Towards a Digital Archive of the Atlantic Slave Trades: Unlocking the Records of the South Sea Company

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.