Acknowledgements

In 1979 during my thesis defense at the University of Rochester, Gene Genovese commented with some justification that my work read not so much as a thesis, but rather as an appendix to a thesis. Mercifully, he signed off anyway. Several books and many articles later, if Gene’s remark continues to resonate it is because of YouTube, and especially my appreciation of the dazzling videos of the late Swedish epidemiologist, Hans Rosling and his family in support of his worldview that “The world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.”Footnote ¹ In no field does this aphorism resonate more than in studies of slavery and slave trading in global history.

A long-time association with www.slavevoyages.org with its now five databases currently containing details of 212,661 people, over half of whom are African or African American, and 66,800 voyages that carried enslaved people, inevitably means incurring huge debts. The late Philip Curtin started my journey by donating 2,313 IBM punch cards (one per voyage) shortly after he published his 1969 Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, while at the same time Herbert S. Klein was beginning to establish databases from the archives of the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino in Lisbon, and the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid. Stephen D. Behrendt, the late David Richardson, and the late Manolo Florentino became principals in the process of vastly broadening the range of British and Brazilian voyages by donating the fruits of their own archival labors and helping to shape the user interface that allowed the public to access their data. Steve has sent a steady stream of corrections and new references over the decades. In the crucial years spent moving the project to the web, Martin Halbert and Katherine Skinner of the Emory Library were central to winning a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) award. Between 2008 when the transatlantic slave trade database went live on the web and 2011 when www.african-origins.org was launched, the project began its turn from an exclusive focus on the voyages of slave ships to the people on or managing those voyages. This shift of emphasis could not have happened without Richard Anderson, Nafees Khan, Ugo Nwokeji, Kwesi J. DeGraft-Hanson, Daniel Barros Domingues da Silva, Olatunji Ojo, Henry B. Lovejoy, Liz Milewicz, Marcy Alexander, but above all Phil Misevich, who led the way on the African names project and has done most of the editing of users’ contributions to the language identifications of African names over the last twelve years. Data for maps in Chapter 7 is largely his work.

In a real sense, www.slavevoyages.org and www.african-origins.org, with which it is now merged, were not the creation of any single scholar or institution. The consortium that now maintains the site with their financial contributions comprises ten institutions in addition to Emory, but this is essentially a stewardship. The real “owners” are rather the community of scholars who work on the Atlantic slave trades and the interested public that use, contribute to, and exploit their work. Contributors of data to voyages and African names number in the thousands and cannot all be named here. Funding agencies that underpinned this activity are in chronological order the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Casa de Rui Barbosa Foundation of Rio de Janeiro, and the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. Henry Louis Gates, Randall Burkett, and the late Barbara Solow provided a home for the development of the transatlantic slave trade database at Harvard in 1992, and ever since, Professor Gates has provided critically important periodic interim funding, as well as advice on content. I cannot imagine what the site would look like without his thirty years of support. And while most of this paragraph is about www.slavevoyages.org, I find it impossible to separate out work on the voyages site from the writings on the pages that follow here.

The addition of the intra-American slave trade database has had a major impact on our understanding of the Black Atlantic and, more specifically, many of the arguments made in the following pages. This, too, could not have happened without the careful work of Alex Borucki and Greg O’Malley. Dave Wheat has kept up a stream of new information about voyages in the early transatlantic slave trade over the last decade, as well as commenting on the complete manuscript. Jorge Felipe and Marial Iglesias Utset have guided me through the still widely underappreciated and massive slave trade to Cuba. Leonardo Marques has navigated me through the scholarly shoals of the South Atlantic historiography. Jane Hooper was always on hand to answer queries about the Indian Ocean world. Jelmer Vos contributed masses of slave-trading data from the AHU in Lisbon and the BNA in London, and for two decades has given insightful advice. Craig Perry took a course with me on Atlantic slavery at Emory, yet over the years since I have learned more from him about medieval slavery than he did from me in that course.

I have benefited from the expertise of many readers. Jim Walvin not only read the complete manuscript but gave me sage advice on publishers. Richard Anderson gave Chapter 7 a particularly careful reading. The late David Brion Davis commented on a preliminary version of Chapter 6. John Thornton reviewed the whole manuscript. Both he and Ewout Frankema gave invaluable comments on Chapter 5. I have been especially lucky to collaborate with Nick Radburn, another who read the complete manuscript and whose influence in this work is clearest in Chapter 4. Pieter Emmer also corrected many errors as he, too, engaged with the complete 520 typescript pages.

Both the site and my own work have benefited enormously from a close association with programmer Domingos Delmonica that started in Emory when he was completing his PhD and continued after his return to Brazil a decade ago to establish his own business. Designers and software engineers Yang Li, videographer, Steve Bransford at Emory, Jane Webster of Newcastle University, author of the best book on this topic and John Mulligan at Rice have not only made the site attractive and usable but also brought to my attention unsuspected elements of the data. The Emory Center for Digital Scholarship has supported all my endeavors even though I moved to emeritus status twelve years ago. Beyond the call of duty, these included the hospitality of the co-director, Allen Tullos and his wife, Cynthia Blakeley after I moved from Atlanta. Their advice on polishing my completed manuscript was critical. When I moved to Vancouver I was warmly welcomed by the late Danny Vickers, then chair of the History Department of the University of British Columbia. The collegial UBC scholarly community and especially the excellent Library made the final preparation of the manuscript relatively painless.

Two scholars especially have been constant and supportive companions in my own journey of discovery. Paul Lachance worked with me on the CD-ROM and had two fellowships at Emory while we moved the data to the web. He was involved in every major decision about the design of the site in its Emory phase, and prepared the imputed values and the estimates page prior to the movement of the project to Rice. His SPSS skills are simply better than mine. We have, in addition, coauthored a series of papers and he has read and improved much of my sole-authored work prior to publication. We lived for two decades separated by a short bike ride along the Ottawa Rideau canal path. Such proximity turned into one of the foundation stones of this study.

The second of the two goes back even further. This book is the first of my written works since 1975 that the late Stan Engerman was, for health reasons, not able to read in draft format several times over. For this reason, I feel as much trepidation over this publication as I did my first – which happened before I met him. His knowledge of and contribution to the scholarship of slavery was peerless, but just as important was his talent for phrasing criticisms in a nonconfrontational manner. Apart from his own huge contribution to economic history, no scholar has been as active, astute, or generous a critic as he has over the past half century. I cannot better the words of Peter Coclanis when he wrote, “the work of almost every student and scholar of economic history has been improved because Stan Engerman has read or commented on it. If any scholar in any field merits disciplinary canonization, it is he.”Footnote ²

Errors, needless to say, are my own.