Towards an Indian Ocean and Maritime Asia Slave Trade Database
ESTA aims to build a database that reconstructs the historic slave trade in the Indian Ocean and Maritime Asia region in order to facilitate new research, connections, and more global perspectives in collaboration with an emerging network of scholars committed to develop a coherent field of Asian slave trade and slavery studies – including East, Southeast and South Asia as well as South and East Africa.
This project is committed to:
- Stimulate interaction between scholars and connections between regions.
- Stimulate more research and archival work to unearth historical data for more accurate reconstructions.
- Mobilise the wealth of available historical and quantifiable data on slave transportations, enslaved populations, markets and prices.
Currently, the database contains data on more than 4,000 slave trade voyages. This is the result of the curation of five separate datasets created, and generously shared with us, by individual researchers.
The data can be explored and queried in our initial Data Viewer.
The original datasets can be found in the project Dataverse.
More information on the project can be found at the project website: https://esta.iisg.nl/.