Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database

Director: David Eltis (Emory University)

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, originally published as a CD-ROM in 1999, has been available in a new and greatly expanded format on an open access website since December, 2008 and is periodically updated as new information becomes available. It is located at http://www.slavevoyages.org. It includes detailed information on 35,000 transatlantic slave trading voyages that occurred between 1520 and 1866 as well as estimates of the overall size and direction of the trade. Detailed personal information on over 90,000 Africans removed from captured slave ships in the nineteenth century, including their African names, is accessible at http://www.african-origins.org. David Eltis and David Richardson’s Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven, 2010) draws heavily on slavevoyages.org and african-origins.org. Slavevoyages.org has recently completed a recode and is now proceeding with additional development that will provide access to a database on the intra-American traffic. This threeyear project, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Emory University, the Universities of California at Irvine and Santa Cruz, and the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, will underwrite the site’s sustainability over the next decade and will be completed in 2018. Further development on identification of the people involved in the transatlantic slave around the Atlantic basins is also underway supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.