Home – The ESTA Database
The Exploring Slave Trade in Asia project aims to curate data that reconstructs the historic slave trade in the Indian Ocean and Maritime Asia region.
Currently, the database contains data on more than 4,000 slave trade voyages. This is the result of the curation of five separate datasets created, and generously shared with us, by individual researchers. The original datasets can be found in the project Dataverse.
Forced transportations of people across the Indian Ocean and Asia transpired in a variety of (often interconnected) contexts, ranging from commodified and legalized slave trade to "illegal" (private) human trafficking, and tributary exchanges between polities to penal slavery. To understand the interactions between different manifestations of slave trade and their connections to other forms of bondage and coercion, we find it important to record these distinct but connected forms of slave trade in as much detail as possible. This is paramount to getting a better grasp on the structures of slave trade in this region and has informed our data model in crucial ways. Read more about our considerations in these publications.
This database is the result of international collaboration, committed work and contributions by researchers, students, and developers since 2016.
If you see any errors, have additional data on voyages, or want to contribute slave trade data, please contact us here.
Additional information can also be found on our project page, esta.iisg.nl.