Towards a Digital Archive of the Atlantic Slave Trades: Unlocking the Records of the South Sea Company
Lead Research Organisation:
LANCASTER UNIVERSITY
Department Name: History
Abstract
Between 1500 and 1867, 12.5 million Africans were forced aboard slave ships and transported across the Atlantic Ocean; over half a million people who survived the Middle Passage undertook another seaborne 'Final Passage' within the Americas. These world-shaping forced migrations generated an immense quantity of archival material that is scattered across the globe and written in multiple languages. But accessing, understanding, and interpreting this material is presently difficult, especially for marginalized people who lack the resources to reach archives in Europe and North America.
This project aims to democratize access to the archives of the Atlantic slave trades by employing innovative digital methods. It will create the Digital Archive of the Atlantic Slave Trades (DAAST) an open-access digital resource that will enable users to access enormous quantities of manuscript material drawn from libraries around the world. Those records will be made comprehensible by using handwritten text recognition and machine translation technologies. Research description framework approaches will enable archival materials to be semantically linked, and tied to Slave Voyages (SV), a powerful dataset of the Atlantic slave trades. The DAAST will consequently enable users to comprehend how the trade operated; the experiences of its victims; and the motivations of its perpetrators, while simultaneously grasping the trade's size, complexity, and duration.
This project lays DAAST's foundations through a focus on Britain's South Sea Company (SSC)-one of the largest slaving entities in history. Founded in London in 1711, the SSC was soon after granted the asiento, the exclusive right to carry enslaved people to the Spanish Americas. Between 1713 and 1739, the SSC dragged forty-two thousand captives from Africa to the Americas; it shifted a further forty-eight thousand people from the British Caribbean to the Spanish Americas. Because of the SSC's key role in both trades, its voluminous records- which are distributed through archives in the United Kingdom, the US, and Spain-shed uniquely detailed light on the operation of the slave trade across the vastness of the Atlantic World.
In addition to enhancing efforts to research the slave trades' history, this project promises to have broader impacts on both slave trade studies and the Digital Humanities. By creating a new platform for making the archives of the slave trade accessible and comprehensible, this project will generate a resource that will grow exponentially and underpin generations of new scholarship. Researchers in other fields grappling with the challenges of making archival material available and comprehensible will also benefit by utilizing the methodologies pioneered through this project. Cultural institutions will be also be furnished with a powerful model that they can emulate as they seek to decolonize their collections by making them accessible to a global public via digital methods.
This project aims to democratize access to the archives of the Atlantic slave trades by employing innovative digital methods. It will create the Digital Archive of the Atlantic Slave Trades (DAAST) an open-access digital resource that will enable users to access enormous quantities of manuscript material drawn from libraries around the world. Those records will be made comprehensible by using handwritten text recognition and machine translation technologies. Research description framework approaches will enable archival materials to be semantically linked, and tied to Slave Voyages (SV), a powerful dataset of the Atlantic slave trades. The DAAST will consequently enable users to comprehend how the trade operated; the experiences of its victims; and the motivations of its perpetrators, while simultaneously grasping the trade's size, complexity, and duration.
This project lays DAAST's foundations through a focus on Britain's South Sea Company (SSC)-one of the largest slaving entities in history. Founded in London in 1711, the SSC was soon after granted the asiento, the exclusive right to carry enslaved people to the Spanish Americas. Between 1713 and 1739, the SSC dragged forty-two thousand captives from Africa to the Americas; it shifted a further forty-eight thousand people from the British Caribbean to the Spanish Americas. Because of the SSC's key role in both trades, its voluminous records- which are distributed through archives in the United Kingdom, the US, and Spain-shed uniquely detailed light on the operation of the slave trade across the vastness of the Atlantic World.
In addition to enhancing efforts to research the slave trades' history, this project promises to have broader impacts on both slave trade studies and the Digital Humanities. By creating a new platform for making the archives of the slave trade accessible and comprehensible, this project will generate a resource that will grow exponentially and underpin generations of new scholarship. Researchers in other fields grappling with the challenges of making archival material available and comprehensible will also benefit by utilizing the methodologies pioneered through this project. Cultural institutions will be also be furnished with a powerful model that they can emulate as they seek to decolonize their collections by making them accessible to a global public via digital methods.
