Africa and Africans in the African Diaspora: The Uses of Relational Databases

Hall comments in the article Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History by David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson make two major claims: it presents a new, superior model for interpreting the formation of culture in the Americas, and that it challenges the belief that Africans played an important role in the introduction and technology of rice cultivation and processing in the Americas. Here, she argues that the database employed by Eltis, Morgan, and Richardson is inadequate, citing calculations from her own database, the Louisiana Slave Database, which she claims is superior insofar as it includes information not only on the slave trade voyages but also from documents found throughout the Americas. Indeed, she calls for the creation of a Western Hemisphere Slave Database based on the extensive archives on this side of the Atlantic. Her own view supports the claim for the African slave origin of American rice cultivation, and she calls Eltis, Morgan, and Richardson to task for what she judges as unfair criticism of this analysis.