Africa and Africans in the African Diaspora: The Uses of Relational Databases

Abstract

African American Studies, better labeled Negro American Studies, are for the most part superficial and incomplete, referring to black people without knowing them. The typical researcher cannot disengage from the tendency to present them as fragmented and superficial, without seeing Africans as individuals coming from a society with rules and values of its own … as someone torn from a particular culture that could not be erased by the simple act of crossing the Atlantic. From human beings full of culture and knowledge, they have been transformed into mere merchandise: tons of ebony. In their 2007 AHRarticle “Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History,” David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson make two major claims: (1) that the article presents a new, superior model for interpreting the formation of culture in the Americas, and (2) that it challenges the belief that Africans played an important role in the introduction and technology of rice cultivation and processing in the Americas. For their conclusions about rice, they rely mainly on calculations from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Version 2 (referred to hereafter as TSTD2) as a tool to study the distribution of enslaved Africans from rice-growing regions in Africa to regions in the Americas that exported rice to Europe.1 Mandinka women displaying bundles of African and Asian rice, 1987. Photo by Judith A. Carney. The authors claim to have made a great new discovery about culture formation in the Americas. They then revive and reprise an unrelated discussion from a 1991 forum in the William and Mary Quarterly, criticizing a book by David Hackett Fischer titled Albion's Seed. Fischer's book is about British colonizers of the United States. Scholars have never claimed that British cultures were erased by the transatlantic crossing. Its methodology has not served as a model for African diaspora studies.2 The article distorts the work of the many scholars it criticizes. Our varied methodologies are reduced to a monolithic advocacy of static “seed” cultures brought over from the Old World and continued as “enclave cultures” in the Americas. “Rather than frame the issue as solely one of transfers and conduits,” the authors write, “we should also think of transformations and overlapping circuits. Rather than posit that slaves and planters always acted knowingly, we should entertain the possibility that they often responded to unseen market forces. Rather than assume that migrants remained conservatively attached to traditional ways, we might also view them as experimenters and improvisers” (1332). The scholars criticized in “Agency and Diaspora” share only one interpretation: that the knowledge and culture of Africans from particular coasts and ethnicities were not erased by the transatlantic crossing. This historian, for example, has written that the process of culture formation (creolization) responded to various, changing factors in the Americas, including the patterns of introduction of Africans from particular regions and ethnicities; gender proportions and patterns of mating and parenting; how rapidly migrants began to procreate and the extent of biological merger among diverse peoples; the demographic and military strength of the Native American population; whether the geography facilitated runaway slave (maroon) communities; the economic, strategic, and military priorities of the colonizing powers; the extent of manumission of former slaves and their demographic strength and social status; military and police uses of slaves and free people of color; the labor demands of the major exports as the economy evolved; and policies of social control reflected in various European political and religious traditions and institutions and how effectively they were enforced. Concepts and definitions of creolization in the Americas vary among the scholars whose work is criticized in “Agency and Diaspora.” The most recent version is Linda Heywood and John Thornton's conclusion that the Charter Generation of Africans who molded the Creole cultures of British and Dutch America before 1660 were largely Europeanized, Catholic West Central Africans.3 The rest of the article minimizes the significance of African technological transfer to the Americas in the planting and processing of rice. Although some anecdotal qualitative sources are used, the argument relies overwhelmingly on calculations made from TSTD2. David Eltis, Stephen Behrendt, David Richardson, and Manolo Florentino deserve great credit for their tireless work on this database, including its impressive technological advances over the first version, TSTD1. Thousands of new Brazilian and Portuguese voyages have been added, correcting the Anglo-focused distortion of TSTD1. The database has been made more user-friendly and is accessible to the public free of charge as an open-source work. It enables users to make calculations, corrections, and additions. It can answer many important questions about the transatlantic slave trade. But when it comes to certain kinds of questions, its limitations must be taken into account. It cannot answer the questions about rice posed in “Agency and Diaspora.”4 Historical databases are wonderful, innovative tools. They can integrate huge amounts of detailed, concrete data into broad patterns allowing for analysis over time and place. The vast quantity of information they can contain and analyze is a great advantage, especially in making broad, comparative studies. Databases can answer questions that cannot be answered using more traditional methodologies, can partially or tentatively answer others, and can help answer still others, combining quantitative calculations with the findings of other disciplines, including archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, and geography, as well as traditional history. But there are some questions that are simply beyond their capabilities. It all depends on the questions that a given database is designed to answer. Databases can be more rigid than qualitative sources. In using them, scholars must keep in mind that just because something is not included in a historical document or a database, that does not mean that it did not happen. There is important information that has never been documented; there are documents that have not yet been found and studied. TSTD1 and TSTD2 were designed to contain only documented and studied voyages of slave trade ships that crossed the Atlantic. “Agency and Diaspora” hardly considers the redistribution process that took place when these new Africans were first sold in