Construction of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database: Sources and Methods
Introduction
It is difficult to believe in the first decade of the twenty-first century that just over two centuries ago, for those Europeans who thought about the issue, the shipping of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic was morally indistinguishable from shipping textiles, wheat, or even sugar. Our reconstruction of a major part of this migration experience covers an era in which there was massive technological change (steamers were among the last slave ships), as well as very dramatic shifts in perceptions of good and evil. Just as important perhaps were the relations between the Western and non-Western worlds that the trade both reflected and encapsulated. Slaves constituted the most important reason for contact between Europeans and Africans for nearly two centuries. The shipment of slaves from Africa was related to the demographic disaster consequent to the meeting of Europeans and Amerindians, which greatly reduced the numbers of Amerindian laborers and raised the demand for labor drawn from elsewhere, particularly Africa. As Europeans colonized the Americas, a steady stream of European peoples migrated to the Americas between 1492 and the early nineteenth century. But what is often overlooked is that, before 1820, perhaps three times as many enslaved Africans crossed the Atlantic as Europeans. This was the largest transoceanic migration of a people until that day, and it provided the Americas with a crucial labor force for their own economic development. The slave trade is thus a vital part of the history of some millions of Africans and their descendants who helped shape the modern Americas culturally as well as in the material sense.
