The Intra-American Slave Trade Database, created by Alex Borucki (University of California Irvine) and Gregory O’Malley (UC Santa Cruz), documents more than 27,000 trafficking voyages from one part of the Americas to another from 1550 to 1860. The three-year project “Routes of Enslavement in the Americas,” funded by the UC Office of the President is expanding this collaboration to a network of scholars and students to strengthen the study of this traffic and to increase the database’s coverage. With Sabrina Smith (UC Merced), they are targeting three core areas or expansion: 1) further research on Caribbean migrations (coerced and free) of African-descended people between islands and with the mainland Americas. 2) interregional movements of African and African-descended captives within colonial New Spain including territories outside of today's Mexico (e.g. US Southwest), 3) investigation of the Black Pacific by tracking coastal trafficking routes involving ports in the seaside from California to Chile.

Chaired by Sabrina Smith, this panel will examine the first theme of this project: the broad Caribbean maritime spaces and the trafficking of enslaved people between French, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, and British colonies, as well as in the United States. Since this is a core region of coverage for the existing Intra-American database, the goal of this session is to expand collaboration and to develop new research strategies to address existing gaps. We hope to outreach to new collaborators, beyond the panelists, to plan for new research directions.

Alex Borucki and Greg O’Malley will present on the existing coverage of the Intra-American Slave Trade Database for the Caribbean and surrounding mainland but focusing on the gaps (the “known unknowns” coming from other sources and recent scholarship), for instance, on the Caribbean traffic involving French colonies and slavers, the role of the Danish West Indies, and the post-1808 traffic related to the British Caribbean the United States.

Jorge Felipe González (University of Texas, San Antonio) will present on the patterns of the Spanish Caribbean slave routes from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. While centered on Cuba, the paper will also cover the late traffic from the Danish West Indies to Puerto Rico, and from there to Cuba, as well as the remnants of the French traffic from Guadeloupe and Martinique to Cuba until the early 1830s, including scattered cases of illegal trafficking from Cuba to U.S. New Orleans and Galveston.

Manuel Covo (UC Santa Barbara) will examine French language sources on the traffic of captives to (and from) Saint Domingue during the Haitian revolution, connecting French slave routes with merchants and mariners from the United States as well as the Spanish, British, and Danish Caribbean.

Jennie K. Williams (University of Virginia) will expand upon her previous work, which tracked the coastwise traffic of enslaved people to New Orleans, by examining the broader maritime domestic slave trade. Her paper will demonstrate the capillarity of the internal traffic by outlining the forced transportation of enslaved people to and from dozens of ports along the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coastlines.