Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Abstract

The men, women, and children forced into slavery in the Atlantic world came from diverse African societies with long histories of political, economic, and cultural development. They were taken from the trading centers of the Hausa city-states, the farming and artisanal communities of Senegambia, the Kongo and Mbundu polities of West Central Africa, and many other regions. They carried with them agricultural expertise, metallurgical skills, medical knowledge, religious traditions, and oral histories that helped sustain communities in the face of displacement and enslavement.Enslavement did not erase this intellectual and cultural inheritance, nor did it render its victims passive numbers in history. Instead, these individuals—scattered against their will across the Americas—were bearers of cultures. In the markets of Havana, the rice fields of the Carolina Low Country, the sugar mills of Bahia, and the mountain estates of Jamaica, enslaved Africans repurposed inherited knowledge to meet new realities. They wove fragments of home into new forms of resistance, ritual, kinship, and survival. The historical record that bears witness to these lives is scattered—geographically dispersed, archivally fragmented, and digitally siloed. The traces of individuals often exist as mere shadows: a name in a baptismal registry, a notation in a ship manifest, a mention in a planter’s ledger, a deposition in a colonial court. These documents, while scattered across continents and disciplines, gesture toward one another—but too often speak in isolation.Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade confronts this problem directly. Through an ontology-based approach to data organization, it seeks not only to systematize knowledge of the historical records of enslavement, but to restore connective tissue between dismembered lives and histories. This is more than a technical endeavor; it is an ethical one. Each name, record, fragment is treated not as a data point but as the trace of a full human life—a person whose agency was never wholly extinguished. The ontology functions as both a scaffolding for the integration of disparate archival materials and as a principled commitment to historical justice. By bringing scattered records into structured relation, we begin the work of reassembling stories often left out of histories.1

Comments

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

DOI

10.14321/jsdp.6.4.0316

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