The U.S. Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1644–1867: An Assessment

Abstract

Last year was the bicentenary of the abolition of the African slave trade by the United States and 2008 is the bicentenary of that law going into effect. But there are perhaps better reasons to reconsider the patterns of the U.S. side of the African slave trade. More African migrants have arrived in the United States since 1992 than during the whole slave trade era. Moreover, the moment at which the second African diaspora overtakes the first in terms of size and diversity coincides with a technological revolution. Digitization and the World Wide Web have combined with an established computer revolution to provide historians easy access to documents, and, more important, the power to digest and manipulate the information they contain that is way beyond what their predecessors could ever have imagined. The impact of technology is particularly significant for a subject where the quality and quantity of surviving records is generally very strong and the geographic scatter of the documents immense. While there is much still to be discovered about the U.S. trade in Africans, we can now throw major new light on its rise and fall, the people involved, its size and direction, and a great range of other issues, many of which are not at all quantitative. The recent launch of the new transatlantic slave trade database (at www. slavevoyages.org) permits an overall reassessment of colonial American and U.S. involvement in the slave trade over the more than three centuries when,