[Many thanks to Michael O’Neal (Slavery, Smallholding and Tourism) for bringing this item to our attention.] Christy DeSmith (The Harvard Gazette) writes about SlaveVoyages, a groundbreaking, publicly accessible digital tool for data on history’s largest slave trades, which gathers four decades of scholarship on more than 30,000 voyages and 200,000 people.
SlaveVoyages, a groundbreaking tool for data on history’s largest slave trades, is getting a new home.
Word of the project’s upcoming move was shared recently by Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. “I’m pleased to tell you today that the SlaveVoyages site, with all of its databases, will live in perpetuity here at Harvard University,” Gates announced at a conference dedicated to celebrating the open-access resource.
SlaveVoyages was the result of nearly four decades of scholarly contributions, with researchers from multiple institutions working painstakingly to digitize handwritten records from archives worldwide.
Today, its multisource dataset, currently housed at Rice University, features information on more than 30,000 slaving vessels that traversed the Atlantic between the 16th and 19th centuries. Also documented are details on nearly 221,000 individuals involved with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, including ship captains and the humans they trafficked.
The project’s website, launched in 2008 at Emory University, brings data to life with rich visualizations. A time-lapse animationtracks each of the individual voyages on a map of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. A pair of 18th-century French slaving ships, both bound for present-day Haiti, have been recreated in 3D video based on surviving drawings.
As SlaveVoyages expanded, the Hutchins Center provided key funding along with the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Emory University. Stepping up to help support the project in its new home is the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative (H&LS).
“Education is central to the mission of the initiative,” said Sara Bleich, vice provost for special projects and the leader of H&LS. “SlaveVoyages’ databases build on the curiosity of Harvard students who catalyzed the University’s ongoing reckoning with its ties to slavery. By cofunding the project with the Hutchins Center, the initiative can help amplify knowledge-sharing and visibility, empower scholars and students worldwide, while also reaffirming our commitment to truth.” [. . .]
For full article, see https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/04/slave-trade-database-moving-to-harvard/
[Many thanks to Michael O’Neal (Slavery, Smallholding and Tourism) for bringing this item to our attention.] Christy DeSmith (The Harvard Gazette) writes about SlaveVoyages, a groundbreaking, publicly accessible digital tool for data on history’s largest slave trades, which gathers four decades of scholarship on more than 30,000 voyages and 200,000 people. SlaveVoyages, a groundbreaking tool
