DOI: 10.1111/hic3.

12530

ARTICLE

DB or not DB: Writing the history of the slave

trade to North America in the era of the database

Sean M. Kelley

University of Essex
Abstract
Correspondence Since the publication of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Data-
Sean M. Kelley, University of Essex,
Colchester, UK. base (now known as Voyages) in 1999, it has occupied an
Email: skelley@essex.ac.uk important place the study of the North American slave
trade. Some historians, particularly those interested in the
African Diaspora and African American culture, have
embraced its ability to elucidate the specific connections
between Africa and North America over time. While most
historians have accepted the validity of the database, some
have criticized the database's tendency to privilege quanti-
tative abstraction over a more “human” narrative. A smaller
number still have rejected the estimates offered by the
database specifically regarding the number of Africans
disembarked in the United States after 1808, but most
scholars in the field have accepted the Voyages estimates.
There are now plans to link the Voyages database with a
number of other slavery‐related digital history projects,
which suggests that the era of the database is here to stay.

In 1999, Cambridge University Press published the CD‐ROM version of what was then called the Transatlantic Slave
Trade Database and transformed an entire historical field (Eltis, Behrendt, Richardson, & Klein, 1999). In truth, David
Eltis and David Richardson, the leaders of the project, along with other original contributors such as Herbert Klein,
Stephen Behrendt, and Johannes Postma, had been compiling data for over a decade and had already begun to pub-
lish some of the results. But the decision to make the entire dataset available to the general public was revolutionary.
Suddenly, any researcher with library access (the original CD‐ROM cost about $200) could run customized searches
over specific timespans and regions of Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Users could even look up details on any of
27,000 individual vessels and search on variables such as the number of captives, mortality rates, and the names of
captains and ship owners. In the succeeding years, the database has been enlarged to approximately 35,000 entries,
rechristened as Voyages, and moved onto the Internet, available to anyone with a computer (Eltis & Richardson, 2008,
p. 5; Eltis, Behrendt, Florentino, & Richardson, 2008). Mention “the Database” to anyone in the field, and they will
know exactly what you mean.

