This study uses historical records from 36 archives in the United States to analyze 8,437 enslaved people’s sale and/or appraisal prices from 1797 to 1865. Demographic information, including name, year, age/age group, gender, state, and trade/skill notations were recorded when applicable. By calculating average appraisal and sale values across cross-sections of gender (male or female) and age group (0-10 years old, 11-22 years old, 23-39 years old, and 40+ years old), a total of sixteen major comparative prices were analyzed (app/male/0-10; app/female/0-10; sale/male/0-10; sale/female/0-10; app/male/11-22; app/female/11-22; sale/male/11-22; sale/female/11-22; app/male/23-39; app/female/23-39; sale/male/23-39; sale/female/23-39; app/male/40+; app/female/40+; sale/male/40+; sale/female/40+). Scholars have the opportunity to use this data set to understand how enslaved people were valued and appraised. The demographic data included will be useful to those who want to explore various aspects of the history of slavery and enslaved people.

A “runaway slave record,” or as it is officially titled, “Runaway and Escaped Slaves Records, 1794, 1806-1863,” include accounts, correspondence, receipts, and reports concerning expenses incurred by localities related to the capture of enslaved people attempting to escape bondage to pursue freedom. The collection also includes records with information related to enslaved people from multiple localities who escaped to United States military forces during the Civil War. While many independent businesses bought and sold human beings, local and state governments such as the state of Virginia also participated in and profited from human trafficking. Localities were reimbursed for the expenses of confining, feeding, and selling of self-emancipated people, and likewise, the state established procedures to compensate enslavers for their financial loss when enslaved people ran away or were imprisoned or executed. If a person was captured and their enslaver could not be identified, they became the property of the state and were sold. The proceeds from these sales went to the state treasury, and often, records of those sales can be found in the Public Claims records from the Auditor of Public Accounts. The net proceeds were deposited into the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Literary Fund for the public education of poor white children.

The data in this collection is drawn directly from the historical documents and may contain language that is now deemed offensive.

This study uses historical records from 36 archives in the United States to analyze 8,437 enslaved people's sale and/or appraisal prices from 1797 to 1865.

The "Enslaved People in the African American National Biography, 1508-1865" dataset builds on the complete print and online collection of the African American National Biography (AANB), edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. The full collection contains over 6,000 biographical entries of named historical individuals, including 1,304 for subjects born before 1865 and the abolition of slavery in the United States. In making a subset of biographical entries from the multivolume work, the goal was to extract life details from those biographies into an easy-to-view database form that details whether a subject was enslaved for some or all of their lives and to provide the main biographical details of each subject for contextual analysis and comparison. 52 fields covering location data; gender; names, alternate names and suffixes; dates and places of birth and death; and up to 8 occupations were included. We also added 13 unique fields that provide biographical details on each subject: Free born in North America; Free before 13th Amendment; Ever Enslaved; How was freedom attained; Other/uncertain status; African born; Parent information; Runaways and rebels; Education/literacy; Religion; Slave narrative or memoir author; Notes; and Images.

“Slave Statistics” consists of 7,289 records derived from lists of enslaved individuals in Anne Arundel and Montgomery counties as of November 1, 1864, the date when the Constitution of 1864, which abolished slavery in the state of Maryland, took effect. Maryland remained in the Union during the Civil War, despite the divided loyalties of her people. Because Maryland was a Union state, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation did not free Maryland slaves. Many enslaved people, however, had taken advantage of the war's confusion to leave their enslavers earlier, some by joining the Union Army. Hoping that the federal government would repay the state's loyalty and compensate its citizens for the chattels lost, the General Assembly ordered that a listing be made of all slaveholders and their slaves as of November 1, 1864. The federal government never compensated the owners, but these records, called “Slave Statistics,” are the only evidence available of enslaved people and owners at the time of state emancipation. The Maryland State Archives retains the Slave Statistics reports for 1867-1869 for eight Maryland counties; the dataset includes information from two of the eight counties, Anne Arundel and Montgomery. The dataset includes all information on the original lists, including names of enslavers; county and district of residence; names of enslaved individuals and their physical condition, term of servitude, and Union Army service, including regiment; record date; and compensation (if applicable).

