The Lady and I know the guy who helped lead the slave voyages research. He is a friend of the Lady's father and was at our wedding. Totally fascinating dude. He was a Brit who came to Canada as a teacher and toiled away getting his PhD at URochester part-time across the lake from where he lived. He finished during a real down time in history and got a job at the Canadian equivalent of a community college where he also toiled in obscurity until his book came out, which was a game-changer for Atlantic studies and the history of the African slave trade. He got a legit job at Queens, then he put out a huge CD-ROM in the 90s and expanded the research (as part of a multi-institution collaboration) in the early 2000s which is all now on the web. THEN he was forced to retire at 65, moved to Ottawa, and went out on the US job market, where he was demand and got an endowed professorship at Emory. He commuted by plane every week. Now he lives in Vancouver and still commutes to Atlanta.
the guy you're talking about is an economist. This Boston Globe article on Nunn's research includes some critical and incisive comments by David Eltis, the guy I'm talking about.
One of my hobby horses is that historians need to get more skilled at quantitative methods (skills that were fairly popular in the discipline until the early 80s) or else people like Nunn are going to (continue to) pre-empt historians doing a non-half-assed job in this interpretive and analytical work based on increasingly available masses of data.
Oh, your friend must be a fascinating guy. Despite the editors' allegations that scientists are just mean and disrespectful, it doesn't take much imagination to sense the sheer labour and attention to detail involved in compiling all this information
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Re: your last comment, historians are really only taking tiny tiny steps into real interdisciplinarity. We have always thought of interdisciplinarity as ranging all the way from social history to political history, hardly realizing that there are a LOT of other fields out there that can help us
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One of my hobby horses is that historians need to get more skilled at quantitative methods (skills that were fairly popular in the discipline until the early 80s) or else people like Nunn are going to (continue to) pre-empt historians doing a non-half-assed job in this interpretive and analytical work based on increasingly available masses of data.
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