the Americas, then reloaded onto other ships and subsequently moved by water and/or land to other places before reaching their varied final destinations. In this process, they were sometimes clustered by their region of origin and/or ethnicity when buyers were able to purchase the new Africans they preferred.5 There are problems with rigidity as well as the omission of important data in TSTD2. It was created from research into original manuscript documents carried out by many historians during the past forty years or more. Each record covers a specific transatlantic slave trade voyage. The fields in a database contain information about the individual records that it includes. They are designed to answer the questions the creators of the database want to ask, not necessarily to provide the information contained in the original documents. Unless a database has been designed to be flexible, once the fields have been defined and a substantial amount of data has been entered, adding new fields can be laborious, time-consuming, and expensive. TSTD2 remains locked into the same questions that scholars have asked since the publication of Phillip D. Curtin's The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census in 1969, but with a notable limitation: there is no field for the entry of data on African ethnicities. Except for a few entirely quantitative questions, such as gender, age category, and deaths when this information was recorded in the documents and then noted and published by the historians who studied them, TSTD2 does not focus on information about the enslaved Africans on the ships. The fields were not changed between TSTD1 and TSTD2. Obviously, historians record only what they think is important, and we cannot tell what those who did the original research chose not to record. In some cases, information that indeed was recorded by the scholar who conducted the initial research will not be entered into the database because no field was created for it. Such omissions may have included information about African ethnicities that Eltis, Morgan, and Richardson dismiss as inaccurate and perhaps therefore unimportant (1349). Was information about the ethnicities of Africans on transatlantic slave trade voyages documented? Yes. To what extent? Without consulting the original documents, we cannot know. If there were no fields in TSTD2 in which this information and the contents of these original documents could be recorded, this data is not available to us. Thus a crucial advantage of using original manuscript documents is lost. Perhaps there is very little information in transatlantic slave trade documents about the Africans aboard the ships; or perhaps, as Nicolás Ngou-Mve observed, those who conducted the research using the original documents did not consider this information important enough to record. Thus when the editors of TSTD2 did not do the initial research themselves, the information in the database is twice removed from the original sources. Ngou-Mve calls on historians to look at all the documents again, even if other historians have already studied them. This writer's experience with transatlantic slave trade voyage documents is limited to Louisiana, but it supports Mve's conclusion.6 Historical databases and new media need to go beyond purely quantifiable questions. As Daniel J. Cohen suggests, “Focusing on the full potential of the medium and being sure that digital history is not simply an echo of quantitative processes or algorithms to the abundant digital record in the service of source discovery and analysis is extremely important … and equally important are the networking and collaborative possibilities of the medium—that is, focusing on human rather than machine activities.”7 The search and visualization capabilities of advancing technology facilitate these advances. Visualization will allow us to consult the original documents whose contents have been filtered out by rigid, purely quantifiable databases and their questions. During the past two decades, there has been a seismic change in perception about documents relating to Africans and their descendants throughout the Americas. The shift has been from a belief that original manuscript sources did not exist or were extremely rare to a recognition of the truly extraordinary abundance of documents in archives, courthouses, ports, museums, and private collections housed throughout the Americas. This writer's database about Louisiana slaves was initiated in 1984. Focusing on people who were enslaved, it was created almost entirely from original manuscript documents. It contains almost all of the information about each description of a slave entered into the database from original documents, including unquantifiable data.8 The limitations of TSTD2 call into question Eltis, Morgan, and Richardson's critique of Judith A. Carney's well-known work about the transfer of rice cultivation from Africa to the Americas. She carried out a truly impressive range of varied and exhaustive research and used it judiciously and well. Carney is a multilingual, multidisciplinary geographer who was inspired to study original historical documents by the pioneering work of historians Daniel C. Littlefield and Peter H. Wood. Her grasp of geography and agricultural technology enhances her insights into the meanings of such primary sources. From the earliest manuscript sources and publications of Portuguese observers, beginning with the mid-fifteenth century, she thoroughly documents the well-established, widespread, complex cultivation of rice in varied environments along the coasts of Upper Guinea and up its rivers. She makes use of a variety of approaches, including documentary sources on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the five centuries of the Atlantic slave trade and in-depth field work in Africa and the Americas. In contrast, Eltis, Morgan, and Richardson base their conclusions on the flimsy evidence of what they found documented for twenty voyages of the Royal African Company visiting Gambia and between and The of voyages they used is very and limited in time because there was no field to record such information in they to consult original documents. they this women did not rice on the It is that women rice on slave trade but that those were not recorded in the or that documents but have not yet been or that the original did not record this or that they did record but it was not included in TSTD2. Carney has evidence of women rice on a slave trade in out that it is only one such documented She about how rice could have been into the Americas without She evidence for and varied introduction of rice between Africa and the Americas over the Carney could