Organisations
| Title | Britain's Forgotten Slave Traders |
| Description | A two part documentary fronted by David Olusoga which will broadcast on BBC2 in October 2026 titled Britain's Forgotten Slave Traders. The Documentary will feature the research of this project via a scene that the co-PI, Dr Radburn has filmed with Olusoga at the British Library which highlights the document discoveries made via this award. |
| Type Of Art | Film/Video/Animation |
| Year Produced | 2026 |
| Impact | The documentary should have a wide viewership (approximately 2 million). The findings of this project, especially the close association between the South Sea Company and the slave trade, will therefore be disseminated to a large audience. There is currently a high public interest in this topic thanks to the Church of England's pledge to pay £100m in reparations for its holdings of South Sea Company stock and annuities. There is therefore a strong possibility that this documentary will contribute to ongoing debates about the Church's role in the slave trade, and the history of the SSC more broadly. |
| Description | This project pulled together, for the first time, the papers of the South Sea Company. Those papers were scattered across several locations: the British Library (which held the company's official papers); the Clements Library (which held the papers of one of the SSC's directors); the Huntington Library (which held the papers of one of the SSC's investors); and the Archivo General de Indies (which holds Spanish-language material related to the SSC). Taken together this material comprises approximately 20,000 pages of historical sources---by far the largest corpus relating to the SSC's slave trading ever assembled. This project has now made that corpus of material available to the public. Through a newly designed document viewer on Slavevoyages.org (a free-to-access online portal related to the Atlantic slave trades), users can access all of the material that we collected (with, for the time being, the Spanish-lanuage material, which we are currently trying to obtain the rights to publish online). In addition to viewing the documents, users can: read transcriptions of the sources that the project team generated through HTR software and then cleaned; search the metadata and transcriptions; search for tagged key terms within the documents (people, places etc); and follow links from the documents to Slavevoyages datasets and vice versa. This project has therefore made freely available one of the largest documentary collections relating to the Atlantic slave trades. Beyond widening access to the documentary records of the slave trade, this project has also demonstrated that the SSC was deeply engaged in that trade. The SSC shipped, we show, over fifty thousand people from Africa and an equal number of people within the Americas. It pursued the trade in people vigorously, and its agents and directors were deeply involved in organizing the business. These findings, which we will publicize via an edited collection of research papers in 2027, will revise understandings of the history of the SSC---one of the most important companies in British history. |
| Exploitation Route | We anticipate that the documentary sources digitized and made available by this project will be used widely by members of the public, students, museum curators, archivists, and scholars as they research the history of the South Sea Company and the Atlantic slave trades. We will reach this audience via slavevoyages.org, a website that is visited by over fifty thousand users a month and is used extensively by educators and members of the public. We also anticipate that this project will prove to be an exemplar of how to digitize and make available large volumes of historical documents, spurring efforts to democratize archival sources. We are especially eager to see the findings of this project used in the ongoing debates about the South Sea Company's role in the slave trade. |
| Sectors | Culture Heritage Museums and Collections |
| Description | On September 28, 2023 the Washington Post reported on the findings of this project via a widely read article (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/28/slave-trade-monarchy-uk-archives/) that was published online and in the print edition. The online article was one of the most highly read articles in the newspaper, reaching a readership of 2.5 million people. The article was also widely commented upon by the readers, with over two thousand comments. This project will further contribute to non-academic impacts in October 2026, when the findings of this project will be broadcast in a new two part documentary series: Britain's Forgotten Slave Traders. That show should have an audience in the millions, who will gain, through viewing the documentary, an appreciation of the SSC's key role in the slave trade, as well as the wider involvement of the British state and society in the trade. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2023 |
| Sector | Education |
| Impact Types | Societal |
| Description | Barbados R.O.A.D Project |
| Geographic Reach | South America |
| Policy Influence Type | Influenced training of practitioners or researchers |
| Impact | This project was crucial in providing the Barbadian team with the technical skills that they will require to undertake the broader work of the ROAD project: working with historical manuscript sources; transcribing those sources; learning the technical vocabulary of eighteenth century sources; learning metadata schema; working collaboratively on documentary corpuses; and working in HTR software such as Transkribus. A testimonial from the ROAD project's leader, Dr John Mulligan, can be obtained to speak to these accomplishments if needed. |
| URL | https://gisbarbados.gov.bb/blog/prime-minister-announces-major-heritage-project/ |
| Title | Improved Eighteenth Century English Handwritten Text Recognition Model |
| Description | We utilized Handwritten Text Recognition software (Transkribus) to machine transcribe approximately 15,000 pages of historical manuscripts. The speed and accuracy of HTR is dependent on the "models" that the software uses to recognize and transcribe text. These models improve through "training" using machine learning and AI technology. To facilitate the transcription of our materials, we "trained" Transkribus' eighteenth century English handwriting model, considerably increasing its accuracy and effectiveness. This model is available for all other Transkribus users and so it will considerably accelerate the machine transcription of historical sources. |
