slave trade

What slave trade does

Enslaved.org is a nonprofit digital humanities project founded in 2018 and hosted at Michigan State University's Matrix: Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences in East Lansing, Michigan. It operates as a free, publicly accessible linked open data platform that aggregates and makes searchable records about enslaved peoples, enslavers, and free persons from the historical slave trade spanning Africa, the Americas, and Europe from the 15th century to 1888. The platform serves academic researchers, genealogists, educators, students, and the general public, with no commercial barriers to access.

The platform is built on Wikibase infrastructure with Semantic MediaWiki principles and uses a proprietary ontology with standardized controlled vocabularies for ethnolinguistic descriptors, role types, occupations, place types, and event types. It integrates 36+ major datasets including SlaveVoyages (10M+ Africans documented), the Louisiana Slave Database (161,109+ people), and Legacies of British Slavery (62,246+ people), unified search across 731,500+ person records, 474,012+ event records, 10,381+ place records, and 3,940+ source records. Core products include the Enslaved.org Hub, peer-reviewed Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation (JSDP), biographical Stories, advanced search, visualization tools, and educational resources for K-12 and higher education. Record matching uses 'match' and 'close match' predicates to identify same-entity connections across collections.

The project operates as a 501c3 nonprofit with no commercial revenue. It is funded primarily through grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation ($1.5M in 2018, $1.4M in April 2021) and previously the National Endowment for the Humanities, with institutional support from Michigan State University and academic partners including the University of Maryland, University of California Riverside, Harvard's Hutchins Center, and others. As of April 2025, NEH grants were terminated by federal executive order, creating a material funding gap. The project is co-directed by Daryle Williams, Dean Rehberger, and Walter Hawthorne.

Name

slave trade

Legal name

Michigan State University Matrix: Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences

Website

https://enslaved.org

Company type

Private

Founded year

2018

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

11–50 employees

Short description

Enslaved.org is a nonprofit linked open data platform hosted at Michigan State University that aggregates 36+ datasets documenting over 731,500 people from the historical slave trade, serving academic researchers, genealogists, educators, and the general public through free access.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Digital Humanities Research Platform

NAICS

Libraries and Archives (51921), Libraries and Archives (519210), Web Search Portals, Libraries, Archives, and Other Information Services (5192)

SIC

Services-Prepackaged Software (7372)

akta.pro industry

PRIMARYBPAAAKAG

Records Digitization & Archiving (Legacy Files, Retention Support)

Business & Public Services/Administrative & Support Services (BPO, Call Centers, Back Office)/Data Entry, Data Processing & Document Digitization

SECONDARYBPADAGAK

Human Rights Monitoring, Documentation & Advocacy

Business & Public Services/International Organizations & Development/Human Rights, Democracy & Governance

Keywords

• Linked open data
• Digital humanities
• Historical research databases
• Genealogy research tools
• Academic data publishing

Headquarters

HQ city

East Lansing

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2C

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Operations, Infrastructure, Marketing or Sales

Revenue model

1. Grant Funding: Primary funding comes from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities grants. Michigan State University's Matrix Center provides institutional hosting and support. The platform does not generate commercial revenue.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion1 record

Distribution channels3 records

Marketing channels6 records

Core offering

Enslaved.org is a free, publicly accessible linked open data platform that aggregates and interconnects historical records of enslaved peoples, enslavers, and free persons across 36+ integrated datasets spanning the 15th to 20th centuries in Africa, the Americas, and Europe. The platform offers unified search across person, event, place, and source records, biographical Stories, data visualization tools, and downloadable linked open data files, with the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation serving as its peer-reviewed publishing mechanism. Users include scholars, genealogists, students, educators, and the general public.

Product overview

Enslaved.org is a digital humanities discovery platform that aggregates datasets about the historical slave trade. The platform consists of the core Enslaved.org Hub for searching records of people, events, places, and sources; the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation (JSDP) as the peer-review publishing mechanism; Stories for biographical narratives; and visualization tools for data analysis. The platform spans slavery records from Africa, the Americas, and Europe, from the 15th century through 1888.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Brands

• Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation (JSDP): A digital academic journal that publishes original datasets about the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants, and the method by which data is contributed to Enslaved.org.

Products and services

• Enslaved.org Hub A discovery hub that aggregates and makes searchable records about enslaved peoples, enslavers, and free persons from the historical slave trade, spanning Africa, the Americas, and Europe from the 15th century to 1888. Provides unified search across 731,500+ person records, 474,012+ event records, 10,381+ place records, and 3,940+ source records.
• Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation (JSDP) A peer-reviewed digital academic journal that publishes original datasets about the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants drawn from documents produced from the 15th to early 20th centuries. Serves as the publishing arm and formal data contribution mechanism for Enslaved.org.
• Stories Biographical narratives highlighting the lives of enslaved individuals, resistance, and freedom across Africa and the Americas, derived from datasets and contributed biographies.
• Visualize Data Data visualization tool providing tables, charts, and graphs with filtering by project and data types including gender, age, place types, and event types across the integrated collections.
• Linked Open Data (LOD) JSON and RDF files of linked open data available for download and reuse by researchers and developers to integrate Enslaved.org data into other applications.