The slave register in the former Dutch colony of Suriname was established by Royal Decree in 1826 to combat the illegal international trade in enslaved people. Slave owners had to report the people in their possession and every mutation (such as births, deaths, purchases, and sales) to a civil servant. By registering people and their transfers, a closed registration was created that made it almost impossible to smuggle people illegally into Suriname. The registration in the slave registers was a continuous process which was maintained until the abolition of slavery in Suriname on 1 July 1863. Once every three to ten years, civil servants started a new series of registers into which the information that was still relevant was copied. As a result, there were a total of five series of slave registers. Not all the books of the slave registers have been preserved. The 1826-1830 series is completely missing. By estimation, a third of the slave registers from 1830 onwards have been lost, mainly from the older series. Of the 1830-1838 series only 42% of the registers still exists. Later series are much more complete: the survival rate is 55% of the series 1838-1848 and 72% of the series 1848-1851. The last series from 1851 to 1863 is more than 95% complete. Within the slave registers, a distinction was made between enslaved people owned by plantations and people owned by private slave owners. This distinction makes it possible to research the workforces of different plantations. However, one has to be aware that slave registers registered ownership, not the actual workplace of enslaved people. People could be hired to other plantations. Between 1830 and 1848, the information for each enslaved person is limited. Beside the name of the owner, only the name of the enslaved, the gender and sometimes the age were registered. By new-born children the name of the mother was also mentioned. The dates mentioned in the slave registers are the ‘mutation dates’, the date of registration of each event, not the actual date of the event. Because some plantations only registered new-borns and deaths only twice a year, there could be months between an event and its registration. Over the years, the information recorded in the slave registers increased. Starting in 1848 the slave registers mention the birth year and the name of the mother of each person, which makes reconstructions of female family lineage possible. From 1850 onwards, the actual dates of births and deaths had to be registered also. Fathers were never registered, and neither was cohabitation. Families were not normally registered together as a group. When slavery was abolished in 1863, two new registrations were generated. Slave owners had to hand in lists of the people they owned, in order to claim a compensation from the Dutch government. These list, called ‘Borderellen’, contains information on owner, name of the enslaved, sex, age, religion and occupation. Furthermore, a register of names was created for each district in which the emancipated former enslaved were registered with their new family name, first names, year of birth, name they had before 1863, place of living and sometimes information on family relations. The information in these two sources was combined by Lamur et al (2004) in one Emancipation dataset. This dataset is added to the database with the permission of the authors. The current version is version 1.1

This dataset records 1,584 sales and purchases of enslaved peoples made by free women of color in New Orleans from 1810 to 1820. These transactions were recorded in a notary’s office, where selling and purchasing enslaved people was routine business. This dataset addresses unique slaveholding patterns among this community, inclusive of race, ethnicity, and gender, and evaluates broader considerations in the study of the historical slave trade in New Orleans in the early American period.

The Santos Enslaved and Enslaver Dataset (SEED), created between 2003 and 2006, offers an innovative micro-historical method so users can better understand the diverse lived experiences and oppression of enslaved people. The dataset is one of the most detailed for any city or county of a slave society. It cross-references the identities of thousands of enslaved individuals and enslavers in documents from 13 Brazilian archives and 43 primary source types. It contains more than 42,806 entries drawing from information in medical, church, government, and judicial records of the nineteenth century. More than 1,960 individuals were identified and cross-referenced through multiple historical sources, allowing for a wide range of narratives to emerge from the data.

Introduction

"Slavery was an ugly, dirty business but people of virtually every race, colour, and creed engaged in it on every inhabited continent. And the people they enslaved were also of virtually every race, colour, and creed." ~ Thomas Sowell

The persistence of slavery throughout human history, spanning all continents and involving people of diverse backgrounds, underscores its deeply ingrained and universal nature. Despite its historical prevalence, modern slavery manifesting as forced labour, human trafficking, forced marriage and the exploitation of children (mainly girls), continues to plague millions worldwide. This project aims to explore the contemporary dimensions of slavery, highlighting its root causes, human impact, and the urgent need for collective action to eradicate it from our world. By understanding the complex legacy of slavery, we can better address its modern iterations and work toward a future of freedom and dignity for all.

Recommended Reading

We did not weave the web of life ! We are merely a strand in the web. link

A previous project of mine on Kaggle. Where I concentrate on some important factors that will affect humanity's potential to survive on planet Earth: - Global Demographic Shifts. - Inequality. - Climate change. - Resource depletion.

