The third week takes up the “Middle Passage”, beginning with the director’s broad introduction to the political and economic conjunctures in Europe, Africa, and the New World that facilitated the birth of the Atlantic economy and how growing European financial strength in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries drew more and more parts of Africa into selling captives. Participants will then consider a visiting scholar’s detailed and gripping visual presentation of the voyage of one French slaver in 1731-32 – from Vannes to Dahomey and Martinique – in the context of these broad historical patterns and as one possible model for integrating the several regional fields relevant to their projects (Prof. Robert Harms). On Tuesday morning we will introduce a massive on-line database of some 35,000 individual slaving voyages to explore the potential of this rich and detailed resource to provide context for the human experiences of enslavement and journeys across the Atlantic that the narrative sources reveal, in spite of its quantified anonymity. After another day left free for individual research, the seminar will take up the crucial individual human experiences of people brought in slavery to the New World on Thursday, with Professor Stephanie Smallwood of the University of Washington and author of a prize-winning study on the experience of the Middle Passage; (http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/SMASAL.html?show=reviews). Friday is free for research and/or consultations with the director.