The Slave Trade: Creating A New World

FAIN: TR-256290-17

Firelight Media, Inc. (New York, NY 10031-6300)
Stanley Nelson (Project Director: January 2017 to present)

Production of a four-hour documentary examining the Atlantic slave trade as an agent of momentous demographic, economic, and moral transformations.

Firelight Media requests a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the production of a major four-part television series on the Atlantic slave trade, to be produced by acclaimed filmmaker Stanley Nelson, for national broadcast on PBS. The series, with the working title The Slave Trade: Creating A New World, covers four centuries of the Atlantic trade, the largest forced long-distance migration in history, and one of the most momentous and transformative events of the past millennium. In four one-hour programs, each covering a defined historical period and featuring a specific voyage as its narrative spine, the series explores crucial aspects of a vast and hugely profitable enterprise that peopled continents, transformed economies, and shaped the modern world, and one that had at is core a concerted and highly effective effort to turn millions of human beings into commodities that could be bought and sold.