LibGuides: Atlantic World: Primary Sources

Resources on Slavery

Slave Voyages
The Transatlantic Slave Trade database contains information on more than 36,000 slave voyages that forcibly embarked over 12 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, offering researchers, students and the general public a chance to rediscover the reality of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in world history. Additionally, the Intra-American Slave Trade database describes 11,000 maritime voyages trafficking enslaved people within the Americas.

Slavery, Abolition, and Social Justice
Primary sources, an interactive map, scholarly essays, tutorials, and other research tools on slavery and abolition in the United States.

Documentary heritage of the enslaved people of the Dutch Caribbean and their descendants (1816-1969)
The collection consists of archives located in Suriname, Curaçao, St. Maarten, and the Netherlands. It includes mostly slave, manumission and emancipation registers and civil registry documents of freed slaves.

Sabin Americana (1500-1926)
Works about the Americas from the 16th through early 20th centuries, including books, pamphlets, and serials. Collection is based on Joseph Sabin's bibliography Sabin Americana.
Oliveira Lima Library
Pamphlets, monographs, and other documents from the collection of Manoel de Oliveira Lima, a Brazilian diplomat, journalist, and historian in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Age of Exploration
Diaries, maps, ship logs, and other documentation chronicling European maritime exploration from c. 1420 - 1920.
Colonial Caribbean, 1624-1870
Administrative documentation, trade and shipping records, minutes of council meetings, and other documentation from the Colonial Office, as collected by the National Archive, UK.
Caribbean colonial statistics from the British Empire, 1824-1950 - British Online Archive
Statistical records from Caribbean British colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, listed by year.
Global Commodities
Primary sources from libraries, companies, and trade organizations tracking the history of fifteen commodities traded around the world. Includes company papers and accounts, government reports, statistical records, maps, advertising, photos, paintings, prints, and examples of finished goods and raw materials.