In Memoriam : David Richardson

I first met David at Colby College, Maine, in August 1974, though to my subsequent regret it was 18 years before we began a collaboration. Fifty years later, I still find myself engaging with the mass of data on the British slave trade, as well as the early French trade, that he assembled and continued to augment down to the mid 2010s. This work comprised his sole-authored four-volume catalogue of the Bristol slave trade and then, with Katherine Beedham and Maurice Schofield, ‘A Computerised Edition of the Liverpool Plantation Registers, 1744–1786’. These formed the core data for the English slave trade. When Steve Behrendt's data for 1779–1807 became available, it emerged that, for six decades from the 1740s, the English had carried more African captives across the Atlantic than any other country. But the work involved in these projects comprised far more than collecting the numbers of enslaved people. The project encompassed all the details of often complex voyages and involved the creation of 276 variables that are still in daily use in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, now housed on the SlaveVoyages website (www.slavevoyages.org).

I mention this somewhat arcane information because an eighteenth-century document has recently come to light containing details of 1,340 voyages that disembarked slaves in Jamaica – the principal slave market in the British Americas. In the process of integrating this new source into the SlaveVoyages website, I have gained new respect for David's meticulous work. It turns out that this new source contains only 66 voyages that we did not already know about from David's work. I have worked with many careful scholars over the years, but he was the best – patient, resourceful and usually correct in his final decisions. But his key contribution to slave-trade scholarship was yet to come. After Cambridge published the CD-ROM of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database in 1999, he applied for and won the largest single grant the Slave Voyages project has so far obtained – from the United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities Research Council. This funding allowed us to establish temporary research centres in Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon, and thus greatly extend our coverage of the Portuguese slave trade. Under his supervision on the Lisbon front, thousands of previously unrecorded Iberian voyages became accessible. This work allowed us to begin the arduous process of moving the database to the Web. Another eight years of piecing together data followed, this time drawing on Iberian as well as Brazilian archival material, before the SlaveVoyages website went live in 2008. Having established the eighteenth-century pre-eminence of British slave trading in his earlier work, David's new grant allowed us to identify the Portuguese as the major trafficking country overall, and to highlight the importance of the hitherto neglected South Atlantic slaving routes.

While all this was going on – indeed from 1995 to shortly before his final illness – David co-authored and co-edited 20 books and research essays with me alone, with most of the latter finding homes in top-ranked journals and major university presses. He wrote on all parts of the Atlantic World, including African history. The widely used Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, published in 2010 by Yale University Press, was his idea. It has sold more copies than the rest of the books published by its two co-authors put together. An extended second edition of the Atlas is in preparation – proof perhaps not only of the resilience of the printed word, but also of the enduring importance of his research. Most strikingly, David had an extraordinary ability to work with those with whom he disagreed – an unusual characteristic among the academics I know, including myself! Yet this activity comprised just a small fraction of his research output. I was just one of a dozen other scholars with whom he published during his career – many eminent, others very junior, including his former students.

Not the least of what he brought to the collaborative table was a peerless collection of notes and xeroxed documents taken from a wide range of archives. In the 1990s, I would work through these during extended visits to his office, and I was followed by many other scholars. Fortunately, when he retired, this treasure trove was transferred to the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE). No research on the British slave trade can be complete without the researcher making an extended visit to WISE.

One might ask whether the very institute that now houses these documents would even exist but for the tireless efforts of David. He was one of a trio of scholars (Mike Turner and Gary Craig were the others) who might be classed as the founders. What astonished me during my visits to Hull in the pre-WISE days was the way he was able to teach and hold down administrative positions at the same time as working with me. We would spend hours merging data and eliminating duplicate voyages before he would disappear for an hour to lecture on Japanese economic history or the history of whaling. On his return from class, he would usually have a resolution to whatever intractable problem we were trying to solve. It was the same with his administrative responsibilities. He went seamlessly from department head to dean and then to director of WISE, without his research missing a beat. I do not know of any other scholar who was able to combine major administrative achievements with permanently important scholarly contributions. A glimpse of his curriculum vitae will establish this last point. His research output truly appears to have increased after he assumed these additional duties. And let it be clear that the creation of WISE in the early years of the century was in itself a full-time job. It required him to be at ease with politicians at both the local and national levels, as well as the upper range of the University of Hull’s administration. The talents he displayed in interacting with scholars in the increasingly fractious field of the Black Atlantic were clearly suited to smoothing the path that made the establishment of both WISE and the SlaveVoyages website a reality.