The Global Slavery Index 2023

The Global Slavery Index 2023 by the Walk Free Foundation offers an updated analysis of modern slavery worldwide, covering forms such as forced labour, forced marriage, debt bondage, human trafficking, and child exploitation. link WalkFree

Key Insights:

• Global Increase: In 2021, approximately 50 million people were living in modern slavery, a 25% increase over the last five years.
• Regional Distribution: The Asia-Pacific region accounts for the largest share, with 29.3 million people in modern slavery.
• Highest Prevalence Rates: Countries with the highest rates of modern slavery per 1,000 population include:
  • North Korea: 104.6 per 1,000 people.
  • Eritrea: 90.3 per 1,000 people.
  • Mauritania: 32.0 per 1,000 people.
• G20 Nations: These nations collectively account for more than half of all modern slavery cases. Among them, India leads with an estimated 11 million people in forced labour.

Contributing Factors:

• Climate Change: Environmental degradation increases susceptibility to exploitation.
• Armed Conflict: Conflict zones experience heightened rates of modern slavery.
• Weak Governance: Inadequate legal frameworks and enforcement exacerbate the issue.
• Health Emergencies: Crises like the COVID-19 pandemic have amplified vulnerabilities.

Recommendations for Action:

• Legislation: Strengthen laws to prevent the use of goods and services linked to modern slavery.
• Sustainability Integration: Embed anti-slavery measures in climate and sustainability policies.
• Educational Initiatives: Provide educational opportunities to reduce vulnerability.
• Regulatory Oversight: Enforce stricter regulations on child marriage and supply chain transparency.

Modern Slavery at a Glance

The Global Estimates of Modern Slavery 2021, produced by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), Walk Free, and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), are the foundation for the national statistics presented in Walk Free’s Global Slavery Index 2023. link ILO

This report provides insights into:

• Prevalence & Numbers: Estimates of modern slavery across 160 countries, derived from household surveys and vulnerability assessments.
• Vulnerability: Analyses factors that make communities more susceptible to modern slavery based on 23 indicators across five dimensions.
• Government Response: Assesses efforts in 176 countries based on 141 indicators across five milestones, highlighting policies, programs, and progress.

The report also highlights goods imported by G20 countries that are at risk of being linked to forced labour, encouraging transparency and accountability in supply chains.

Global Estimates of Modern Slavery. Forced Labour and Forced Marriage. link ILO pdf

Data Visualisation; Global_Slavery_Index_2023.csv

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![](https://www.googleapis.com/download/storage/v1/b/kaggle-user-content/o/inbox%2F13231939%2Fb2ebd0e70b03...

The Curaçao colonial administration began keeping track of slaves at the beginning of 1839. This so-called slave record was maintained until 1863, when slavery was abolished. All owners were obliged to register the name, gender, year of birth and name of the mother of the people in their property. Furthermore, all changes had to be registered: birth, death, sale, release and the import and export of people in Curaçao. This resulted in a closed registration: as long as someone was alive and in slavery, this person could be followed in the slave registers. In total, the slave registers of Curaçao consist of eight books, with a total of 1,070 folios (pages). The registers consist of 21,515 entries for 13,062 unique individuals. Absent from the registers are governmental owned enslaved persons. This encompasses maybe a few tens to a hundred individuals in Curaçao. Furthermore, as enslaved persons were not permitted to marry and hence are legally fatherless, the name of the father is missing in all slave registry.

This document provides an overview of the construction of the Curaçao slave registers database and the variables therein. A quick summary of the variables is given first. An detailed description of the variables is provided in the appendices, which is then followed by an explanation of how the variables were created.

The Natchez Database of Free People of Color (NDFPC) contains data about Natchez, Mississippi’s free Black community during the Spanish era (1779-1795) and after the United States acquired it in 1796 until 1865. It records the name of every free black individual who surfaced in the author’s research; diligent attention was paid to entering values like gender, age, race, property ownership, occupation, literacy, experiences of violence, among many others (53 in total) in the dataset. The companion to the NDFPC is the Natchez Index of Free Individuals and Families of Color, which is an approximately 500-page text document that archives transcriptions of records on the 1,018 free Black individuals who lived or stayed in Natchez during those years. It is organized alphabetically by surname when known or by first name. Digitization of the dataset and index will facilitate research by descendants engaged in genealogical research and other scholars of enslaved and free people of color.