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https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12530
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North America received less than four percent of all Africans landed in the Americas but continues to receive
an outsized share of scholarly attention, unjustly, in the eyes of many. One reason surely relates to the enormous
level of scholarly attention paid to North American slavery in general, but another stems from a desire to under-
stand the origins of African American culture. Historians of North America have had two main responses to the
arrival of the Voyages database. Many have embraced Voyages either as a general reference tool or, in some cases,
to provide the underlying structure for larger inquiries. These tend to be specialists in either the slave trade or the
African Diaspora. Other historians have voiced concern that the Database, while perhaps useful, reduces the field
to a “numbers game” and misses the larger human tragedy of the slave trade. Beyond this, a few have expressed
outright skepticism toward its quantitative implications, especially in regard to the post‐1808 illegal slave trade.
This essay will survey these themes in literature on the transatlantic slave trade to North America, focusing on
works published after ca. 2000.
The question of how many Africans were carried to the various regions of the Americas—what some call the
“numbers game”—has been of longstanding interest to all historians in the field, with efforts to quantify the slave
trade long predating the publication of the Voyages database. The problem has been in devising accurate estimates;
most early figures had been based on little more than guesswork. Philip Curtin's, 1969 classic, The Atlantic Slave Trade:
A Census, represented the first systematic effort to estimate the total volume of the trade, including to North Amer-
ica. Based on a variety of sources, including port, tax, and census records, he estimated that about 427,000 Africans
had been carried to North America up to the time of the Civil War, less than one‐third of what some earlier studies
had proposed (Curtin, 1969, p. 88).
The Voyages team adopted a different method, one based on counting documented voyages, the assumption
being that it was unlikely that any vessel could complete a slaving voyage without leaving an evidentiary trace some-
where, whether in Europe, Africa, or the Americas, especially after the seventeenth century. Even so, aware that it
will never be possible to include every voyage ever made, the Voyages team has tried to account for gaps in the doc-
umentary record by creating a separate “Estimates” section on the website offering what it believes are the true fig-
ures. Based on these methods, Curtin's estimate for the total number of Africans carried directly to North America
aboard transatlantic vessels was revised downward, to about 389,000 (Eltis, 2001, p. 45; Eltis, 2008, p. 350). How-
ever, that figure did not take into account those Africans who arrived indirectly, via the inter‐colonial trade. A sepa-
rate but compatible inter‐colonial Voyages database created by Gregory E. O'Malley (2014, p. 130) suggests that an
additional 72,000 captives were carried to North America from the Caribbean, the vast majority of them African‐
born. Combining the direct transatlantic trade with the inter‐colonial trade, then, yields a total of 461,000 Africans
carried to North America.
While the bottom‐line estimate was of great significance in itself, for many historians, the real breakthrough of
the Database was that it allowed researchers to explore connections between specific regions of North America
and specific regions of Africa over time. African Diaspora historians were among the first to embrace the new data.
Many of these had been engaged in a larger critique of the prevailing paradigm of African American culture, as artic-
ulated by Mintz and Price (1992). Their model, now known as “creolization,” had envisioned enslaved Africans as
“crowds” rather than culturally coherent “groups,” which implied the abandonment of old ethnic practices in favor
of new hybridized ones (Mintz & Price 1992, p. 18). The challenge to this model emerged before the appearance
of the Database, as scholars such as Chambers (1997), Daniel C. Littlefield (1981), Gomez (1998), Klein (1999),
Lovejoy (1982, 1989, 1997), Thornton (1991, 1992), and Walsh (1997) used existing slave trade estimates to revisit
Mintz and Price's assumptions. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (1992, 2005) went further, constructing her own database of
almost 9,000 individuals based on documents in Louisiana archives.
Collectively, these historians argued that the slave trade did not, as Mintz and Price had asserted, run in a
random fashion. Rather, the regularized routes and connections used by slave‐trading merchants had a tendency
to create clusters of Africans of similar ethnolinguistic backgrounds. The economic structure of the slave
trade, in other words, had important cultural implications. The resulting series of regional studies amounted to a
wholesale re‐mapping of African America realized most completely in the work of Michael Gomez (1998), which
KELLEY 3 of 8

