Synopses & Reviews
In September 1781, the captain of the British slave ship
Zong ordered 133 slaves thrown overboard, enabling the shipandrsquo;s owners to file an insurance claim for their lost andldquo;cargo.andrdquo; Accounts of this horrific event quickly became a staple of abolitionist discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Ian Baucom revisits, in unprecedented detail, the
Zong atrocity, the ensuing court cases, reactions to the event and trials, and the business and social dealings of the Liverpool merchants who owned the ship. Drawing on the work of an astonishing array of literary and social theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Giovanni Arrighi, Jacques Derrida, and many others, he argues that the tragedy is central not only to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the political and cultural archives of the black Atlantic but also to the history of modern capital and ethics. To apprehend the
Zong tragedy, Baucom suggests, is not to come to terms with an isolated atrocity but to encounter a logic of violence key to the unfolding history of Atlantic modernity.
Baucom contends that the massacre and the trials that followed it bring to light an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation based on speculative finance, an economic cycle that has not yet run its course. The extraordinarily abstract nature of todayandrsquo;s finance capital is the late-eighteenth-century system intensified. Yet, as Baucom highlights, since the late 1700s, this rapacious speculative culture has had detractors. He traces the emergence and development of a counter-discourse he calls melancholy realism through abolitionist and human-rights texts, British romantic poetry, Scottish moral philosophy, and the work of late-twentieth-century literary theorists. In revealing how the Zong tragedy resonates within contemporary financial systems and human-rights discourses, Baucom puts forth a deeply compelling, utterly original theory of history: one that insists that an eighteenth-century atrocity is not past but present within the future we now inhabit.
Review
andldquo;A fantastically stimulating read, Specters of the Atlantic will be an extremely significant book. Its core strength is that it deals in such detail and in such an imaginative way with the primary texts associated with the case of the Zong. Nobody has read those texts in such a careful and stimulating way before, and nobody has used the case to construct such an ambitious historical schema.andrdquo;andmdash;Peter Hulme, author of Remnants of Conquest: The Island Caribs and Their Visitors, 1877andndash;1998
Review
andldquo;Specters of the Atlantic is quite possibly the most provocative scholarly work I have read in a decade. I really cannot praise this book enough.andrdquo;andmdash;Mary Poovey, author of A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society
Review
andldquo;This work is a compelling study of the roles of slavery and abolition in the origins of finance capital in the British Atlantic empire. The work is an interdisciplinary tour de force, with superb scholarship on slavery, modernity, the Enlightenment, postmodernism and contemporary literary theory. It is one of the finest comparative studies of the philosophy of history and liberation struggles that I have read.andrdquo;
Synopsis
Cultural and literary study of the 1781 massacre on the slaveship Zong for the insurance money and the aftereffects of the event on the development of modernity.
About the Author
Ian Baucom is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. He is the author of Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity and a coeditor of Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain, also published by Duke University Press.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Part One: andldquo;Now Beingandrdquo;: Slavery, Speculation, and the Measure of our Time
1. Liverpool, a Capital of the Long Twentieth Century 3
2. andldquo;Subject $andrdquo;; or, the andldquo;Typeandrdquo; of the Modern 35
3. andldquo;Madam Death! Madam Death!andrdquo;:Credit, Insurance, and the Atlantic Cycle of Capital Accumulation 80
4.andrdquo;Signum Rememorativum, Demonstrativum, Prognostikonandrdquo;: Modernity and the Truth Event 113
5.andrdquo;Please decideandrdquo;: The Singular and the Speculative 141
Part Two: Specters of the Atlantic: Slavery and the Witness
6. Frontispiece: Testimony, Rights, and the State of Exception 173
7. The View from the Window: Sympathy, Melancholy, and the Problem of andldquo;Humanityandrdquo; 195
8. The Fact of History: On Cosmopolitan Interestedness 213
9. The Imaginary Resentment of the Dead: A Theory of Melancholy Sentiment 242
10. andldquo;To Tumble into It, and Gasp for Breath as We Go Downandrdquo;: The Idea of Suffering and the Case of Liberal Cosmopolitanism 265
11. This/Such, for Instance: The Witness against andldquo;Historyandrdquo; 297
Part Three: andldquo;The Sea is Historyandrdquo;
12. andldquo;The Sea is Historyandrdquo;: On Temporal Accumulation 309
Notes 335
Index 377