About

Professor Henry Lovejoy is affiliated with the Digital Slavery Research Lab (DSRL) at the University of Colorado Boulder. The lab focuses on developing, linking, layering, and archiving open-source data and multimedia related to the global phenomenon of slavery and human trafficking, with particular attention to the historic Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and trans-Saharan slave trades. The mission of the lab is to train students to become interdisciplinary collaborators by combining historical research on human trafficking with digital humanities methods. Through the design of sustainable resources, the lab aims to enhance mutual understanding and stimulate dialogues around these critical historical and contemporary issues. The interdisciplinary nature of the lab involves collaboration among faculty, students, and programmers from various departments including History, Applied Mathematics, and Computer Science, as well as partnerships with industry leaders in digital humanities. Students working under this initiative are trained in metadata development, digital archiving, historical GIS, spatial modeling, digital humanities tools, 3D environments, and web-based visual interfaces. The lab supports scientific research and the development of educational materials, the collection and preservation of written archives and oral traditions, and the inventory and preservation of memorial sites and places related to slavery and human trafficking.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Archaeology
• Ethnology
• Law
• Data science
• Geography
• History
• Genealogy
• Ancient history
• Anthropology
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• Queen Victoria’s ‘Liberated African’: Sarah ‘Sally’ Forbes Bonetta and Her Extraordinary Apprenticeship by the British Royal Family, 1850–1862

  Slavery and Abolition · 2024-07-24

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In 1848, Dahomey's army enslaved a five-year-old Yoruba girl, named Aina, whose fate on the surface was unusual. She was given as a 'gift' to a British diplomat who presented her to Queen Victoria in England in 1850. This girl was 'liberated' according to anti-slavery law that was applied to Africans taken off slave ships, and she can be identified as a 'Liberated African'. The Queen's special interest in Aina was expressed further through her baptism as Sarah Forbes Bonetta (c. 1843–1880), although she was generally known as 'Sally'. Because of this relationship, British newspapers romanticized her as an 'African princess' who symbolized public endorsement of anti-slavery policy. Sally's apprenticeship centres a fascinating story within the context of the suppression of the slave trade and imperial ambitions in Africa. While not captured on a ship, as 200,000 'Liberated Africans' were, she was enslaved by Dahomey's army, British diplomats 'liberated' her, and the Queen became her legal guardian until the age of 21. The Queen paid for her Christian education in Sierra Leone and England, and in 1862, arranged her marriage to James Pinson Labulo Davies, a wealthy merchant based in Lagos.

  PublisherDOI

• Registered Liberated Africans

  Harvard Dataverse · 2024-01-08

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This list of over 113,500 "Liberated Africans" relates to individuals captured from the slave trade and forced into indentures by various governments around the world. While the majority of these data derive from registers made in Freetown, Sierra Leone after 1808, the list includes other registers from Cuba, Brazil, British Caribbean, East Africa, Southern Europe, and Middle East.

  PublisherDOI

• Conceptualizing ‘Liberated Africans’ and Slave Trade Abolition: Government Schemes to Indenture Enslaved People Captured from Slavery, 1800–1920

  Past & Present · 2024-06-28 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract A new survey of ‘Liberated Africans’ exposes how global calculations of involuntary African indentured labour after 1800 have been significantly underestimated. This analysis of the suppression of the slave trade draws upon a publicly accessible database and digital archive at LiberatedAfricans.org. A quantitative, spatial and chronological visualization of abolition in action, the website memorializes lived experiences of the victims of abolition on micro and macro levels. Results show that there were more than 700,000 individuals captured from the slave trade, ‘liberated’, and forced into periods of indenture according to anti-slave-trade law. This article consolidates the historiography to challenge dominant narratives that British-led efforts were the most voluminous, instead revealing a more complex and multifaceted global phenomenon involving the mass registration of upwards of 200,000 people by name. Digital humanities methodologies facilitate tracking migratory patterns of ‘Liberated Africans’ in diaspora, that is from African regions of departure through documented capture locations in slave trade blockades, judicial processes resulting in ‘liberation’, and settlements of indenture often involving secondary migrations. With the participation of at least eighteen different nations, key findings determine that Portugal and France contributed to upwards of 370,000 ‘Liberated Africans’, surpassing Britain which supplied about a third of global estimates.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: A Modelling Strategy to Estimate Conditional Probabilities of African Origins: The Collapse of the Oyo Empire and The Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1817–1836

