Considering the Slave Trade

History and Memory

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3479907
AutoresBernard Bailyn (autor de correspondencia)
Año2001
Volumen58
Número1
Páginas245
Fecha de publicación2001-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698
EditorialJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2674426
OpenAlexW2325158224
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas11

I have been wondering about some way to express the importance of the Du Bois Institute slave trade dataset on which most of these nine essays are based. Perhaps by analogy. Astronomers knew of the vast range of cosmic phenomena before the Hubble Space Telescope existed, but that extraordinarily perceptive eye, coursing freely above the earth's atmosphere, has led to a degree of precision and a breadth of vision never dreamed of before and has revealed, and continues to reveal, not only new information but also new questions never broached before. So the Du Bois slave trade database, with its tracings of 27,233 Atlantic slave trade voyages, three quarters of which succeeded in disembarking slaves in the Americas, representing more than twothirds of all Atlantic slave voyages, has made possible a precision and breadth of documentation in the history of the African diaspora no one had thought possible before and raises a host of questions never approached before. And also, it must be said, it suffered glitches in its development not unlike those that afflicted the space telescope. Just as the Hubble's lens proved faulty and had to be repaired before it had the expected clarity, so the CD-ROM on which the slave trade data were inscribed needed months, even years, of adjustment and correction before it reached the state of accuracy and procedural clarity it now has. At its first public appearance, at Harvard's Atlantic History Workshop in April I998, the CD-ROM itself could not be used at all, since it was still being cobbled together somewhere in Colorado, and so for that initial public performance the resourceful team of Eltis, Richardson, Behrendt, and Klein particularly Eltis and Behrendt had to funnel the data through an SSPS program, the relation of which to the nonperforming CD-ROM only they understood. Nevertheless, the news, or some of it, came through that computerized squint clearly enough. The sheer scope and comprehensiveness of the database became vivid even then. Now the finished CD-ROM, with its data susceptible of the subtlest analysis, is publicly available. While the information it contains is not complete, as the compilers candidly explain (it is, for example, fuller on the British data than on the Portuguese, stronger on the eighteenth century than on the seventeenth), it is yet a record so full, so flexible in its manipulation, and so precise in what it contains that the whole subject, not only of the trade in slaves but slavery

Astronomy · CLARITY · COSMIC cancer database · Diaspora · Genealogy · Inscribed figure · Political science · Space (punctuation) · Computer Science · History · History and Developments in Astronomy · Law