Call for Papers
The Slave Voyage Database and African Economic History
A Workshop
Monday, May 3, 2010
Harriet Tubman Institute, York University
Special Issue - African Economic History, José C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds.
The Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples and the editors of African Economic History announce a call for papers for a special issue on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, [url]http://www.slavevoyages.org[/url], and its significance for African economic history. The Tubman Institute is providing a forum for discussion and debate over the relevance of the database in understanding African economic history.
The pioneering work of Philip Curtin led to subsequent expansion of the demographic analysis of the forced migration of African peoples under slavery, culminating initially in David Eltis, David Richardson, Stephen Behrendt, and Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and now greatly expanded through extensive collaboration among scholars into the on-line slave voyage database. The great debt that scholars owe to the editors and compilers of this database is enormous. Under the leadership of David Eltis, and including Herbert Klein, Stephen Behrendt, David Richardson, Manolo Florentino and many other scholars, the records of over 35,000 voyages have been assembled into a user friendly, open source, on-line database. The achievements of this monumental collaboration now wait to be explored and challenged.
Proposals should be submitted to [mailto]tubman@yorku.ca[/mailto] and must meet the following criteria:
- Essays must address the historical issues and methodological problems arising from the voyage database as relating specifically to African economic history
- Essays must use the database, subject to critique and qualified analysis
- Essays may be submitted in English, French, Spanish or Portuguese
Accepted essays will be presented at a Workshop of invited participants at the Tubman Institute, York University, Toronto, on Monday, May 3, 2010. Accepted essays will be published in a special issue of African Economic History and subsequently as a volume in the Harriet Tubman Series on the African Diaspora, Africa World Press.