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Considering the Slave Trade: History and Memory
Bernard Bailyn
| 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 two-thirds 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. |
1 |
| 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 1998, 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 itself—its African origins,
its demography and ethnography, its economy, its politics, and its
role in the development of the Western Hemisphere—has been
transformed. The exploitation of this resource has just begun, and
as the authors show time and again in the essays above, there are
as yet as many questions as answers. |
2 |
| What
strikes one first in reading these papers drawn from the database
and in thinking back to the other presentations at the 1998 Williamsburg
conference on the dataset in which they originated, is the sheer
force of numbers. I recall the first crude effort at such quantification
forty years ago—it was merely punch-card tabulations—and
marvel at how sophisticated the numerical calculations can be and
at what can now be perceived just by assembling the numbers. |
3 |
| For
numbers (if I may put it this way) count. There is much that numbers
alone, sheer quantities, can reveal. |
. . . |
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