Jane Hooper receives NEH grant to fund Slave Voyages project

Jane Hooper receives NEH grant to fund Slave Voyages project

Dr. Jane Hooper, Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of History and Art History, has received a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities grant to support an expansion of the acclaimed Slave Voyages website.  The award is from NEH’s “Digital Projects for the Public” category of grants. 

Dr. Hooper currently serves on the Operational Committee for the Slave Voyages project, which has offered free online information about the voyages of enslaved people across the Atlantic and within the Americas since 2008.  As an open, collaborative project, the database has expanded significantly over the years, to bring in new datasets, including the Intra-American Slave Trade Database, the African Origins Database, and the Oceans of Kinfolk Database.  In addition to these databases, the website includes an archive of images, a 3-D animation of a slave ship, and other visualizations.

The original website has been widely used by students, scholars and the general public.  However, the project contained an important blind spot:  it focuses on the Atlantic world.  Dr. Hooper, a historian of Madagascar and Indian Ocean trade, met with other prominent scholars of Indian Ocean history at an international workshop at Rice University in September 2022, where they made plans to incorporate research on Indian Ocean and Asian slavery into the Slave Voyages project. 

With support from the NEH grant, the team will create an Indian Ocean and Asia database of voyages which transported enslaved African, Malagasy, Middle Eastern, Indian, Southeast Asian, and East Asian men, women, and children within and beyond the Indian Ocean world between 1500 and 1940. The database will incorporate the voyage datasets into an open-source and fully searchable online database.  This project will shed light on the fact that the transoceanic commerce in slave labor was a truly global phenomenon that involved Arab/Swahili, Chinese, Indian, and Southeast Asian as well as European and American vessels.  This transoceanic slave trade in the Indian Ocean began centuries before it did in the Atlantic and continued into the mid-twentieth century, decades after the transatlantic trade’s demise in the mid-1860s.