Project Overview

The interdisciplinary field of Atlantic Studies has delivered many new insights and matured to the point of self-reflection and -critique. Its scholarly monographs transcend regionalism to emphasize the interconnections among Europe, North America, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa; bring long-ignored actors to life; and conceptually transform the Atlantic into a dynamic space of flows rather than a dead space of separation. Its collaborative efforts have established Web-based databases such as the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TSTD) that will stimulate new research for decades.

This project delivers another such Web-based database, stimulated by my research on the logbooks of the merchant vessels that participated in an Atlantic commodity network. Unlike many other such efforts in the humanities, this database was developed as a Geographic Information System (GIS) and thereby is intrinsically spatial in order to contribute to what some have termed "geographically integrated history." It focuses on mapping the routes of vessels between about 1750 and 1900 that carried cargoes of coffee, sugar, spices, gold, and many other products as well as enslaved Africans between Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, South America, North America, and Asia.

Such analysis and visualization of Atlantic shipping networks has intellectual roots in the Annales School and present-day parallels in the Climatological Database for the World's Oceans, 1750-1850 (CLIWOC), a database that climatologists have constructed using the weather observations found in historic logbooks. A massive Annales project of the 1950s reconstructed Spanish shipping of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Atlantic to produce insights about the routes, timing, and other characteristics of the annual fleets that still inform our understanding of colonial Latin America. CLIWOC uses the Web to make public its database of daily vessel positions and weather observations from more than 3,000 Spanish, English, French, and Dutch logbooks dating to the 1700-1800s. Its purpose is to reconstruct historic climate for the era before establishment of widespread weather stations and climate satellites rather than analyze Atlantic shipping and commodity networks. This project applies CLIWOC methods, updated with the new temporal and Web mapping capabilities of the latest GIS software, to the intellectual ambitions of the Annales School.

The inclusion of many voyages drawn from CLIWOC and my own research on Catalan logbooks as well as nineteenth-century historic hurricane tracks from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration demonstrates the potential for such a Web-based GIS approach to understanding the relationships among different commodity networks and social and environmental processes. It also facilitates enhancing the sophistication of related analyses and visualizations; serves the GIS on the Web to allow other scholars to use it to answer questions related to their own intellectual interests and to submit additional data for inclusion; maps the actual routes of some of the slave voyages included in TSTD rather than only the embarkation and disembarkation ports; and by sharing methodological details builds a teaching component into the project website that can stimulate and facilitate other humanities scholars to initiate more such Web-based GIS databases for a broader range of topics.

Such Web-based databases are inherently scalable. Scaling up would involve additional data contributed by users, as they have done for the TSTD. With the inclusion of additional voyages, users will be able to, for example, generate animated visualizations of the actual routes of specific vessels pertinent to their own reserach in relation to particular hurricane tracks; graph the relative volumes of types of trade pertinent to their own research along different routes in different seasons for a particular commodity; and link to other data, such as maritime art and literature associated with particular shipping lanes, or even particular vessels and voyages that they are researching.

While carrying out the project, I maintained a blog that describes the process of working through methodological issues as well as interim results. In addition to the subsequent sections of this Website concerning Methods and Data, the Project Database, the GIS, and Web mapping, that blog might be of additional interest to scholars who intend to initiate a Web-based GIS related to their own research.

Selected References

1. Arbellot et al., Construction Graphique, vol. 7 of Séville et l’Atlantiique (1504-1650) (Paris: École Pratique des Hautes Études, 1957).
2. Bailyn, Bernard, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005).
3. Bodenhamer D. J., J. Corrigan, and T. M. Harris, eds., The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).
4. Boelhower, William, “I’ll teach you how to flow”: On figuring out Atlantic Studies, Atlantic Studies 1 (2001): 28-48.
5. Carney, Judith A., and Richard N. Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
6. Elliott, John H., Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
7. Eltis, David, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
8. Eltis, David and David Richardson, An Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
9. García-Herrera, R., G. P. Können, D. Wheeler, M. R. Prieto, P. D. Jones, and F. B. Koek, CLIWOC: A climatological database for the world's oceans 1750-1854, Climatic Change 73 (2005), 1-12.
10. Green, Jack and Philip Morgan, Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
11. Können, G. P., and F. B. Koek,. Description of the CLIWOC database, Climatic Change 73 (2005): 117-130.
12. Owens, Jack B., Toward a geographically-integrated, connected world history: Employing geographic information systems, History Compass 5/6 (October 2007): 2014-40.
13. Patricia Cohen, Digital maps are giving scholars the historical lay of thel Land, The New York Times, 26 July 2011.
14. Patricia Cohen, Geographic information systems help scholars see history, The New York Times, 27 July 2011.
15. Prohom Durán, Marc J., and Mariano Barriendos Vallvé, Los diarios de navegación Catalanes: Una nueva fuente de datos climáticos sobre los océanos (siglos XVIII a XX), in El Clima entre el Mar y la Montaña, edited by C. D. Liaño, J. C. García Codrón, D. F. Rasilla Alvarez, P. Fernández de Arróyabe Hernáez, and C. Garmendia Pedraja, pp. 519-28 (Santander: Universidad de Cantabria, 2004).
16. Scott, Rebecca J., Public rights and private commerce: a nineteenth-century Atlantic creole itinerary, Current Anthropology 48 (2007): 237-256.
17. Sluyter, Andrew, The Hispanic Atlantic’s tasajo trail, Latin American Research Review 45 (2010): 98-120.
18. Sluyter, Andrew, Black Ranching Frontiers: African Cattle Herders in the Atlantic World, 1500-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
19. Topik, Steven, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank, eds., From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500-2000 (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2006).

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