The Zong
WARNING
You are viewing an older version of the Yalebooks website. Please visit out new website with more updated information and a better user experience: https://www.yalebooks.com
A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery
James Walvin
View Inside
Format: ClothPrice: $35.00
e-book
Out of Print
On November 29, 1781, Captain Collingwood of the British ship Zong commanded his crew to throw overboard one-third of his cargo: a shipment of Africans bound for slavery in America. The captain believed his ship was off course, and he feared there was not enough drinking water to last until landfall. This book is the first to examine in detail the deplorable killings on the Zong, the lawsuit that ensued, how the murder of 132 slaves affected debates about slavery, and the way we remember the infamous Zong today.
Historian James Walvin explores all aspects of the Zong’s voyage and the subsequent trial—a case brought to court not for the murder of the slaves but as a suit against the insurers who denied the owners’ claim that their “cargo” had been necessarily jettisoned. The scandalous case prompted wide debate and fueled Britain’s awakening abolition movement. Without the episode of the Zong, Walvin contends, the process of ending the slave trade would have taken an entirely different moral and political trajectory. He concludes with a fascinating discussion of how the case of the Zong, though unique in the history of slave ships, has come to be understood as typical of life on all such ships.
“A world authority on transatlantic slavery, Walvin produces an authoritative, fair-minded and grippingly readable account of a case whose legacy is, as he shows, with us still today.”—Madge Dresser, BBC History Magazine
“The voyage of slaves to the plantations of the Caribbean has never been better recorded than in The Zong by James Walvin. Walvin’s victory is to take us aboard The Zong in all its evil…..This penetrating book is a magnet for anyone interested in human tragedy.”—Colin Gardine, Oxford Times
Publication Date: October 18, 2011
12 b/w illus.
