History: Home

Global Commodities consists of primary documents relating to the history of 15 commodities: chocolate (cacao), coffee, cotton, fur, oil, opium, porcelain, silver and gold, spices, sugar, tea, timber, tobacco, wheat, wine and spirits. Document types include advertisements, company records, correspondence, diaries, leaflets, maps, mercantile papers, paintings, pamphlets, port records, prices current, private papers and scrapbooks among others. The collection can be searched by theme (e.g., advertising and consumption, production, trade and commerce). Other features include a chronology for each commodity, data and visual resources. This collection will be useful for assignments on the Early Atlantic World, British colonialism, etc.

Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice — “Designed for teaching and research, this resource brings together [primary] documents from libraries and archives across the Atlantic World, covering an extensive time period from 1490” (database homepage).
Highlights include: African forts and the Gold Coast; Materials on Brazil; Education and social justice; Family Papers, Correspondence, Bills and Plantation Journals; Local court records relating to slavery; Resistance and Revolts; Testimony of enslaved people; Slavery in the Early Americas; Songs that recall the Transatlantic Slave Experience; Urban Slavery in New York and Philadelphia; The Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania; Zanzibar and the Indian Ocean Slave Trade