Note on Terminology

Since this project was first created in the 1990s, scholarship on the history of slavery and slave trading has become increasingly attentive to the importance of terminology in identifying people who were the victims of capture, human trafficking and enslavement during the era of the transatlantic slave trade. The persistent and decontextualized use of the term 'slave,' in reference to an unfree person, is a needlessly dehumanizing word to describe someone who was captured, held in bondage, sold as a commodity and/or forced into servitude. The slavevoyages.org project is in the process of reviewing the website and its databases and considering how to best incorporate alternative language that will better recognize the dignity of the people who traveled on these vessels against their will. Unfortunately, some of the language used to label fields of information in our databases is embedded in the programming of our website. Changing the terms we use requires reprogramming the website, which takes technical skill. Since slavevoyages.org is a free website, we are dependent on research grants to fund our programming, which means that these changes will not appear as quickly as we would like. Please bear with us!