April 25-26, 1998

This two-day Workshop was devoted to analysis and interpretation of the Atlantic slave trade, focused on the new database of 27,224 slave voyages, 1562-1867, compiled under the sponsorship of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. This compilation, now in machine-readable form to be published on CD-ROM by the Cambridge University Press, is the product of a team of scholars—David Eltis of Queens University, Canada, David Richardson of Hull University, England, Herbert Klein of Columbia University, and Stephen Behrendt, now at the University of Victoria, New Zealand. The Introduction to the CD-ROM, now scheduled for publication in mid-1999, has been made available online by Cambridge University Press in an Acrobat format. The data set, representing voyages by all the major transatlantic carriers, covers approximately two-thirds of all voyages in the history of the trade and includes characteristics of the vessels, numbers of slaves, ports of departure and arrival, crew size, and other significant variables.

Saturday, April 25