broke North America into three principal regions of disembarkation, each with its own distinctive blend of African
cultural inputs.
With the publication of the CD‐ROM version of the Database, a new wave of studies appeared, many elaborating
on themes explored earlier by Thornton, Hall, and Gomez. Linda Heywood and John Thornton (2007) used the data to
support their contention that Kongolese Catholics constituted an “Atlantic Creole Charter Generation” in the English
and Dutch colonies. Lorena Walsh (2001) parsed the Chesapeake data very finely to argue that the cultural impact of
the slave trade varied significantly not only over time but across sub‐regions. Kevin Roberts (2003) used the data to
contextualize his exploration of Africans in Louisiana, emphasizing the influence of Central Africa over other regions,
such as the Senegambia and Bight of Benin. Kwasi Konadu (2010) and Walter Rucker (2015) examined the formation
in a range of New World locales of a diasporic consciousness among peoples of the Gold Coast region, seeking to
understand what Konadu termed the “Akan variable.” But perhaps, inevitably, the Carolina‐Georgia Lowcountry
has attracted the most attention. Young (2007) used the data to argue that the region was but one node in a larger
Central African Atlantic cultural complex, where a common understanding of the sacred nurtured resistance to slav-
ery. Ras Michael Brown (2012) made a similar case, exploring the significance of Simbi water spirits, while Sean M.
Kelley's argument for the existence of Mande linguistic and cultural clusters was guided by the second edition of
the Voyages database (Kelley, 2016).
In challenging the creolization thesis, these works all shared a common assumption: that slave trade data, which in
essence linked ports with other ports, could serve as a guide to understanding African cultures in the Americas. Inev-
itably, that assumption has been called into question. Morgan (1997) went to the heart of the matter in a critical
essay published just as the Database was taking shape, asking, “how homogenous or heterogeneous was the Atlantic
slave trade seen from the vantage points of African coastal regions and American destinations?” The search for
answers brought the fields of African and American history closer together. One of the more interesting conse-
quences was a series of studies focused on resistance and rebellion, with historians, supported by the Database,
echoing earlier works by Thornton (1991) and Hall (1992) in viewing specific African identities as a shaping force.
Rucker's (2006) examination of American slave rebellions and plots, for example, argues that “particular ethnic
enclaves … produced unique and possibly representative modes of resistance”; Chambers (2005) concludes that
enslaved Igbos collaborated in the murder of Ambrose Madison, grandfather of the fourth president; and Smith
(2001) builds on Thornton's (1991) suggestion that Kongolese Catholics were responsible for carrying out the
Stono Rebellion.
The Database has also found a receptive audience among historians of colonial slavery (as contrasted with the
African Diaspora scholars discussed above), but for many, the emphasis has been on the bottom‐line total more than
on connections with specific regions of Africa. Ira Berlin's Generations of Captivity (2003) is a good example. Focused
on the transition from “societies with slaves” to “slave societies,” (and vice versa), what mattered for Berlin was how
many Africans arrived, and when; where they came from is far less important. Jennifer L. Morgan's exploration (2004)
of enslaved women in the British American colonies similarly relies on the Database for information on sex ratios in
the slave trade, with the specific backgrounds of the Africans a secondary concern—her focus is on gender and
power.
For most historians of colonial slavery, the presence of Africans has been the salient fact; how they were deliv-
ered has mattered less. In the past dozen years, however, historians have shown more interest in the mechanics of
the trade itself, with two works standing out as particularly influential: Stephanie Smallwood's Saltwater Slavery
(2006) and Marcus Rediker's The Slave Ship (2007). Although different in approach—Smallwood grounded her study
in Royal African Company records while Rediker drew on a wide range of autobiographical works—the two books
share a number of qualities and have done much to shape how Americanists view the slave trade. At the most basic
level, both works can be seen as a reaction to the Voyages database, not because they question its methods or figures
(which they mostly accept and use) but out of a conviction that a purely quantitative approach simply cannot address
the devastating experience of enslavement and transportation across the Atlantic. Rediker's subtitle, “A Human His-
tory,” encapsulates his desire to counter the “violence of abstraction,” the tendency to turn the slave trade into a tale
4 of 8 KELLEY