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-07-10

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Henry Lovejoy compiled a list of cities in the kingdom of Oyo involved in conflict from 1817–1836, their corresponding spatial coordinates, start and end dates surrounding conflict at each city, political affiliations of the city, and an extensive list of primary or secondary sources from which the data are derived. A conflict intensity scale is encoded as a categorical variable with two levels: 2 indicates a city was attacked and 3 represents a city that was destroyed. Cities could be attacked or destroyed over several years. Cities were often rebuilt in the same or slightly different locations and attacked or destroyed again in subsequent years. New cities were also founded, which is represented with 9 in the data set. For an annual overview of political and conflict maps, slave ship departures, available documentation, and imagery (including photographs) of the people involved in Oyo's collapse see http://www.yorubadiaspora.org. GIS materials compiled by Lovejoy are published at https://doi.org/10.1163/2405836X-00402002. Compiled in collaboration with Ashton Wiens, Zachary Mullen, and Eric Vance, the R Shiny App can be viewed at https://walkwithweb.shinyapps.io/LA_Rshiny_app1/. Those data sets are available at https://osf.io/h6upw.

  PublisherDOI

• Regionalization of Africa as a Controlled Vocabulary for Data Analysis

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-07-10

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  These regions provide a basic geographic understanding of the continent and its peoples from perspectives rooted in African and African diaspora history. The centers on a geographic hierarchy that divides Africa into six broad regions that are sub-divided into 34 subregions, including major offshore islands.AfricanRegions.org is helpful for researching and teaching this continent’s complex history in broad, regional terms. This regionalization is created from primary sources and the scholarly literature following rigorous academic standards. They are primarily devised as a neutral guide to the continent with labels that are easy to input and translate for database construction and historical reconstruction. The intention is to avoid terms that might be confused with ethnolinguistic groups, the jargon of slave traders, colonial places, modern countries, and other perspectives. As a controlled vocabulary, regional categories can consolidate, link, and display larger datasets about people, events, and places in African and African diaspora history, which derive from archival collections, digitized primary sources, scholarly analysis, and other multimedia. The regional data was created in collaboration with Karl Grossner, Technical Director of the World Historical Gazetteer https://whgazetteer.org/. The interactive teaching resource www.AfricanRegions.org displays these regions for educational purposes.

  PublisherDOI

• Lucumí Cabildos and "Liberated Africans" in Havana, Cuba

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-07-10

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  These data relate to the Yoruba diaspora to Cuba during the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The cabildos list relates to Yoruba-based socio-religious organizations in Havana, which were legally permitted and often referred to as mutual-aid societies. These institutions were often a central place in which African cultures creolized in Cuba. The second dataset relates to a list of names of nearly 4,000 people who were registered by the Havana Slave Trade Commission between 1824 and 1841. These data included documented African names, which were interpreted to determine the language of names. Henry Lovejoy recruited Olatunji Ojo (Yoruba), Abubakar Babajo Sani (Hausa) and Umar Hussein (Dagomba), who volunteered to interpret names from this sample independently from each other. Collectively, these names specialists are familiar with well over 20 dialects found in the Bight of Benin interior and could identify likely ethnolinguistic origins for about 85% of the sample.

  PublisherDOI

• Registers of "Liberated Africans" of the Havana Slave Trade Commission, 1824-1841

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-07-09 · 1 citations

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Between 1824 and 1841, the Havana Slave Trade Commission registered 10,391 "Liberated Africans." These data include biographical information for African name, assigned Christian name, age, sex, height, ethnonym, and source information. These data still require transcription of physical descriptions and names of interpreters. Henry Lovejoy prepared this list independently from another transcription by David Eltis. After, Henry Lovejoy, David Eltis, Philip Misevich, Oscar Grandío Moraguez, and Daniel Domingues da Silva co-edited the list on a single monitor at Emory University in 2010.

