Digital Approaches to the History of the Atlantic Slave Trade

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daryle Williams
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Digital Tools ◽  
Humanities Computing ◽  
Cd Rom ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
Digital Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
The 1960S

The robust, sustained interest in the history of the transatlantic slave trade has been a defining feature of the intersection of African studies and digital scholarship since the advent of humanities computing in the 1960s. The pioneering work of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, first made widely available in CD-ROM in 1999, is one of several major projects to use digital tools in the research and analysis of the Atlantic trade from the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth century. Over the past two decades, computing technologies have also been applied to the exploration of African bondage outside the maritime Atlantic frame. In the 2010s, Slave Voyages (the online successor to the original Slave Trade Database compact disc) joined many other projects in and outside the academy that deploy digital tools in the reconstruction of the large-scale structural history of the trade as well as the microhistorical understandings of individual lives, the biography of notables, and family ancestry.

scholarly journals Slaves and Slavery in Kingston, 1770–1815

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (S28) ◽  
pp. 39-65
Author(s):  
Trevor Burnard
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
British America ◽  
History Of ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
The Town

AbstractHistorians have mostly ignored Kingston and its enslaved population, despite it being the fourth largest town in the British Atlantic before the American Revolution and the town with the largest enslaved population in British America before emancipation. The result of such historiographical neglect is a lacuna in scholarship. In this article, I examine one period of the history of slavery in Kingston, from when the slave trade in Jamaica was at its height, from the early 1770s through to the early nineteenth century, and then after the slave trade was abolished but when slavery in the town became especially important. One question I especially want to explore is how Kingston maintained its prosperity even after its major trade – the Atlantic slave trade – was stopped by legislative fiat in 1807.

The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade

1981 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 340
Author(s):  
David Northrup ◽  
Henry A. Gemery ◽  
Jan S. Hogendorn
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
History Of ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

SLAVERY AND ITS TRANSFORMATION IN THE KINGDOM OF KONGO: 1491–1800

2009 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
LINDA M. HEYWOOD
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

ABSTRACTStudies of slavery in Africa during the period of the Atlantic slave trade have largely ignored questions of how political processes affected enslavement during the period and also the extent to which notions of who could be enslaved were modified. Documentation for the kingdom of Kongo during the 1500s to 1800 allows us to explore how the trade was sustained and the social and political dynamics behind it. In a state that consistently exported large numbers of slaves throughout the period of the trade, kings of Kongo at first observed quite a pronounced distinction between foreign-born captives subject to enslavement and sale in the Atlantic trade and freeborn Kongos who were largely proctected from enslavement and sale overseas. In time, however, the distinctions that separated foreign-born and Kongos fell apart as later political authorities and others disregarded such distinctions and all Kongos became subject to enslavement and sale overseas. This was a product of internal Kongo conflicts, which witnessed the collapse of institutions and the redefinition of polity, what it meant to be a citizen or freeborn, and who could be enslaved.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History

2013 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
African History ◽  
Current State ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Colonial Encounter ◽  
Do So ◽  
State Of The Field

This book critically reflects upon the current state of the field of modern African history. It focuses on the history of the continent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although also looks back to the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Its aim is to consider the evolution of the field and to set out where, after fifty years of sustained research, it has arrived. To do so, each of its twenty-six chapters explores a particular theme, organized in five sections: Key Themes in African History; The Colonial Encounter; Religion and Belief; Society and Economy; and Arts and the Media.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
pp. 171-180
Author(s):  
Victoria Fortuna
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Military Dictatorship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

The epilogue examines the 2011 human rights march in Buenos Aires on the National Day of Memory for Truth and Justice (Día Nacional de la Memoria por la Verdad y la Justicia), the anniversary of the start of the last military dictatorship (1976–83). It analyzes the author’s participation with Oduduwá Danza Afroamericana (Oduduwá Afro-American Dance), a group that brought together scores of volunteers to perform choreography based in Orishá dance. Orishá dance’s Yoruban origins and connection to the African diaspora made it an unexpected addition to the demonstration given the construction of Argentina as exceptionally white among Latin American nations. The group strove to connect Orishá dance’s link to the violence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade with Argentina’s history of political disappearance, as well as the country’s own violence against Afro-Argentines. Oduduwá’s project reiterates the importance of dance as both a political practice and one linked to memory.

The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade.

1981 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 286
Author(s):  
Robert R. Davis ◽  
Henry A. Gemery ◽  
Jan S. Hogendorn
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
History Of ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

Many Seasons Gone: Memory, History, and the Atlantic Slave Trade

2009 ◽  
Vol 83 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 99-104
Author(s):  
Ted Maris-Wolf
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Ayi Kwei Armah ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

[First paragraph]African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame. Anne C. Bailey. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005. 289 pp. (Cloth US $ 26.00)Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. Saidiya Hartman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. xi + 270 pp. (Cloth US $ 25.00)In Two Thousand Seasons, the great Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah describes the effects of centuries of European exploitation and violence in Africa and the alienation and death that separated Ghanaians in 1973 (when the book was published) from those before them. “Pieces cut off from their whole are nothing but dead fragments,” he laments. “From the unending stream of our remembrance the harbingers of death break off meaningless fractions. Their carriers bring us this news of shards. Their message: behold this paltriness; this is all your history” (Armah 1973:2). It is this seeming paltriness, this history of meaningless fractions that Anne C. Bailey and Saidiya Hartman explore in their latest works, identifying and mending shards of memory and written and oral fragments into recognizable and meaningful forms. As with Armah in Two Thousand Seasons, for Bailey and Hartman, “the linking of those gone, ourselves here, those coming ... it is that remembrance that calls us” (Armah 1973:xiii). Both of them, haunted by remembrance and driven by a personal quest for reconciliation with the past and a scholarly desire for the truth, are unwilling to accept the past as passed, or to settle for the scattered silence that so often substitutes for the history of Africans and those of the diaspora.

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