It quickly became a widely used research and teaching tool, with more than 2,500 users visiting the SlaveVoyages website on an average day. The database also quickly attracted contributions from additional users. Initially, the database’s coverage focused on the trafficking of African-born individuals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most of whom were recent survivors of the infamous Middle Passage across the Atlantic. By early 2022, however, major new datasets were added expanding coverage into the nineteenth century to document forced movements of enslaved people born in the Americas, most notably in the domestic slave trades of Brazil and the United States. As of this writing, the database has grown to contain more than 28,000 trafficking voyages, which moved well more than half a million enslaved people from one port in the Americas to another.
A major new grant to fund the project from 2023-2026 ensures that such growth will continue, but it also poses challenges for the database’s many users. The database is evolving, and its coverage is still incomplete. In this presentation, Borucki and O’Malley will describe the research contained in the project so far, discuss the known gaps in its coverage and plans to address them, and invite contributions and suggestions from scholars interested in the project.