For more than three decades, I have been able to rely on quick responses from David to my incessant questions. I see his handwriting whenever I open my filing cabinets from the pre-electronic era. His comments and papers fill my back-up drives. His passing of course means an enormous loss to the field, but this is nothing compared to the gap it leaves in my own personal and professional life. Quite apart from his long list of publications, we can at least be assured that his foundational work on the slave trade will endure, given that the SlaveVoyages website is now averaging 2,000 visitors a day, is used in classrooms around the world, and is supported by an international consortium of governments and research institutes. Even after the onset of his final illness, he was still sending me data culled from the trade books of slave ships that identified individual African sellers of enslaved persons. As we go to press, we can still look forward to those of his contributions that are still to be added to the ‘People of the Atlantic Slave Trade’ interface of the SlaveVoyages website.

I first met David Richardson during a job interview at the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE) in Hull in 2009. I was about to finish my PhD in Leiden and was applying for a new position. WISE had just opened a postdoctoral post within the framework of the European Union-funded project ‘Slave Trade, Slavery Abolitions and Their Legacies in European Histories and Identities’ (EURESCL). David was one of the principal investigators of EURESCL and responsible for its British branch. At the time, he was also the director of WISE, one of the main partner institutions in the project. As such, David was obviously the chair of my interview panel. He welcomed me warmly; the questions that followed were sharp, precise and to the point, like the arguments in his articles, chapters and books. This was something I expected, given his knowledge of the slave trade and other related topics. What surprised me the most in this first meeting with David was the fact that, despite being one of the major scholarly authorities in the field and a renowned author, he came across as a rather modest and unpretentious man.

In September 2009, I started in this new job and, for a period of several years, had the privilege of working directly with David. Together, we developed several outputs for Work Package 2 of the EURESCL project, including data sets on ‘Arrivals of Enslaved Africans in Europe’ and ‘Slavers Operating from Mozambique’, which are both currently freely available online. During my time at WISE and in the years that followed, we also worked on a collective volume, bringing together a group of young and established researchers whose work focused on the South Atlantic slave trade and its Indian Ocean connections. Networks and Trans-Cultural Exchange: Slave Trading in the South Atlantic, 1590–1867 was published by Brill in 2014 and ended up being the winner of the 2015 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award.

Despite the differences in content, all these outputs had three main goals in common. First, they all aimed to bring to the attention of the academic community and the wider public data on flows, routes, actors and interconnections in the trade in enslaved peoples, which was underexplored in the international historiography at the time. This was, for example, the case with the transportation of enslaved Africans to Europe, either directly from the African continent or indirectly via the Americas or on voyages originating in Asia. Second, these initiatives aspired to contribute to the development of a more encompassing and inclusive scholarship. This was accomplished, on the one hand, by bringing together specialists from different streams of slave-trade historiography, focusing on both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and, on the other, by fostering dialogue between academic traditions and bodies of scholarly production from the anglophone, francophone, Spanish and lusophone worlds. Lastly, these initiatives stimulated the development of new avenues of research and allowed for the expansion of our knowledge and understanding of the various topics related to the commerce in enslaved peoples during the early modern period and beyond. These were, however, not only the specific goals in these initiatives. More importantly, I think, these were core ideas and objectives that were present throughout the development of David's entire career and guided his trajectory as an academic and a scholar.

