Description
Transatlantic Slaving and the African Diaspora: Using the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute Dataset of Slaving Voyages
September 11, 1998
The conference “Transatlantic Slaving and the African Diaspora: Using the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute Dataset of Slaving Voyages” will mark Cambridge University Press’s CD-ROM publication of a database containing information on 27,205 slave trading voyages between 1588 and 1867. Drawn from the research of an international array of scholars working in nine different languages in dozens of Atlantic basin archives, the material encompasses between two-thirds and three-quarters of all the transatlantic slave voyages attempted between the late sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. The capstone of an international research effort that began in the 1960s, this compilation, made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, constitutes the largest dataset on slave shipping and forced migration before the mid-nineteenth century and promises to be a major tool in improving our understanding of the African diaspora and Atlantic history.