of “ledgers, almanacs, balance sheets, graphs, and tables” (Rediker, 2007, p. 12). Smallwood likewise sees such
sources as “effac[ing] the personal histories that fuelled the slaving economy,” but then rereads those same docu-
ments to tease out a more human narrative (Smallwood, 2006, pp. 5, 98).
Both works place great emphasis on the ship itself, not as a means of transportation but as the locus of larger
struggles and transformations. For Smallwood, the slave ship was far more than a delivery system: it was a crucial site
in which “African captives” became “commodities” (Smallwood, 2006, pp. 5, 36, 153). Rediker agrees but additionally
sees the slave ship as “central to a profound set of economic changes essential to the rise of capitalism” (Rediker,
2007, p. 43). This emphasis on the shipboard experience leads both to revive, at least tentatively, Orlando Patterson's
1960s‐era “social death” thesis (Brown, 2009; Patterson, 1982). For Smallwood, captives were “so socially
impoverished as to threaten annihilation of the self, the complete disintegration of personhood, suffering “unparal-
leled displacement” and “disorientation” (Smallwood, 2006, pp. 59–61, 125, 131). Rediker, citing Smallwood, argues
that the slave ship was the site of “a process of culture stripping,” preparatory to “new forms of life” (Rediker, 2007, p.
265). Others, particularly critics of the social death thesis, have seen the slave ship as a locus of bonding among Afri-
cans (Hawthorne, 2008). Regardless of one's perspective, both works deserve credit for making the mechanics of the
slave trade central to our understanding of colonial slavery (e.g., Head, 2013; Heywood & Thornton, 2007; Kelley,
2013, 2016; Mustakeem, 2016; O'Malley, 2014, 2017).
A more explicit criticism of the Database emerged in 2010 in response to an article by Eltis, Morgan, and
Richardson (2007) questioning the “Black Rice Thesis,” or the contention that enslaved Africans were responsible
for introducing the crop and the methods of cultivation to the Americas (Carney, 2001; Carney & Rosomoff, 2012;
Fields‐Black, 2008; Littlefield, 1981; Wood, 1974). Their case rested on several types of evidence, including slave
trade data that demonstrated that the Carolina Lowcountry received most of its early captives from the non‐rice
growing region of West Central Africa. The article prompted an exchange in the American Historical Review, with
supporters and dissenters weighing in. Two critics, Hall (2010) and Hawthorne (2010), highlighted the role of the
Database. Although both believed that slave trade data were useful and had compiled databases of their own, each
argued that the Voyages database in particular, based largely on shipping records, was too blunt an instrument to
address human qualities, such as ethnicity and culture. Although genetic evidence has emerged to suggest that Africa
was the source for Carolina Gold, the debate continues (Severson, 2018; Stokestad, 2007). The exchange, however,
did force the field to confront the limitations of slave trade data.
While most historians have accepted the Database in at least qualified terms, a few have ignored its estimates
altogether, especially concerning the number disembarked after the 1808 ban on the international slave trade. In
some cases, this may simply reflect a lack of awareness, while in others, it may be an expression of outright skepti-
cism. The figure offered by the “Estimates” section of the Voyages database suggests that just over 13,000 Africans
arrived in the United States after 1808. Tomich (2004), in arguing for a “Second Slavery,” suggested that 270,000
captives were imported into the United States after 1808, while Ernest Obadele‐Starks (2007) has proposed that
“as many as 786,500” Africans were landed in the United States after 1808. Both figures, however, rest on very
shaky foundations. Tomich cites figures from the 1930s that were rooted in little more than guesswork (Ernest
Obadele‐Starks, 2007, pp. 66–67). His footnotes ultimately trace back to W.E.B. Dubois's landmark study of 1896
(Dubois, 2007), by way of Lewis C. Gray's work on Southern agriculture (Gray, 1933). Without a reliable secondary
literature to guide him, Dubois had conflated the importation of enslaved Africans into the United States with the
participation of American merchants in the slave trade to Cuba, which spiked at various points in the nineteenth cen-
tury (Dubois, 2007, p. 123). While Dubois's work is still valuable, most modern scholars are well aware that his quan-
tifications are unreliable. Tomich, for his part, seems to have recognized the issue, omitting any mention of illegal US
slave importations from his more recent work (Tomich, 2018; Tomich & Zeuske, 2008). Obadele‐Starks, on the other
hand, cautions that his figure is based on no “formal” quantification (2007, p. 10). Inferring from his text, the estimate
seems to encompass not only Africans disembarked in the United States but also Africans transported aboard US‐
flagged ships to other parts of the Americas, small numbers people from the Caribbean taken to US ports, and even
American‐born slaves transported in the domestic maritime trade.
KELLEY 5 of 8

