Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South ...

Rawley, and Lovejoy. Whereas Serge Daget and Jean Mettas brought to light new numbers on the French slave trade based on documents from Nantes,¹³ the works of Charles Becker, David Richardson, David Eltis, and José Curto confirmed Curtin's estimates.¹⁴ Based on these new estimates, Lovejoy revised his own estimates, increasing slave exports from 11,698,000 to 11,863,000.¹⁵ Using a variable death rate of between 10 percent and 20 percent, he estimated slave imports at between 9 million and 10.8 million. Despite the 1.8 million difference, Lovejoy's estimate of slave imports falls within the margin established by Curtin.

By the end of the 1980s, North American historians started using electronic databases to manipulate demographic data sets, allowing them to count the general numbers while retaining particular elements of various slave routes. By the end of the 1990s, David Eltis and Barbara Solow, in collaboration with Stephen D. Behrendt and David Richardson, had developed the W. E. B. Du Bois Database. More than to establish estimates, the propose of such a database was to collect all available data related to the Atlantic slave voyages. In its beginnings, the database held data on 27,233 slave voyages between 1595 and 1866. In 1999 the database became available electronically under the title The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM.¹⁶ Using the database in 2001, David Eltis estimated slave exports at 11,062,000 and slave imports at 9,599,000 for the period between 1519 and 1867.¹⁷ For the first time, the data collected for almost thirty years was available to the general public, who could also examine the methods employed by historians for establishing the volume of the Atlantic slave trade.

Historians working on slavery in different Atlantic geographical areas largely accepted the numbers provided by The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. During the commemoration activities of the 200th anniversary of British and U.S. abolition of the slave trade in 2007 and 2008, a revised version of the database (www.slavevoyages.com), funded by Emory University's Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History Endowment, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, became accessible on the Internet. This newest version covers 34,940 individual slaving voyages between