Voyages: the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database

The 2019 version of the transatlantic slave trade database contains 36,002 voyages compared to 34,940 in 2008 (and 27,233 in the 1999 version of the database that appeared on CD-ROM). Since 2008, several thousand corrections have been made and additional information added. Thus 284 of the 2008 voyages have been deleted either because we found they had been entered twice, or because we discovered that a voyage was not involved in the transatlantic slave trade. For example voyage id 16772, the Pye, Captain Adam, turned out to have carried slaves from Jamaica to the Chesapeake, but obtained its captives in Jamaica, not Africa. Offsetting the deletions are 1,345 voyages added on the basis of new information. Further, many voyages that are common to both 2008 and 2019 versions of the database now contain information that was not available in 2008 (see table 1 of “Understanding the Database” for the current summary). The 2019 version has 274 variables, compared with 98 in the Voyages Database available online. Users interested in working with this larger data set can download it in a file formatted for use with SPSS software. Because some users may find it useful to view data as it existed in earlier versions, the database as it was in 1999, 2008 and 2010 can also be selected for download. A codebook describing all variable names, variable labels, and values of the expanded dataset is available as a pdf document. With only a few exceptions, it retains variable names in the original 1999 CD-ROM version.