This large-scale project examines British, French, and Dutch slave-ship outfitters in the eighteenth century. Marlous van Waijenburg (HBS) and I are compiling the first outfitter-centered database of the transatlantic slave trade in order to ask a series of questions about female investment, family investment, outfitter-captain relationships, the consequences of long stays on the African coast, and wealth legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. This project is being funded by the National Science Foundation.

Royal African Company Networks is a pilot project designed to explore the possibilities of using computational text analysis and GIS to investigate the correspondence of the Royal African Company, England’s late seventeenth-century African trade monopoly. Our project maps over 3,000 letters between the company’s main fort, Cape Coast Castle, in modern-day Ghana and the company’s ‘outforts,’ or smaller holdings on the coast. We then combine mapping with computational text analysis to draw out themes in the correspondence. We hope this project demonstrates the potential of bringing an interdisciplinary approach to historical analysis and serves as a stepping-stone for further exploration.