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The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A New Census
Barbara L. Solow
| "NO intellectual
passions are stronger than those involved in achieving precision,
standards and conventions. The stable results of those struggles
appear matter-of-fact, but realising them is an emotional, political
and messy business. Scientific agreement on the value of the last
decimal place, the last second of arc, the starting meridian of
longitude, the relative accuracy of naked-eye or telescopic sights
on the sextant, the value of a foot, ounce and pound, and the calibration
of the thermometer mobilises passions and political energies on
a heroic scale. Those who mean to achieve precise scientific representations
and to make them widely credible must, for these reasons, be as
good at social engineering as at observing, recording and measuring. |
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| "Knowledge
of the apparent and proper motions of a comet through the sky or
of the duration of a solar eclipse, for example, were collective
accomplishments, and so, too, were reliable star-charts and maps
of geomagnetic variation. To produce such things, and to make them
credible, you had to know something not only about the natural world
but also about other observers, their skill and their integrity.
You had to know who was a skilful and honest observer, you had to
get them to communicate their observations, you had to bring these
observations together in one place, and represent them in such a
way that they could circulate robustly in a range of scientific
and practical communities."1
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These words come from a review of a biography of Edmond Halley. We know Halley's name today from the comet, but his importance goes much beyond that. It was owing to him that Newton published the Principia, something that Newton acknowledged in his preface; Halley prepared charts, tables, and maps of stars, comets, and tides; he invented isolines; he constructed life tables and has been called the father of modern life insurance. He even invented a diving bell to salvage a sunken treasure ship for the Royal African Company and went down in it himself. |
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We cannot compare the achievement of the Du Bois Institute transatlantic slave trade database to the achievements of Edmond Halley. None of us associated with the project has ever gone down in a diving bell. But what Steven Shapin says about Halley's work is equally applicable to ours. |
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Every census is simultaneously a social construct and an empirical statement about the real world, objective and subjective at the same time. In an earlier incarnation I did a lot of work on Irish economic history, and I learned this lesson first-hand. Whenever the English declined to do anything to alleviate conditions in Ireland, they appointed another royal commission and ordered surveys and collected vast quantities of detailed data. The result is extraordinarily rich archival sources for nineteenth-century Ireland. |
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