names found in Courts of Mixed Commission records for Havana, Cuba, and Freetown, Sierra Leone, to identify likely ethno-linguistic origins. The names in these recordings were pronounced by speakers of the same language and accent that the Courts of Mixed Commission registrars would likely have had (e.g., if the name was written in a Havana register, Eltis and Nwokeji had the name pronounced by a Spanish speaker with a Havana accent). This helped connect the sound of the name to its spelling and thus enabled a more accurate assessment of the name’s possible ethnic origins than provided by its written counterpart alone.
Eltis and Nwokeji played these recordings to informants in Nigeria and to members of the African diaspora in parts of North America, who were able to identify through these pronunciations the likely ethnic group from which the name derived. Such one-on-one research with informants, though successful, proved highly time consuming and yielded little more than two identifications for each African in their dataset, and led to the pursuit of an online method of broadly soliciting volunteers to assist with this project.
View digitized images of the first pages of the Sierra Leone and Cuba Courts of Mixed Commission registers, from which the information on these Africans was drawn. An earlier database drawn from these sources called the African names database is available on the downloads page of this site. It contains data on stature that are not available on African-Origins. Information on liberated Africans and registers of the Courts of Mixed Commission may also be found in the Glossary. For more information about the African Origins Project and opportunities to participate, please visit http://www.african-origins.org.
History Project Team Contributors of data Acknowledgements African Origins Project Contact us
A brief account of the origins of a single multi-source dataset of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its realization first as a CD-ROM published by Cambridge University Press in 1999 and now, in an expanded version, on the Voyages website. Names of the principal investigators, of members of the project development team, and of individuals serving on the steering committee and advisory board. Names of scholars and researchers whose findings on the trans-Atlantic slave trade have been incorporated into the Voyages Database. Major sponsors and institutional partners of the Voyages website, as well as other organizations and individuals who have assisted the work of the project team. A scholar-public collaborative project using audio recordings of names in African Names Database to trace the geographic origins of Africans transported in the transatlantic slave trade. Members of the Voyages editorial board and the email address for contacting the website.
VOYAGES EDITORIAL BOARD
Daniel B. Domingues da Silva – Managing Editor (Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Missouri, Columbia, USA)
Manuel Barcia Paz (Lecturer, Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Leeds, UK)
Steve Behrendt (Senior Lecturer, History Programme, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)
David Eltis (Professor, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History, Atlanta, Georgia, USA)
Manolo Florentino (Professor, Departamento de História, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Antonio Mendes (Centro de História de Além-Mar, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal)
David Richardson (Director, Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation at The University of Hull, UK)
Jelmer Vos (Centro de História de Além-Mar, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal) |
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