Most historians in the field would agree that the true figure is much closer to 13,000 than to 270,000, let alone
786,000. There is simply no evidence to suggest that many Africans arrived in the nineteenth century. There is, more-
over, every reason to believe that such a large population would have left an evidentiary trail. Recent studies of clus-
ters of illegally imported Africans in nineteenth‐century Texas and Alabama have demonstrated that despite their
status as contraband, Africans left many traces in probate records, plantation records, and court documents; in run-
away advertisements and travelers' accounts; in Freedmen's Bureau records; and in the federal censuses of 1870 and
1880 (with the latter recording not only the birthplace of each person enumerated but also that of their parents). If
hundreds of thousands of Africans really were landed in the United States after 1808, there would be ample record
of their presence (Diouf, 2007; Eltis, 2008; Kelley, 2008; Kelley & Lovejoy, 2016). That is emphatically not to say that
Americans were innocent when it came to slave trading. As historians such as Leonardo Marques (2016) and Randy L.
Sparks (2017) have demonstrated, American merchants and sailors were deeply involved in the transportation of cap-
tives to Brazil and Cuba. It is clear now that the number of captives carried by Americans to Latin America far
surpassed the number imported into the United States. In fact, it is this very distinction between participation in
the carriage of captives to other markets and the importation of captives to the United States that has led to so much
confusion over the years.
A final response to the abstraction of the Database has been what might be called the “biographical turn.” Since
2000, a number of biographical, autobiographical, and microhistorical accounts have appeared, seeking implicitly or
explicitly to personalize the statistics (Bryant, 2015; Kelley, 2016; Sparks, 2004, 2016). Several existing narratives
by Africans have been republished with new interpretive material, along with a few “new” ones (Alryyes, 2011; Grif-
fin, 2009; Johnston, 2012; Law & Lovejoy, 2001; Winter, 2004). Surely, the best known of these is Zora Neale
Hurston's long‐unpublished manuscript based on her 1927 interviews with Cudjo Lewis, one of the last Africans to
arrive in North America as a slave (Hurston, 2018). But one narrative in particular, that of Gustavus Vassa, has been
the subject of great debate, ever since Vincent Carretta found his birthplace listed as “Carolina” in two separate archi-
val sources (Carretta, 2005). The strongest responses have come from Africanists Paul E. Lovejoy (2006) and James
Sweet (2009) both of whom pointed out that there are many possible explanations for why an African might have
given different answers to questions of nativity. Both also stressed that identities among diasporic Africans were
multi‐layered and contingent.
At this writing, all signs point to the continued centrality of Voyages, though perhaps not as the Database. And the
compilers of the Database, it must be said, have been generally aware of its limitations. Over the past 2 years, plans
have been made to incorporate Voyages into Enslaved, a projected network of slavery‐related databases. Associated
databases include Freedom Narratives, a collection of over 600 African testimonies from the era of the slave trade,
and Liberated Africans, a database of over 100,000 men, women, and children who were removed from slave ships
during the nineteenth century (Anderson et al., 2013; Nwokeji & Eltis, 2002; Schwarz, 2010). Another related data-
base will contain biographical details for the merchants and mariners who operated the slave trade. These, along with
other slavery‐related collections, will all be mutually searchable, in the hope that connecting data with human stories
of will offer a more complete view of African agency and suffering.
It is always hazardous to predict where future research will go, but two basic conclusions seem plausible. First,
Voyages, in combination with additional databases, will almost certainly remain at the heart of the field. There is sim-
ply no going back to the hazy generalizations about “Africa” that were once so common. A generation of historians
has now become habituated to thinking about Africa in regional terms (at the very least), which in turn suggests that
interest in African history will grow as researchers strive to understand the patterns revealed in the data. Second—
and perhaps ironically—we can probably anticipate a less overtly quantitative approach to the study of the slave trade
as the Database articulates with other, more qualitative databases and archives. Within a few years, we can expect to
be able to search and sort biographical materials for thousands of Africans involved the slave trade by region of
embarkation and region of departure, as well as over time. In addition to informing our understanding of the slave
trade, these materials will likely foster the study of the multiple trades that comprised the whole. If that does happen,
it will be the Database that started it all.
6 of 8 KELLEY

ORCID
Sean M. Kelley https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2419-516X

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AU THOR BIOGRAPHY
Originally from San Francisco, California, Sean M. Kelley is a Senior Lecturer in Global History at the University of
Essex, where he specializes in the history of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. He has published two books,
the most recent being The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare: A Journey into Captivity from Sierra Leone to South Car-
olina (UNC Press, 2016). He is currently working on a book about North American merchants and the transatlan-
tic slave trade from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.

How to cite this article: Kelley SM. DB or not DB: Writing the history of the slave trade to North America in
the era of the database. History Compass. 2019;17:e12530. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12530