not have as Eltis, Morgan, and Richardson that enslaved African a few of rice in her can all that is to the of the major she makes in is that the the transfer not only of but of of cultivation as including processing from places of to in the Atlantic is she uses the Eltis, Morgan, and Richardson the out of and then dismiss her work with “Agency and Diaspora” is in that of the for on the transatlantic crossing was to that slaves to which they were The authors that more than rice was on the slave trade ships they which Upper Guinea between and But rice, not was an important in the Americas. The authors that Africans as well as might have their patterns in the Americas, enslaved for rice the need to enslaved Africans to their traditional patterns in to keep them the Atlantic Eltis, Morgan, and Richardson Carney for the role of women in rice in the Americas. They to the on voyages from Upper But these calculations tell us about among slaves from or about for women of these ethnicities. They that and of Africans with rice-growing experience must have been the of slaves Upper This is no but therefore their of gender among slaves the Upper Guinea are not with to rice most of the and enslaved were the and Gambia in mainly during the before the took on were to the Americas from and gender were among the ethnicities most often in as well as among among Africans from Upper Guinea varied in with from for and The on slave trade ships that the authors present tell us about whether rice in and women from ethnicities. A can be made about for women who how to rice by focusing on mean by gender among ethnicities. In Louisiana during the the mean for women from two ethnicities on and was than that for the the mean was for women than for during the and for women than for between and The mean for women was than the for throughout the The of these women might at partially for this Eltis, Morgan, and Richardson claim that calculations from TSTD2 that Africans from Upper Guinea could not have rice or for its cultivation and processing to the Americas, did who rice them or them and They that few slaves from Upper Guinea in regions when this began to be For they dismiss the on transatlantic slave trade patterns of the of enslaved Africans brought from regions in Africa to regions in the Americas, to factors other than the of slave buyers This is not This writer's and African in the the in “Agency and Diaspora” in other has an to various patterns in the Atlantic slave including market forces. among buyers for slaves of particular ethnicities are as only one from Louisiana Slave Database, from Louisiana Slave Database, from Louisiana Slave Database, of and of mean by gender and ethnicity by for Africans on Louisiana can be found in and African in the Americas, from Louisiana Slave Database, of and of mean by gender and ethnicity by for Africans on Louisiana can be found in and African in the Americas, It is what the calculations from TSTD2 by Eltis, Morgan, and Richardson can about whether there was an African on rice and processing in the Americas. many people did it to and rice in Was there only one introduction of rice, which the they to about its cultivation the varied and changing environments and used in its over there have to be a or a of enslaved Africans from Upper Guinea at the time rice began to be or a of Upper among all slaves in both the and the Atlantic United even rice was exported from the and the United was a region for the transatlantic slave trade from Louisiana that the Company of the asked only for slaves who could them how to Carney perhaps and Eltis, Morgan, and Richardson do not the role of in the introduction of rice to from began to in about with them Asian rice and for its cultivation and TSTD2 contains records for voyages in from between and and voyages in the United from between and There were also slave trade voyages from by and of that are not recorded in the from the voyages from Upper Guinea entered into one or more of these voyages or one or more of the voyages whose is in TSTD2 as could have brought rice and enough Africans who how to and process it and who could have their these about the role that Africans played or did not in the introduction of rice into the Americas cannot be from whose calculations are on African not African ethnicities. Carney's multilingual, multidisciplinary field work and of documents in over the of time and place in the Atlantic are more In book which uses mainly evidence along with traditional historical the time and variety of rice cultivation and among ethnicities along the of Upper Guinea and their transfer to the Americas over Eltis, Morgan, and Richardson rice with the of rice to This enhances their argument that the relating to the and of rice. by is as The market for rice is as or a that exports rather than the were and throughout the Atlantic their own and they and sold all of including rice, and In and Louisiana, slaves were the major of to and and the first Native to the they were In Louisiana, Native and Africans rice. But those did not always the of they they could during the when was and was by and also during and when rice better than other for the that rice for to the authors of “Agency and Diaspora” the and control that over their were not not in of economy and were in a and was not always in their especially during the most crucial of the formation of the economy and William study of on the rice of and that and their were often from that of could not to work in the rice During the century, black slave were the of the slave But the most slave were often the of slave and the from of the “Agency and Diaspora” minimizes the of buyers in the of new of slaves in the Americas a of labor for field and transatlantic in Africa they could of slaves and at The Louisiana Slave records an impressive range of among Thousands of the Africans in Louisiana from regions that were well for certain Although we can the Louisiana Slave about the for it cannot tell us that they brought such with them, even we that particular were in their African But it is of by enslaved Africans in the Americas. us even evidence for the transfer of African technology and for years that they could not who how to and process the Louisiana asked to someone who such Africans began from Louisiana to beginning in on an and as the major In Louisiana, the of the first two Atlantic slave trade ships that from the African in both been to purchase who how to rice and or of rice for which they were to to the of the Company of the their in The first at on these could have been carried and then on to to in Louisiana rapidly as almost all transatlantic slave trade ship

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