Bills of sale are written agreements which convey title of property, including enslaved people, from seller to buyer. Under the system of chattel slavery, laws permitted enslavers to treat enslaved people as personal possessions in the same manner as livestock, farm equipment, or household items. Enslaved people could be bought or sold without regard to their personal relationships or free will. Bills of sale record the name of the seller, the names of enslaved people being sold and their price, and the name of the buyer. Given that they involved a property transaction, bills of sale were commonly recorded and filed with deeds in the local court. However, there was no official requirement that the transfer of an enslaved person be recorded unless necessary for legal purposes such as a court case or an estate settlement. Enslaved people could also be transferred through a deed of gift, there was no money transaction involved in this case, which distinguishes this record from a bill of sale. Enslavers and their family members often transferred enslaved people between themselves in this manner.

Deeds, likewise are written agreements which convey title of property, such as an enslaved person, from one individual to another. Deeds can involve the voluntary transfer of enslaved people between family members with no financial transaction involved. Deeds record name(s) of the grantor(s), grantee(s), and enslaved people. Deeds were proved and recorded in the local court.

The data in this collection is drawn directly from the historical documents and may contain language that is now deemed offensive.

The company known as Franklin & Armfield was the largest slave-trading business in the United States during its years of operation from 1828 to 1836, and it may have been the largest in American history. Partners and agents of the company sold more than 1,600 enslaved people in New Orleans, which housed the largest market for enslaved people in the entire country. The dataset included here contains detailed information about those sales, documenting the names of the enslaved and the individuals who purchased them, some demographic and physical descriptions of the enslaved, the terms of their sales, and other relevant matters. Most information was extracted from records kept by notaries who recorded many of the slave sales in the city.

Beginning in the 16th century, European traders began to buy or capture people in the African continent to enslave and sell for profit. This trade began with Portugal and Spain, but it later expanded to include France, England, the Netherlands and other European countries. By the time the trading of enslaved people was finally put to an end in the 19th century, Europeans had abducted an estimated 12.5 million African people from their homelands, forced them onto ships, trafficked them to the Americas, and sold them on the auction block. Almost two million people died during transport; most of the rest were forced into labor camps, also called plantations. This extensive and gruesome human trafficking is commonly referred to as the transatlantic slave trade. The Portuguese began human trafficking in Africa by trading manufactured goods or money for Africans who had been captured during local wars. Later, some Europeans captured Africans themselves or paid other local Africans to do it for them. Europeans traded for or kidnapped Africans from many points on Africa’s coast, including Angola, Senegambia and Mozambique. Most of the people who were enslaved by the Europeans came from West and Central Africa.The most brutal segment of the route was the Middle Passage, which transported chained African people across the Atlantic Ocean as they were packed tightly below the decks of purpose-built ships in unsanitary conditions. This trip could last weeks or even months depending on conditions, and the trafficked people were subjected to abuse, dangerously high heat, inadequate food and water, and low-oxygen environments. Olaudah Equiano, a young boy who was forced into the Middle Passage after being captured in his home country of Nigeria, later described the foul conditions as “intolerably loathsome” and detailed how people died from sickness and lack of air. Approximately 1.8 million African people are thought to have died during the passage, accounting for about 15–25 percent of those who were taken from Africa.For many enslaved Africans trafficked across the Atlantic, the port at which their ship landed was not their final destination. Enslaved people were often transported by ship between two points in the Americas, particularly from Portuguese, Dutch and British colonies to Spanish ones. This was the intra-American slave trade. No matter where they landed, enslaved Africans faced brutal living conditions and high mortality rates. Moreover, any children born to enslaved persons were also born into slavery, usually with no hope of ever gaining freedom.This data set is the culmination of decades of archival research compiled by the SlaveVoyages Consortium. This data represents the trafficking of enslaved Africans from 1514 to 1866. All mapmakers must make choices when presenting data. This map layer represents individuals who experts can definitively place at a given location on one of at least 36,000 transatlantic and at least 10,000 intra-American human trafficking routes. However, this means the enslaved people for whom records cannot place their departure or arrival with certainty do not appear on this map (approximately 170,985 people). This map, therefore, is part of the story and not a complete accounting. You can learn more about the methodology of this data collection here.