Quantifiable outcome

• Unified search across 36+ datasets that previously existed in isolation
• +2 more outcomes

Named customers4 records

Segments4 records

Ideal customer profiles4 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Feature4 records

Partnerships

Twelve partnerships are on record, tiered core and minor.

• University of California, RiversidecoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2021Led by Daryle Williams as Dean of College of Arts & Humanities. UCR contributes to project expansion and research efforts.
• Omohundro Institute of Early American History & CultureminorStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2021Partnership announced June 2021 for collaborative digital humanities projects on slavery history.
• Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard UniversitycoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2019Provided 150 adapted biographies from the African American National Biography dictionary. Partnership includes Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Editor in Chief), Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and Steven J. Niven (Stories Editor).
• University of MarylandcoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2018Co-directed by Daryle Williams (University of Maryland). Partner in developing linked open data infrastructure and contributing data on Brazilian slavery.
• Matrix: Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences at Michigan State UniversitycoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2011Institutional host providing infrastructure, staffing, and administrative support for Enslaved.org. The Matrix Center serves as the primary institutional home for the project, hosting development teams and providing operational capacity.
• Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database NetworkcoreTechnology or Integration · 1 January 2011Originating project that developed foundational data models, controlled vocabularies, and partnerships that evolved into Enslaved.org. Provided initial datasets including Louisiana Slave Database, Maranhão Inventories Slave Database, and Free Black Database.
• Gwendolyn Midlo HallcoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2011Creator of the Louisiana Slave Database, one of the foundational datasets integrated into Enslaved.org. Rutgers University affiliated researcher.
• Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (Emory University)coreTechnology or Integration · 1 January 2011Major dataset partner contributing the largest collection of trans-Atlantic slave trade voyage records. Contains data on nearly 36,000 voyages and over 10 million Africans.
• Legacies of British Slavery (University College London)coreTechnology or Integration · 1 January 2011Contributed comprehensive dataset on British Caribbean slavery and the £20 million compensation paid to slaveholders after abolition. Contains 62,246+ person records.
• Slave Societies Digital Archive (Vanderbilt University)coreTechnology or Integration · 1 January 2011Contributed data on enslaved peoples in the Americas including Havana baptismal records from 1590-1600. Project led by Jane Landers.
• Brian Mitchell (University of Arkansas Little Rock)coreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2011Creator of the Free Black Database contributing 3,597+ records of free Black people in New Orleans.
• David Eltis (Emory University)coreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2011Principal investigator of Voyages database and founding partner in African Origins project.

Scale indicators10 records

Recent moves6 records

Expansion highlights6 records

Direct peers

• Documenting the American South (UNC): University-hosted digital humanities initiative that aggregates primary sources on the American South including narratives by enslaved and formerly enslaved people. Operates on a similar nonprofit, grant-funded, open-access model for slavery-related archival content.
• Europeana: EU-funded digital platform aggregating millions of cultural heritage items from European libraries, museums, and archives. Comparable model (nonprofit, grant-funded, linked open data for cultural heritage) though broader in scope and regionally focused on Europe.
• SlaveVoyages: The most direct peer: a separate but overlapping digital platform documenting the trans-Atlantic slave trade with ~36,000 voyages and 10M+ Africans. SlaveVoyages data is actually integrated into Enslaved.org as a core dataset, but it also operates as a standalone platform with overlapping users (researchers, educators).

Broad incumbents

• JSTOR: Major digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources used by the same scholarly audience as Enslaved.org. Provides overlapping content (peer-reviewed slavery studies scholarship) but is a broader humanities platform rather than a specialized linked-data archive.
• FamilySearch: Operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, FamilySearch is the world's largest free genealogy platform with billions of records. It overlaps significantly with Enslaved.org's genealogist user segment and contains substantial slavery-era records, though it is a broad incumbent rather than a specialist.
• Internet Archive: Nonprofit digital library offering free access to historical texts, audio, video, and web archives. Operates in the same open-access archival space as Enslaved.org but at vastly broader scope (millions of items) and serves overlapping users interested in primary historical sources.
• Ancestry.com: The dominant commercial genealogy platform with extensive slavery-era U.S. records including Freedmen's Bureau collections. Competes for the same genealogist segment as Enslaved.org but with vastly greater scale, paid subscription model, and broader (non-slavery-focused) scope.
• National Archives and Records Administration (NARA): U.S. federal agency that preserves and provides access to historical documents including extensive slavery-era records (e.g., Freedmen's Bureau records digitized with Ancestry/FamilySearch). A massive scale archival entity that overlaps with Enslaved.org's source domain.

Others

• Wikimedia Foundation: Nonprofit operating Wikipedia and Wikidata, providing the Wikibase infrastructure that Enslaved.org builds upon. Functions as a critical technology partner and ecosystem enabler rather than a direct competitor; its open-data philosophy shapes Enslaved.org's architecture.
• Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture: Major cultural institution dedicated to documenting African American history including slavery. Complementary rather than directly competitive: NMAAHC curates physical and digital collections for public education while Enslaved.org focuses on linked open data infrastructure.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat5 records

Key risks5 records

Key highlights6 records

Customer concentration

• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/75406866/admin

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles7 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

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M&A

Investments

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Frequently asked questions about slave trade