This short feature describes a project to create an online opera which deploys a new web technology, the Syzygy Surfer, developed in the Institute of Creative Technologies (IOCT) at De Montfort University. The project is a collaboration between the IOCT and The Opera Group.

We use slave voyage data from 18th century Great Britain and France to answer two questions: 1) How important was the managerial quality of owners and captains in slave trading? and 2) What explains the substantial variation in managerial quality? Utilizing the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, in which we observe the performance of owners and captains in each of their voyages, we follow the...