A database for slavery tells only part of the story.
Over the four-century trans-Atlantic slave trade, an estimated 12.5 million people were captured and forced to endure a harrowing journey from the west coast of Africa to shores across the Western Hemisphere. Of the approximately 10.7 million who survived, a life of subjugation awaited. |
As the columnist Jamelle Bouie explains in his powerful Sunday Review cover story, we know this much because researchers have spent decades painstakingly detailing information about each ship, voyage and individual embroiled in this ugly history of human trafficking. Much of this information can be found on the SlaveVoyages database, a public website containing data on the trade. |
"It is hard to exaggerate the significance of this work," Jamelle writes. "But no data, no matter how precise, is complete." What is lost when individuals are compiled as columns on a spreadsheet? Who is missing from this data and why? There are "ethical questions that must be asked and answered when dealing with the quantitative study of human atrocity," he writes. "With the history of slavery, the quantitative and the qualitative must inform each other." |
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