It is unquestionable that David was a specialist in the British slave trade. However, in his case, this specialization was never a limitation, but rather a point of departure to seek dialogue with non-English-speaking scholars and collaboration with colleagues across various countries and continents focusing on different streams of the transatlantic slave trade, as well as the Indian Ocean commerce in enslaved people. Dialogue and collaboration were therefore two of David's hallmarks as a scholar, which led to the publication of multiple co-edited and co-authored volumes, articles, book chapters and data sets. Two of these remain seminal works and outstanding contributions that have deeply transformed the field – namely, the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, currently available on the SlaveVoyages website (www.slavevoyages.org), and the Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which were both developed with David Eltis and others. This transformation was triggered not only by the volume of data on the commerce in enslaved peoples that was made available to the academic community, but, more importantly, also by the wide array of new research questions that were inspired through the analysis of this new body of data.

However, these two major contributions did not only change this field of study, but also fostered changes in the perceptions and the knowledge of the wider public about the commerce in enslaved people of African origin. The educational dimensions of the SlaveVoyages website and of the Atlas were extremely important to raise awareness about the wrongdoings of European colonial exploitation and to give voice in the national historical narratives to the experiences of the enslaved peoples and their descendants, as well as their key role in the construction of the early modern and modern worlds. Making scholarly research accessible to broad audiences and raising public awareness about the wrongdoings of European empire-building were, I think, two other important challenges that David took up throughout his career as an academic.

But David Richardson did not only help to build bridges between the academic world and the wider public. Even within the scholarly world, David, in partnership with other colleagues, fostered the establishment of bridges between different streams of the historiography on the slave trade and slavery. By sponsoring the organization of various events in Europe, Africa and the Americas, as well as different publications, David, together with other colleagues, helped start a conversation between specialists on commerce in enslaved peoples across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and beyond. Some of these initiatives, dating back to the first two decades of the twenty-first century, such as the international conference Bridging Two Oceans organized by WISE in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2009, would play an important role in the development of the current approach to the slave trade and the study of slavery, which is far more global and interconnected than previously. In this respect, David also played an important role in widening the approaches to the study of the slave trade and slavery, stimulating comparisons and the exploration of connections between West and East, North and South, as well as between different flows of slave trading and various forms of slavery.

Equally important were David's efforts, during his term as director of WISE, to facilitate the construction of bridges between the study of historical and modern forms of slavery, and to stimulate collaborations between scholars, artists, media and museum experts, and educators. Several initiatives were organized with the aim of helping to make the slave trade and human trafficking, as well as historical and modern forms of slavery, visible and present in schools, public spaces and public memory – in particular in the United Kingdom and other anglophone countries.

To me, however, there were two other remarkable facets of David as a scholar and an academic. The first was his generosity in sharing his knowledge and resources with those who approached him with questions, regardless of whether they were already accomplished or early career scholars. I, like many other colleagues, have benefited immensely from David's scholarly generosity, when he shared with me copies of source materials from various archives deposited in his former office at WISE, as well as numerous publications. The second most valuable thing that David shared with the colleagues who had the chance to work with him was his enthusiasm for research and for the development of new projects. Often, conversations with David were very inspirational, leading to the emergence of new research ideas. David's scholarly legacy cannot therefore only be found in his single- and co-authored publications, in particular on the SlaveVoyages website and in the Atlas, but more importantly also among several generations of scholars of the slave trade and slavery studies who he helped in training and developing their careers. He did so not only by sharing and inspiring many of us, but also by creating opportunities for the participation of young scholars in conferences and workshops, to facilitate their contact with new scholarly networks, as well as teaching activities, not to mention the many references and letters of recommendation he wrote for many of us.

From David, I have learned a lot not only about the slave trade but, more importantly, also about how academia works, and about the mission of the historian towards civil society. We last saw each other in March 2022 when I visited WISE to give a lecture. He was extremely kind to chair and discuss my presentation at length. Like always, his feedback was very insightful and his advice precious, and his enthusiasm for new research remained the same. This is how I will always remember David Richardson – cheerful, energetic, generous, wise and inspiring.