| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

David Eltis et al. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2000. $195.00.

The age of digital publishing has arrived for the history of the Atlantic slave trade with the publication of a CD-ROM that contains the records of 27,233 slaving voyages made between 1595 and 1866. Editors David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein are prominent scholars with an impressive collective record of publications on the quantification of the slave trade. The CD-ROM makes available data that summarize research in this field over the last twenty years. More importantly, the CD-ROM allows the user to command the data from this digital archive with the click of a mouse. While studies of the slave trade have utilized computer models to analyze data for decades, the publication of this CD-ROM breaks new ground by making a digital database available to scholars and the public. It seems a foregone conclusion that the database will be the new benchmark for quantitative studies of the slave trade. 1

Users of the CD-ROM should be aware of its limitations. An eighty-nine-page booklet describes the assumptions and methodology that went into its creation. The editors argue that the database contains approximately seventy percent of all slave voyages made after 1600, based on what they call "scholarly consensus figures" of 11.4 million slave departures and ten million arrivals in this period (p. 5). Based on different assumptions about the size of the slave trade, the percentage included rises or falls. This fact is fundamental to understanding the results of queries to the database. No query will produce numbers equal to the scholarly consensus. On average, all queries will give numbers approaching two-thirds to three-quarters of those totals. . . .

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