UC Santa Cruz has
joined a newly formed consortium of institutions to ensure the preservation,
stability, and future development of what has become the single most widely
used online resource for anyone interested in slavery across the Atlantic
world.
The SlaveVoyages database, previously hosted at Emory University, will now function as a cooperative academic collaboration through a contractual agreement among six institutions: Emory University, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture at William & Mary, Rice University, and three campuses of the University of California that will assume a joint membership — UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine and UC Berkeley.
“Twenty years and four million viewers after its first appearance as a CD-ROM, the future of 48,000 slaving ventures recorded in SlaveVoyages is finally secured for posterity," noted Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center, a consortium member.
Gates has described SlaveVoyages.org as “a gold mine” and “one of the most dramatically significant research projects in the history of African studies, African American studies, and the history of world slavery itself.”
SlaveVoyages.org is
the culmination of both independent and collaborative work by a
multidisciplinary team of international scholars and historians —
including UC Santa Cruz history professor Greg O’Malley.
He helped create the
Intra-American Slave Trade Database, which was added to www.slavevoyages.org as a companion to the much
older Transatlantic Slave Trade Database in 2019. It documents more than 11,500
trading voyages that moved enslaved people from one port in the Americas to
another.
O’Malley compiled the foundational data set of about 7,600 voyages for the Intra-American Database in research for his first book Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807, and then partnered with UC Irvine professor Alex Borucki and other scholars to expand the coverage to all of the Americas and take the project online.
“One powerful thing that the Intra-American Slave Trade Database reveals is just how ubiquitous slavery was in the Americas,” O’Malley noted. “We don’t just document voyages to the obvious places we all think of associated with slavery, such as Virginia, South Carolina, or Jamaica. The Intra-American database shows voyages delivering enslaved people as far north as Newfoundland and as far south as Argentina.”
“All of the original 13 colonies that would become the United States appear in the database receiving shipments of enslaved people. And ships registered in every colony traded slaves elsewhere as well. So slavery was not just a southern problem or atrocity. It was an American one, and I mean ‘America’ as both the entire U.S. and the entire hemisphere. Slavery was virtually everywhere in the Americas, in varying degrees, and white colonists across all the colonies profited from slave trading.”
O’Malley serves on the Operational Committee for the whole website, which reviews data submitted by researchers for inclusion, responds to the many inquiries from the media and the website’s users, and plans future developments. In that capacity, he was involved in the outreach to other institutions about consortium membership, meeting with staff at the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture as part of recruiting them to join…
Full news release at https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/uc-santa-cruz-joins-new-consortium-ensure-future-slavevoyages-database
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