The Nashville Enslaved and Free People of Color Database (NEFPCD) contains information regarding the movements of more than 14,700 Black people and their enslavers in Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee before Emancipation. Information for this database was compiled using the information found in a total of seventeen Davidson County record books containing wills, inventories, and other probate records dating between 1780 and 1865, all of which are housed at the Metropolitan Government Archives of Nashville-Davidson County.

"They Had Names" contains abstracts of 650 Liberty County post-mortem estate inventories and divisions. The names of 18,300+ enslaved people were extracted from Liberty County court documents recorded between 1762 and 1865. The dataset includes original and standardized versions of names of the enslaved and slave owners, allowing for sorting by name. The abstracts contain all names, dates, and identifying information contained in the documents, but omit all non-human property. To enable sorting of the spreadsheet by name, but preserve the ability to discover family groupings, a column was added for the original order within the inventory, allowing a user to discover a name, then sort the spreadsheet by slave owner, date, and order within original inventory to discover possible family groupings. The estate inventories have been digitized and are freely available online at FamilySearch.org and the Georgia Archives Virtual Vault, but lack of indexing and inconsistencies in spelling of names have complicated their use; this dataset is designed to fill that gap.

Chattels records housed at the Maryland State Archives contain recorded sales of property for other than real estate from 1790 to 1862 for twenty-one of the state’s counties; the “Chattels” dataset utilizes information from four counties in central Maryland: Anne Arundel, Dorchester, Kent, and Prince George’s. The “Chattels” dataset is currently composed of 8,691 records that enumerate transactions regarding the purchase and sale of enslaved people in central Maryland between 1790 and 1862. The dataset is derived from lists of sales of property (“chattels”), which included crops, livestock, farm implements, furniture, and wagons. Prior to the Civil War, the sale of enslaved individuals was also recorded in the chattel sales records. Archival records may include bills of sale, chattel mortgages, and releases; additionally some manumission records are included.

Louisiana Slave Database (1719-1820) contains over 104,000 records, with 162 fields each containing descriptions of enslaved people found in original manuscript documents. African slave names, genders, ages, occupations, illnesses, family relationships, ethnicity, places of origin, prices paid by slave owners, slaves' testimony and emancipations, type of document(s) where they were found, and where to retrieve the original document are some of the major fields. The project included all the geographic areas now constituting the State of Louisiana through 1820 and also included some documents originating in or involving parts of what are now Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. The project stopped in 1820 when descriptions of the African ethnicities of slaves became sparse in Louisiana at the same time as the volume of documents escalated.

The records found in this collection include requisition lists filed in local courts and payroll records of the Virginia Engineer Department. Information found in these records include names of enslaved and free Black people, locality of origin, occupation, location of fortification, names of enslavers, and monetary value of enslaved people. Virginia enacted legislation as early as July 1, 1861 during the Civil War to requisition enslaved and free Black people to work on military fortifications and other defensive works around the commonwealth. From 1862 to 1863, at the request of the president of the Confederate States, the General Assembly passed three more laws that requisitioned enslaved laborers to work on fortifications and other works of the defense. Each county and city were given a certain number of enslaved laborers that had to be provided to the government under the requisition act. Enslaved people requisitioned for service did not have a choice. In many cases, the alternative was severe punishment or to be hanged.

Descriptions included in this dataset are drawn directly from the original documents and may contain language which is now deemed offensive.

The purpose of the Gates County Dismal Swamp Records Project dataset is to make available information related to the enslaved and free people of color from northeastern North Carolina and southeastern Virginia who worked in the portion of the Great Dismal Swamp located within Gates County, North Carolina. The Dismal Swamp was the home to many maroons, or self-emancipated people of color who built their own communities outside of traditional society. While these maroons resided in the heart of the swamp, enslaved and free workers toiled at its fringes, cutting canal paths and making shingles under the orders of white overseers and companies. In order to prevent runaways, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a law in 1847 requiring all free/enslaved people of color to be registered at the courthouse and issued a pass before entering the swamp for work. Because of this law, Gates County created a register book, which contains about 750 entries registering free/enslaved people to work in the swamp, with each entry including detailed information about the worker, including their age, height, weight, enslaver/person they were bound to, and a physical description including a comprehensive description of any scars or marks found on their bodies.