  PublisherDOI

• Catalogue of Anti-Slave Trade Legislation in Global Perspective

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-07-13

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This catalog of anti-slave trade legislation is a selection of key laws, treaties, conventions, and diplomatic agreements leading up to the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The majority of these laws are from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. They relate to the global suppression of the slave trade. Using A Collection of Treaties, compiled by archivists in Britain's Foreign Office, Henry Lovejoy compiled the initial catalog from that collection using Google Books. This catalog references over 500 pieces of legislation, which have been made accessible and mapped on the reference resource www.liberatedafricans.org. These laws and treaties form the legal justification that various governments took to capture enslaved people and force them into involuntary indentures lasting several years or more. These indentured labourers from Africa were called "Liberated Africans," although they were not free.

  PublisherDOI

• Mapping Conflict during the Era of the Slave Trade: Metadata Schema for a Spatial Statistical Model and Digital Archive of Enforced Migrations in Pre-Colonial Africa

  2022-01-01

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Labelled a crime against humanity by the United Nations in 2011, the slave trade and its legacy of bondage unfortunately continue to shape modern society through racism, discrimination, and unconscious bias. For those who were silenced, and for their descendants, there is little reconciliation. Without knowing their individual stories – where they came from, where they were taken – this part of human history remains a generalized story of mass atrocity, lacking details about the experiences of enslaved human beings. While historians have amassed data for over 12.5 million people involved in the Atlantic slave trade between 1500 and 1867, we have not been able to piece together enforced population movements from specific African places inland to slave ships at the coast. By applying methods from GIScience and spatial statistics, it is possible to learn about global migrations resulting from slavery within pre-colonial Africa. By extracting spatial data from primary and secondary sources, it is possible to design a spatial data repository and digital archive of pre-colonial African places with instances of conflict to operate on a temporal scale with Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Modelling Strategy to Estimate Conditional Probabilities of African Origins: The Collapse of the Oyo Empire and The Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1817–1836

  Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A (Statistics in Society) · 2022-03-31 · 3 citations

  article

  Abstract Intra-African conflicts during the collapse of the kingdom of Oyo from 1817 to 1836 resulted in the enslavement of an estimated 121,000 people who were then transported to coastal ports via complex trade networks and loaded onto slave ships destined for the Americas. Historians have a good record of where these people went across the Atlantic, but little is known about where individuals were from or enslaved within Africa. In this work, we develop a novel statistical modelling strategy to describe the enslavement of people given documented violent conflict, the transport of enslaved peoples from their location of capture to their port of departure, and—given an enslaved individual's location of departure—that person's probability of origin. We combine spatial prediction of conflict density via kriging with a Markov decision process characterising intra-African transportation. The results of this model can be visualised using an interactive web application to plot—for the first time—estimated conditional probabilities of historical origins during the African diaspora. Understanding the likely origins within Africa of enslaved people may have ramifications for the history of the Atlantic world, whereby the ocean connects, rather than disconnects, Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Paul E. Lovejoy

  50 shared

• Edward A. Alpers

  50 shared

• Matthew S. Hopper

  University of Minnesota

  50 shared

• Mariana P. Candido

  Emory University

  50 shared

• Walter Hawthorne

  50 shared

• Ghislaine Lydon

  Michigan State University

  49 shared

• Colleen E. Kriger

  49 shared

• John Thornton

  Michigan State University

  49 shared

Education

• PhD, History

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2012

• MA, History

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2008

• MA, History

  York University

  2006

• BA, Drama

  Queen’s University

  2002

Awards & honors

• Chief Isaac Oluwole Delano Foundation Best Book Prize for Yo…
• Finalist for the Albert J. Raboteau Best Book Prize (Journal…
• CU Boulder’s Provost Faculty Achievement and Research Impact…