| Type Of Material | Computer model/algorithm |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | > Increase the speed and efficiency by which historical sources can be machine transcribed. |
| URL | https://www.transkribus.org/models/english-handwriting-18th-19th-century-2 |
| Title | South Sea Company Archive |
| Description | We have collected the papers of the South Sea Company as they pertain to that company's slave trading activities c.1710-1750. The approximately ten thousand pages of manuscript materials have been collected from the British Library, the Huntington Library and the Clements Library. They have been combined into a central server at Rice University, and were then machine transcribed via Transkribus, an AI powered piece of software. We then moved the completed transcriptions, into a redesigned version of www.slavevoyages.org, where the documents have been linked into the website's existing dataset. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2025 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | We have already received press attention in this dataset via a widely-read article in the Washington Post, which focused on one of the documents in the collection: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/28/slave-trade-monarchy-uk-archives/. We are also going to publish a scholarly edited collection in 2027, the papers within which draw on the digitized corpus of material. We anticipate the impacts from this project to accelerate considerably in the coming years as Slave Voyages' extensive user base draws on the material that we have digitized. |
| URL | https://www.slavevoyages.org/document |
| Description | Barbados R.O.A.D Project: Research Training |
| Organisation | Government of Barbados |
| Country | Barbados |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | > Dr Radburn (the UK based PI) gave two online talks to the project team at the Barbados R.O.A.D Project (which comprised approximately thirty Barbadian researchers) on the South Sea Company and its archives > Taylin Nelson, a researcher based at Rice University who worked on this project, visited Barbados several times to instruct the R.O.A.D Project team on working with the SSC documents |
| Collaborator Contribution | > The R.O.A.D Project team, which comprised approximately thirty Barbadian researchers, transcribed and tagged approximately twenty volume of the material in this project corpus > Dr John Mulligan, who leads the technical side of the R.O.A.D Project team, worked in close collaboration with this project to a) digitize the sources; b) create a common metadata schema; c) train the model for undertaking HTR on the corpus; d) designing the document viewer into which the corpus was uploaded; e) meeting with Dr Radburn and Dr Domingues da Silva in Los Angeles |
| Impact | > The R.O.A.D team transcribed and tagged twenty volumes of material that are now housed within the document viewer on Slave Voyages > This project proved crucial for upskilling the R.O.A.D team in processing and transcribing manuscript sources. Those skills will prove crucial as the R.O.A.D team moves on to the digitization of the Barbadian government's extensive holdings of primary source material related to Atlantic slavery |
| Start Year | 2023 |
| Description | British Library: Digitization of South Sea Company Manuscripts |
| Organisation | The British Library |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | The project team worked in close collaboration with the BL to digitize their extensive holdings of the South Sea Company's papers. On May 5 2002, the project PI, Radburn, visited the BL to meet Dr Alexander Lock (the BL's CI on the project) and examine the SSC's records together. Lock and Radburn systematically worked our way through the records and identified sixty volumes that we wanted to have digitized for the project. Upon Radburn's return to Lancaster, he maintained constant communication with Dr Lock, including frequent meetings via Zoom/ MS Teams, to facilitate the digitization of the material. Once digitized, the project team undertook Handwritten Text Recognition on the volumes and uploaded them to the new document reader portal in Slave Voyages. Radburn also helped to produce a widely read article in the Washington Post that publicized both the project's work on the BL's collections, and the BL's holdings. He also recently filmed a scene for a forthcoming BBC documentary at the BL that further highlighted the findings of the project and the BL's documents. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Dr Lock and his colleagues at the BL have digitized the materials that we identified during Radburn's visit, which totals 15,000 pages of material. The BL team generated metadata for the material and intended to upload it to the British Library's digital repository, considerably enhancing the library's online holdings focused on slavery and abolition. That process has been hindered by the October 2023 cyber attack on the BL, but it should take place in the next year. The BL nonetheless sent the project team the the image files, which totalled 1.8TB of material, all of which have been transcribed and uploaded to Slave Voyages. The BL also recently hosted Dr Radburn and a tv crew to film a scene for a new BBC documentary series that will feature this project's research findings. |
| Impact | > 15,000 pages of manuscript material digitized > Delivery of image files of the above, totaling 1.8TB of data > HTR of this corpus within Transkribus > Upload of the corpus to Slave Voyages, making it freely available to the public > Scene in forthcoming BBC Documentary series (Britain's Forgotten Slave Traders) filmed at the BL |
| Start Year | 2022 |
| Description | Clements Library (University of Michigan): Digitization of Asiento Records |
| Organisation | University of Michigan |
| Country | United States |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | The research team have maintained constant communication with the Clements throughout the digitization process, and to arrange delivery of the digitized material. We have also consulted with the Clements' librarians on a common metadata schema for the digitized records. Since receiving the digitized material, we have uploaded it to Transkribus and have created transcriptions of the material using Handwritten Text Recognition. We then uploaded the Clements' corpus to the new document viewer in Slave Voyages. |
| Collaborator Contribution | In February 2022, the Clement Library's archivists began the process of digitizing the "Asiento" records within the papers of William Petty, the 1st Earl of Shelburne. This collection details the South Sea Company's slave trade and constitutes approximately 1,500 manuscript pages of material. The library completed the digitization of the material in January 2023, and delivered the resulting image files to the project team via a file sharing portal. The Clements also now hosts the collection on its own digital portal (see link below). |
| Impact | > 1,500 pages of manuscript pages digitized and delivered to the project team as image files. > Image files, plus transcriptions of those files produced by HTR, have been uploaded to Slave Voyages > Manuscript material also hosted on the Clements' website, making it available to researchers remotely utilizing their collections |
| Start Year | 2022 |
| Description | Huntington Library: Digitization of Chandos Papers |
| Organisation | Huntington Library |
| Country | United States |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | In February and March 2022, we consulted with the Huntington Librarians on which volumes of the Duke of Chandos' papers would be digitized in support of this project. We then maintained contact with the librarians throughout the digitization process, and to arrange delivery of the materials. Since the delivery of the digitized images, the project team entered the digitized material into Transkribus and undertook Handwritten Text Recognition on the corpus. This enabled us to produce a new handwritten text recognition model that we also applied to the digitized records we subsequently received from the other partner libraries. |
| Collaborator Contribution | The librarians at the Huntington Library digitized six volumes of the papers of the Duke of Chandos (approx. 1800 manuscript pages) which detail the Duke's investments in both the South Sea and Royal African Companies. They sent us the image files via a file sharing service, and also made the material available to the public via the Huntington's digital library (see link below). The Huntington's Research Division also contribued $25,000 towards the hosting of a conference focused on the South Sea Company and the Atlantic Slave Trades at the Library. The conference took place in May 2025 and was attended by leading scholars from Britain, the US, and Latin America, as well as numerous members of the public (see, https://www.huntington.org/event/south-sea-company-and-atlantic-slave-trade). The success of this project has spurred the Huntington to also digitize the rest of the Duke of Chandos' letterbooks. They have now digitzed 53 additional volumes of material, which are now available to researchers via the Huntington's website. |
| Impact | > Six volumes/ 1800 pages of historical sources digitized, sent to the project team, and uploaded to Slave Voyages' new document reader > Handwritten text recognition model trained for eighteenth-century English in Transkribus > Fifty-three volumes of historical sources (approx. 14,000 pages) digitized and uploaded to the Huntington Library's website |
| Start Year | 2022 |
| Description | Rice University: Co-PI, Technical Assistance, and Research Support |
| Organisation | Rice University |
| Country | United States |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Given that this was a collaborative award between the AHRC and NEH, the project was conceived from the beginning as a collaboration between a team at Lancaster University and another at Rice University. Dr Radburn, the UK-based PI, therefore worked closely with Dr Domingues da Silva (the US-based PI) throughout this project: they had weekly online meetings; met in person in Paris (2024) and Los Angeles (2025); and maintained constant email communication. Radburn also organized the conference at the Huntington Library with Domingues da Silva, and the two of them will edit a collection together that pulls together the papers from the conference, as well as others from invited contributors. That volume is currently under review with the University of Georgia Press, with an expected publication date in 2027. This collaboration persisted (and continues) despite the NEH cancelling the US portion of this grant in early 2025. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Rice University provided a wealth of contributions to the project: > Dr Domingues da Silva committed substantial time to the project, despite not receiving a teaching buy out from the NEH portion of this grant > Six postgraduate students worked on processing the corpus of documents > Rice's technical team, led by Jerrell Jones (https://library.rice.edu/people/jerrell-jones), helped to design the new document viewer into which the corpus of material was uploaded > Rice hosted and funded a conference in Paris in 2024 to which Dr Domingues da Silva and Dr Radburn were invited, enabling them to meet in person and plan the completion of this project > Dr Domingues da Silva designed and taught a module on the history of the South Sea Company, which included hands-on sessions with the corpus of documents produced by this project (https://esther.rice.edu/selfserve/!bwzkpsyl.v_viewDoc?term=202410&crn=15319&type=SYLLABUS) > Rice continued to support this project even after the NEH cancelled the grant |
| Impact | > Forthcoming edited volume (The South Sea Company and the Atlantic Slave Trades), which is under review with the University of Georgia Press > New postgraduate module at Rice University focused on the South Sea Company (https://esther.rice.edu/selfserve/!bwzkpsyl.v_viewDoc?term=202410&crn=15319&type=SYLLABUS) > Conference at the Huntington Library developed and run by Dr Radburn and Dr Domingues da Silva (https://www.huntington.org/event/south-sea-company-and-atlantic-slave-trade) |
| Start Year | 2022 |